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11. These thinkers and others provide a cultural backdrop which has halakhic significance. The works of Rachel Adler , Judith Plaskow , Daniel Boyarin , and Howard Eilberg- Schwartz probe the rabbinic mind and culture that reveal to us rabbinic conceptions and biases.
12. We have modified but not rejected kiddushin. The question of gitin is complex, but the essential point is that the rejection was based on halakhic language. The challenge of those who reject kiddushin as a proper paradigm for Reform Jewish marriage or who would included gay and lesbian marriage within the kiddushin paradigm is to use" halakhic language" and to make it consistent " with the theory and rhetorical style of the Rabbinic legal tradition."
13. Such arguments are important only to those understand Reform Judaism within the general rubric " rabbinic Judaism ."
14. CCAR Responsa Committee" On Homosexual Marriage" 5756.8, p. 1 I have indicated in my paper cited in footnote 1. Whether Reform marriage halakhically should be considered kiddushin, is questionable. And if, in fact, it is not would we not be better to use a new name and a new ceremony. There are immense difficulties with this suggestion. One of the most important is the acceptance of such a change by ordinary Jews and whether it will be a pithon pe for the Orthodox.
15. Ibid., p. 1
16. Menachem Elon , Principles of Jewish Law, Philadelphia , 1994 p. 272. 17. Ibid, p. 273.
18. The majority of psychiatrists and psychologists have accepted the APA decision to remove homosexuality from its official list of pathologies. See citations provided by Bradley Artson in his" Enfranchising the Monogamous Homosexual: A Legal Possibility A More Imperative," S'vara Vol.3# 1, 1993 p. 19. Some health professionals still do not agree with the decision. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism and liberal Protestants have been explicit in the acceptance of gays and lesbians. More conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews still maintain that homosexual behavior is a sin.
19. Elliot N. Dorff and Arthur Rosett, A Living Tree the Roots and Growth of Jewish Law, New York , 1988. p.224.
20. Roth p. 180.
21. Ibid. P. 171.
22. Ibid. p. 172
23. Ibid. p. 237.
24. Ibid. p.244.
25. Ibid. p. 373.
26. Ibid. p.3 74 The historian Shaye J.D. Cohen writes," The sort of homosexual relationships which we are encountering more and more frequently in our society and about which you are speaking, that is stable monogamous loving relationships between adults of equal status- relationships of this kind were unknown in antiquity... Consequently we may assume that the rabbis of antiquity did not know and therefore were not addressing, this type of homosexual relationship." Artson ," Enfranchising," p. 22.
27. Lev. 18: 22