Book Reviews
25 December, 2012 at 11:03 AM
God vs. Gay? and Through the Door of Life
by Daniel Lichman
http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/12/god-vs-gay/In God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality Jay Michaelson, the founder of Nehirim, the Jewish LGBT spirituality organisation, uses this perspective to explore both how religious values affirm lesbian and gay lives and how sexual diversity affirms religion. He uses a distinctly Judeo-Christian values-based theological vocabulary to argue a considered, articulate political case for gay rights in the USA.
Michaelson is well placed to do this. He is well known for his writing on religious, legal and LGBT issues through Zeek magazine in the 2000s and now through regular newspaper columns. While the content of this work is different, there is a stylistic similarity to his previous book, Everything is God, in that both interweave the personal and the theoretical in a logically-argued polemical treatise. Turning his oeuvre to the often unpleasant and peculiarly American religious debate about marriage equality is clearly of limited effectiveness if reserved for a Jewish critique. Luckily Michaelson's postgraduate studies were on the Christian bible.
Michaelson intends this book to make a difference to the political reality. His assumption is that religious anti-gay rhetoric can be undermined by exposing its deep flaws and lack of scriptural grounding. Citing Martin Luther King's harnessing of the force of religious rhetoric in the campaign for civil rights, Michaelson argues that religion has a similar potential in the campaign for sexual equality.
[...]
Judiasm, and more particularly Ladin's deep relationship with God — "when I look in the mirror, I see the mystery of God's creation" — is an anchoring theme of this moving work. Ladin describes her years of gender disphoria before she embarked on her transition. Jay Ladin felt uncomfortable in his male body from a young age. He married, had three children and still periods of gender disphoria would utterly destabilise him. His marriage broke down as his wife felt that his desire to become a woman was selfish and destructive. Aside from the detail of gender transition, this is a powerful, universal human story. As Ladin says, "Transsexuals' lives may seem strange, even bizarre, but the questions we face... are the questions life poses to us all: How can we become ourselves?"
Many people are not easily able to speak frankly with a trans person about their experience. Testimony such as Ladin's is valuable and may help to encourage the cis (non-trans)-gendered reader to confront and challenge their own confusion, questions and prejudice.
