Originally published at customerservant.com. You can comment here or there.

It appears as though, in a bid to keep the prohibition against homosexuality in place, the executive committee of the Committee on Laws and Standards within Conservative Judaism secretly passed a ruling last summer that raises the number of votes needed to canonize a minority oppinion from six to twenty.
According to those in favor of lifting the ban on homosexuality, the ruling was enacted specifically to prevent their oppinion from becoming law within the Conservative movement.
They claim that the ruling was passed without their knowledge, and that they only found out about it last week, during discussions concerning the ban.
All of this tells me that the Conservative movement is running like a well-oiled corporate machine.
If we want to keep from acknowledging what we all know is the majority oppinion anyway, then we’ll just come up with new criteria for voting in new oppinions, and classify it under “Needs of the Movement”.
Kind of like “Needs of the Business”.
This is the official way of saying, “We’ll do whatever we want.”
Not that I disagree with the outcome that the traditionalists are trying to achieve.
They have a situation in which precedence has already been established allowing legal decisions to be influenced by what the layity thinks, based on personal oppinion instead of consideration of Halachic sources.
The only problem is, now you have to live with it.
Conservative Judaism is supposed to be committed to the Halachic approach.
If that’s the case, then there’s no way you can honestly not forbid homosexual unions, and you definitely can’t allow active homosexuals to be ordained as clergy.
The Torah is very clear about the prohibition of homosexuality.
There’s nothing ambiguous about it.
While I find the use of strong-arm tactics reprehensible, especially in what is supposed to be a religious setting, I find the end the traditionalists are trying to achieve the right one.
But what amazes me more is that Eyton Kober is so worked up about all this.
He goes out of his way to heap sarcasm where it’s pointless.
It seems to me as though he expects the Conservative movement to just discard the prohibition, rather than allow that some in the movement might actually be in favor of letting the prohibition stand because the Torah says it should.
This beggs the question.
There are Orthodox Jews who abandon the laws of Lashon Harah.
Does that mean they should abandon Halachic observance altogether?
After all, the argument seems, “Since you don’t observe all of Halachah, then you should just quit observing it altogether.”
Is that what you’re really after.
Yes, the tactics are wrong.
But it seems to me that they’re trying to work within a system which already stacks the deck against traditionalists anyway.
And, more to the point, why do you care?
You’ve already written the movement off.
To say that you haven’t written off each individual Jew within the movement is an argument of symantics.
That would be like someone who has written off Orthodoxy saying they’ve written off the movement, but not each individual Jew.
It wouldn’t carry much weight with you either.
So, since the movement is of no consequence, (in your book, it’s not even Judaism), Why do you care what goes on in its committee meetings.