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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/37505/full/37505/make-gay-marriage-a-moral-priority-professor-says-in-s.f/ <br /><br /> <b>Make gay marriage a moral priority, professor says in S.F.</b> <br /> Thursday, March 12, 2009 | by stacey palevsky <br /><br /><p>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.”</p> <p>Chai Feldblum agrees whole-heartedly with that sentiment. But she’s far from being against gay marriage.</p> <p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 126px;"><img alt="BAfeldblum, Chai" class="left" height="170" src="http://dev.jweekly.com/images/uploads/z_photos_2009/zn_03_13_09/BAfeldblum, Chai.jpg" title="Chai Feldblum" width="126" /> <div class="caption">Chai Feldblum</div> </div> “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.’ ”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“The traditional gay rights response is that you should treat us equally,” Feldblum said. “But that doesn’t [create] a moral conversation.”</p> <p>She argues against “moral values” being mainly in the domain of the Christian, conservative right wing.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>To amplify her perspective, in 2005 Feldblum created an online initiative, the Moral Values Project.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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.”</p>

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