New video: Barmitzvah boy calls for gay marriage

New video: Barmitzvah boy calls for gay marriage

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norman lebrecht

December 03, 2013

His argument? Jacob married two sisters in the Bible, so why can’t I marry a man?

 

duncan mcalpine

Comments

  • Amit says:

    ישר כוח!

  • Steve Foster says:

    He never said he wanted to marry a man.

  • stanley cohen says:

    In the broadest possible sense what earthly connection does this have with music, Norman?

    • corkee says:

      Absolutely nothing, of course, Stanley. However it does have to do with younger (and older, i.e. me) musicians who might take a great deal of comfort from the lad’s message. Yes, some (many?) of us are gay and these kinds of messages from a much younger generation make us gay folk feel wanted and needed. So, just relax (Barbara too!) and be supportive. As for Norman’s blog, oftimes there are stories that don’t relate directly to goings-on in the professional music world, but (Chethams is one example) they do make us aware of other issues that many musicans – younger and older – deal with daily. Just open your hearts and minds and be supportive ….. please! This is only one of the international forums with which I’m familiar that is positive about gay/bi/lesbian issues.

  • Barbara says:

    What has this to do with a Classical Music blog?

  • timwalton3 says:

    Good for him. The more people like him that are open about their sexuality & those that speak without predudice the better. Eventually it will silence the people with closed minds.

    I am not Jewish but Christian. There is not a single sentence (verse) in the Bible where Jesus himself says that being gay or loving someone of the same sex is wrong.

    If Jesus did not have a problem then why should anyone else.

    • Michael Schaffer says:

      We don’t really know what the miracle man from Nazareth really said and did, but one thing comes through glaringly obvious in the Gospels, in Acts and Paul: that he was first and foremost a Jewish preacher who preached adherence and a return to Jewish law as laid out in the Old Testament, and that that was what his followers, those that actually knew him, thought to. How that was blablaed into an entirely new religion which then, ironically, ended up persecuting Jews is one of the most astonishing stories in history. But for all we know, he wanted adherence to traditional Jewish law and that means death for men practicing gay sex.

      • timwalton3 says:

        Perhaps Paul was an original Homophobic Bigot like some ‘supposedly’ educated people in this time.

        No one has any right whatsoever to inflict/impose their opinions & beliefs on anyone else.

        For some to say they are Gay is for them & them alone. If they are happy then that should be the end of the matter.

        For anyone to denounce them their happiness whether they are an Archbishop, Pope, Grand Mufti et el is wrong and evil & they have my total contempt. They are of course entitled to have this opinion but they have NO right to impose that opinion on anyone else.

  • DC says:

    Another a light in the darkness….

  • Martin says:

    A lot. Cause this should be music in our ears. Even if we aren’t into this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWWZFHxiGZg

  • Michael Schaffer says:

    Looks like that young man hasn’t gotten to Leviticus yet in his Torah studies:

    Leviticus 20:13

    “‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

    It’s also very instructive to look at what “traditional marriage” actually means in the bible:

    http://www.upworthy.com/the-top-8-ways-to-be-traditionally-married-according-to-the-bible

  • It is really touching how a youngster has the courage to convey his message, his inner voice regardless of the social repercussions this message may have to him. This has a lot to do with art in general and music in particular. So much music has been composed with higher motives. So much music has been condemned due to composers’ higher motives. Motives which were determinative to their whole lives including their compositional processes (Shostakovich, Poulenc, Chopin, Britten). This is an utterly relative issue to the artist’s psyche, and, at the same time, to the amateur’s emotional response. Thank you, Norman.

  • cabbagejuice says:

    From a person who comes from a strict Catholic background, I have always found it intriguing how much of a pick and choose approach Jewish friends of mine have who are not Orthodox. It’s like; I keep Shabbat but drive or eat pork but don’t mix milk and meat, etc., etc.

    There are rules that are certainly time bound like those pertaining to the Temple and its rituals but the basic morality is quite clear, starting from Genesis or B’reshit. The seemingly boring interminable list of who begat whom does have significance in that it emphasizes the importance of family relationships. This will all be wiped out with redefinition of family that will not be based on mother and father.Marriage over the millennia has evolved to monogamous man-woman relationships. Tinkering with that is a backsliding, not a positive move.

    Instead exploding that unit is a dangerous social experiment whose negative implications can only be guessed at and a 12 year old cannot possibly fathom. The door will be open to pederasty, incest and multiple relationships. The whole idea of social acceptance was supposed to be live and let live, not being persecuted for one’s sexual preferences. But now it has been turned upsidedown and anyone who questions the wisdom of redefining such a crucial pillar of society or reserves rights to act according to conscience are actually being sneered at, persecuted, or hounded into silence. Being on the wrong side of political correctness carries penalties of losing jobs or having to close down family businesses like marriage photography or bed and breakfast hotels in which people are not free to conform to their own religious principles.

    • Michael Schaffer says:

      From a person who comes from a strict Catholic background, I have always found it intriguing how much of a pick and choose approach Jewish friends of mine have who are not Orthodox. It’s like; I keep Shabbat but drive or eat pork but don’t mix milk and meat, etc., etc.”

      That has *nothing* to do with being Jewish or not. People from *all* religious backgrounds, including and *especially* Catholic, pick and choose whatever they want. For most people, religion is just a cold buffet. They take what they want and they leave what they don’t want.

      The ultimate picking and choosing is subscribing to a religion which was, if not exactly founded by, at least vaguely based on the teachings of a Jewish preacher or prophet and turning it into a completely new, anti-Jewish religion which actually ended up persecuting Jews, the people of the guy who they deem some kind of divine figure. There is probably *nothing* more hypocritical in the entire history of mankind.

      “The seemingly boring interminable list of who begat whom does have significance in that it emphasizes the importance of family relationships.”

      No, it doesn’t. These genealogy lists, which are very common not just to biblical traditions, but to any kind of tribal history, merely serve to establish patriarchal concepts of legitimacy of rulers and leaders by birth. They have nothing to do with “traditional family values”.

      “Instead exploding that unit is a dangerous social experiment whose negative implications can only be guessed at and a 12 year old cannot possibly fathom. The door will be open to pederasty, incest and multiple relationships.”

      Bullbullbullbullbullbullbullbull. There is no “social experiment” in allowing gays to live free from persecution. People don’t chose to be gay. People don’t chose to be gay now who wouldn’t have chosen to be gay previously, just because now it’s more OK to be gay.

      People don’t *have* to be gay now either. People can still like the other sex and can get married to it if they want. People don’t chose to practice incest either because gay relationships are now more accepted than they used to be. People don’t commit pederasty simply because gay relationships are now more accepted than they used to be.

      One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other per se here. Incest and pederasty are not directly related to being gay. That is just complete and utter bull.

    • Derek Castle says:

      Cj – I tended to agree with some of your rants about Jackie, but this is totally beyond the pale. Such bigoted ‘bull’ (as MS so quaintly puts it) beggars belief. You really must get out more!

      • Musiker says:

        Yes, a hate-monger and a bigot. Nothing “Christian” about what she spews at all. “Traditional values” for her obviously include hatred, fear and bigotry.

      • cabbagejuice says:

        @Derek, you would probably be more at home at the end of the Roman Empire instead of the sober morality that Judeo-Christian values gave to the world. “Give them bread and circuses”. In other words, bloat up the welfare rolls and provide raunchy sex parades that for instance will cost the Toronto taxpayers at least a half-million dollars – World Pride”. This is not a case of living and let live, it is in your face and your children’s. Not only do you have to pay for it but are not allowed to say a word in protest.

        Marriage is about family and children, otherwise no one is persecuting those who want to have coition with whatever and whomever they please. As for “rant” this was only commonsense 40-50 years ago, taught in the best institutions of learning, the relationship between social morality and the best for the greatest number.

        Children will suffer in this new social experiment being deprived of a mother and father, at least officially. An enormous amount of cognitive dissonance is required to accept two fathers or two mothers when this is not reality.

        Nazi and Soviet social engineering were based on phony science and this latest Bolshevism bulldozing dissent is no different.

        • Michael Schaffer says:

          cabbagejuice says:

          December 6, 2013 at 5:51 pm

          “@Derek, you would probably be more at home at the end of the Roman Empire instead of the sober morality that Judeo-Christian values gave to the world. “Give them bread and circuses”. In other words, bloat up the welfare rolls and provide raunchy sex parades that for instance will cost the Toronto taxpayers at least a half-million dollars – World Pride”. This is not a case of living and let live, it is in your face and your children’s. Not only do you have to pay for it but are not allowed to say a word in protest.

          Marriage is about family and children, otherwise no one is persecuting those who want to have coition with whatever and whomever they please. As for “rant” this was only commonsense 40-50 years ago, taught in the best institutions of learning, the relationship between social morality and the best for the greatest number.

          Children will suffer in this new social experiment being deprived of a mother and father, at least officially. An enormous amount of cognitive dissonance is required to accept two fathers or two mothers when this is not reality.

          Nazi and Soviet social engineering were based on phony science and this latest Bolshevism bulldozing dissent is no different.”

          Except that the Nazis actually persecuted gays, so that comparison really doesn’t make sense at all. It does however strongly suggest that you don’t really know what you are talking about when you are throwing around these terms. You don’t seem to be aware either that at the end of the Roman Empire, that empire was almost completely Christianized.

          You do have kind of half a point, an involuntary one though, when you talk about “Nazi social engineering based on phony science”.

          That kind of totalitarian ideology does typically include social engineering, as in suppressing “unwanted” sexual behavior and controlling who can mate with who under what circumstances. That is very typical of many bible-based ideologies like yours, too, and it is also based on nothing more than phony science and beliefs in supernatural beings. So the kind of mindset you are displaying here is very close to that kind of totalitarian ideology.

        • corkee says:

          What zealous and bigoted bollocks! As for World Pride costing Toronto 1/2 million dollars I’d guess it’s probably significantly more than that ….. but the economic return to Toronto will be in the billions. If cabbagejuice is in Toronto I’m certainly glad he doesn’t live on MY street! And he should be too ….. he’d be run out of town.

          PS pointless to discuss this issue with him/her, so no more from me!

          • cabbagejuice says:

            The economic return may be in the millions or billions but the moral return will be just as minus.

          • Musiker says:

            Corkee, it’s never worth anyone’s time or energy to try and have a half-way intelligent discussion with warped, twisted, sex-obsessed, semi-educated bigots who haven’t a moral bone in their body and who are unable to string a logical, well-constructed sentence together. You can file all her phoney statistics straight into the trash can, too. Ignore her. She goes away eventually.

  • cabbagejuice says:

    Parental modelling has a lot to do with sexuality. So do trauma and abuse. Some people have unwanted same sex attractions traceable to absent or abusive fathers or mothers. If they want help in some states in the US or in the UK, they are forbidden because political correctness demands it. Today “feeling” is everything, not objective reality.

    It a mother has a 7 year old boy who likes pink and wants to wear a dress, she writes a book about her Princess Boy. This is bull-donkey-horse.

    The social experiment will produce genderless children without family ties. The meaning of history is knowing where you come from so you will care about where you and your descendants are going. Otherwise feral children can be expected not to give a damn about society or culture.

    As for the 12 year old boy cited above, why this religious playacting when it has nothing to do with its core values? Better to say one has no religion at all.

    • Michael Schaffer says:

      “Parental modelling has a lot to do with sexuality. So do trauma and abuse.”

      And one form of abuse which is very traumatic for people is when they are discriminated against and socially stigmatized because of their particular, non-standard form of sexuality. We know that some people are just born gay. People don’t decide to become gay. Denying them the right to live their lives and their sexuality according to their natural sexual orientation is a very nasty form of abuse.

      In the US, less than 4% total describe themselves as one form of LGBT. Letting them live their lives the way they feel they want to is hardly a massive “social experiment”.

  • cabbagejuice says:

    An enormous amount of cognitive dissonance is required to imagine that the Jehovah of the Bible would approve of same sex marriage despite all His own prohibitions, having from the outset declared: “He made them male and female”. The glaring fallacy here is that a Perfect God would make bodies with parts that don’t fit. There is no gene for homosexuality, so the “born that way” argument is full of holes. Women, in particular, have an intriguing ability to bounce back from one sex to the other.

    For the person who wrote that Jesus allegedly did not have a problem with homosexuality, because it was not recorded if he spoke about it or not, the reason is simple. This lifestyle was more widespread among the Greeks and Romans rather than the Jews (against the Law anyway) that Paul was compelled to speak out against it in the context of the corruption and lasciviousness of the times.

    Instead of assuming the God of the Bible will approve of what you want to believe in, why not just start a new religion? The addled Christian denominations that sanctify such upsidedown interpretations are just as silly. Apparently, they don’t have a problem with abortion either, as the arch baby murderer, Tiller, was a member of a congregation that did not criticize his actions nor shun him.

    Social engineering bolstered by artificial reproductive technology replaced hitherto accepted values my default, that is, filling an educational void with misplaced sympathy (for parents over children), creeping narcissism, and a badly understood notion of rights. Giving the alleged 4% (in actuality more like 1.5%) the option to redefine marriage has already resulted in a genderless Parent 1 and Parent 2. This is not reality, since children are still conceived by male and female. With all the talk, not to mention university courses about “gender”, the astonishing end result is only to eradicate it. This is the phony science informed by and aggressively promoted by political correctness. In a same sex marriage with children, at least one of the parents will not be biological. This is deprivation for the child and selfishness on the part of the couple from the get go.

    Exploding the concept of victim as applied to certain groups is a thankless task but the facts in the book “Pink Swastika” shows how prevalent homosexualism was in the Nazi party up to the highest levels. As for the Pink Triangle itself, it had been explained that these unfortunates were the “femmes” who were sneered upon and persecuted by the more macho but gay bosses.

    Because the study of history, philosophy and ethics are at an all time low, the best policy, particularly recommended for those who just achieved double digit in age, so therefore with minimal life experience, is “Don’t take down a fence until you know the reason why it was put up”.

    • Michael Schaffer says:

      cabbagejuice says:

      December 8, 2013 at 3:03 pm

      [Qoute] The glaring fallacy here is that a Perfect God would make bodies with parts that don’t fit. [End of quote]

      The glaring fallacy here is that a “Perfect God” would no think of making a boy and a girl from the beginning. Instead, he only made a boy. Did the boy have boy parts? Or did he get retrofit with boy parts once that perfect god thought of making a girl, too?

      [Quote] Instead of assuming the God of the Bible will approve of what you want to believe in, why not just start a new religion? The addled Christian denominations that sanctify such upsidedown interpretations are just as silly.[End of quote]

      All Christian denominations are “addled” and largely invented. Jesus was a Jewish preacher who had no intention to start a new religion. That much is glaringly obvious even from the New Testament. You should read that some time. It’s actually quite interesting.

      [Quote] Social engineering bolstered by artificial reproductive technology replaced hitherto accepted values my default, that is, filling an educational void with misplaced sympathy (for parents over children), creeping narcissism, and a badly understood notion of rights. Giving the alleged 4% (in actuality more like 1.5%) the option to redefine marriage…[End of quote]

      Oh, so it’s only 1.5% of the population? No problem then. No massive “social engineering” going on then. No “redefinition of marriage” for 98.5% of the population. Just equal rights for a very small group of people who just feel different about who they like from people like you and me.

      [Quote] Exploding the concept of victim as applied to certain groups is a thankless task but the facts in the book “Pink Swastika” shows how prevalent homosexualism was in the Nazi party up to the highest levels. [End of quote]

      Sure there were some gay Nazis, even high up in the ranks of the party, but gays were still massively and aggressively persecuted by the Nazis. That book is total nonsense. What you like to call “phony science”, or in this case, phony history.

      You are wading deeper and deeper into the bullshit.

      [Quote] Because the study of history, philosophy and ethics are at an all time low, the best policy, particularly recommended for those who just achieved double digit in age, so therefore with minimal life experience, is “Don’t take down a fence until you know the reason why it was put up”.[End of quote]

      I don’t think you know much about history. The world we live in today is far from perfect, but it is already much better than the world just a few decades ago when totalitarian ideologies and religion generally had more influence than today. Just a few decades ago, there were still racial laws even in a modern western country like the US.

      So let me tell why they put up that fence. That fence is there to herd people like you, like cattle, to make them easier to control, influence and exploit them. You aren’t ready to come out from behind the fence, and that’s fine, you can stay in the pen if you like. But many other people are already on the outside, looking back in at people like you.

      • timwalton3 says:

        I agree. ‘Cabbagejuice’s comments are moronic.

        I’ve taken great pleasure in printing them out & they are now in the smallest room in my flat awaiting my next visit to the toilet.

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