Rabbi continues attack on gays, calls same-sex families 'deviant'
Rabbi Yigal Levenstein, co-dean of the Bnei David pre-military academy in Eli, said bringing up children without a mother was "unjust."
By JEREMY SHARONAn activist waves an LGBT flag near Israel's Knesset building(photo credit: REUTERS)
Rabbi Yigal Levenstein, co-dean of the Bnei David pre-military academy in Eli, has continued his crusade against the LGBT community by congratulating the government and coalition for defeating a bill last week that would have granted gay couples access to state-supported child surrogacy.Levenstein has made a series of incendiary comments about homosexuals in recent years, denouncing activism for gay rights and describing homosexuality as “a perversion,” activity that has led to severe tensions between his pre-military academy and the Defense Ministry.In a letter to coalition chairman MK David Amsalem that he made public on Sunday, the rabbi said he had been prompted to write because of what he described as “emotional manipulation” by MK Itzik Shmuli of the Zionist Union, who is gay, who called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the debate on the bill last week to “look him in the eyes” and tell him he could not raise a family.Levenstein said Shmuli was continuing the system of emotional manipulation by homosexuals to silence the ethical debate” and said the MK should himself “look at the Jewish people in the eyes, look very well into the soul of the Jewish people and think about how you can demand from the people of the Bible, the people that brought the ethics of the prophets to the world that sees homosexual families as an ethical distortion to allow your unethical and unjust demands.”The rabbi said homosexuals were “not normal,” that same-sex families were “deviant,” that the children of gay couples would be “wretched,” that bringing up children without a mother was “unjust,” and that the state was not responsible for Shmuli’s personal disappointment about not being able to have children.“This is not ethical but rather cruelty rooted in selfishness,” said Levenstein.“The ideal and ethical family unit is of a mother and father... through the normal family natural and normal life is conducted.… Unfortunately the post-modern world is trying to uproot this holy and pure ideal of a faithful house within the Jewish people.”Shmuli told Levenstein in response not to look him in the eye, and said he was “the ugliest and darkest face of Jewish zealotry.”Said the MK, “The only deviant here is that the state is stupid enough to pay the salary of someone who disseminates poison and hatred like you, with opinions like the ayatollahs of Iran.”A law was passed during the summer Knesset session expanding the rights to state-supported surrogacy for single women, but notably excluded gay men from such access.Netanyahu has said he supported such a right but that he does not have the votes in the coalition to pass it at present.
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