When the California Supreme Court listened to oral arguments about Proposition 8 last week, a man held up a sign in front of the courthouse. It read: “A moral wrong can never be a civil right.”
Chai Feldblum agrees whole-heartedly with that sentiment. But she’s far from being against gay marriage.
“Incest is morally wrong. Domestic violence is morally wrong. But what is morally wrong about me wanting to marry a woman?” she asked. “And the answer has got to be more than ‘God doesn’t like it.’ ”
Feldblum, a professor at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C., was in San Francisco last week as the visiting scholar at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, which twice a year invites scholars, artists or rabbis to spend a weekend with congregants.
Her two-day visit happened to overlap with the March 5 hearing on Proposition 8. “Even though we didn’t anticipate it when we planned to bring her, it couldn’t have been more well-timed,” said Sha’ar Zahav’s Rabbi Camille Angel.
After hearing arguments for and against Proposition 8, the state Supreme Court now must decide within 90 days to uphold the voter-approved initiative or strike it down.
Feldblum spoke several times at Sha’ar Zahav in the two days after the hearing, giving a unique approach to marriage equality: She wants people who are liberal, progressive and gay-marriage supporters to talk about moral values.
“The traditional gay rights response is that you should treat us equally,” Feldblum said. “But that doesn’t [create] a moral conversation.”
She argues against “moral values” being mainly in the domain of the Christian, conservative right wing.
For example, “It is morally good to get married,” she said, “and it is morally bad that Proposition 8 took that away” for same-sex couples.
To amplify her perspective, in 2005 Feldblum created an online initiative, the Moral Values Project.
Feldman had an Orthodox Jewish upbringing in New York. Her father was a Holocaust survivor, rabbi and professor, and she attended yeshiva through high school. She went to college intending to become a talmudic scholar, but ended up with a Harvard law degree.
Nowadays, one of her targets is the chunk of the population that believes homosexuality and gay marriage are “morally neutral” — people who she said are not anti-gay, but still are not completely comfortable with gay marriage.
“Society is going through a shift in moral values,” she said. “They’ve shifted to morally neutral, and now we want people to shift to morally good.”