merry crisis

just a friendly reminder that this type of rhetoric is misleading, (in my opinion, slightly antisemitic) and not the way to go about fighting religious homophobes.

religious jews still follow these laws. we dont wear clothes that have a blend of wool & linen (laws of shatnez). fresh produce in israel follows all of the agricultural laws outlined in the torah. as for some of the other laws i always see referenced: we don’t eat shellfish or pork or anything prohibited by the torah. clean-shaven men will only ever use electric razors never blades. we don’t work on the sabbath, we observe the sanctioned holy days, we believe in, love and fear God and obey God’s commandments.

personally, i find the rhetoric harmful and insulting for three reasons. one, it only works on the (very christian) premise that the torah is outdated, and that ~nobody in their right mind~ would follow those laws anymore. two, it tends to ignore the fact that lgbtq+ orthodox jews exist and have to live through the struggle of being lgbtq+ and observant, despite community backlash, severe judgement and institutionalised homophobia. and three, it gives homophobia-masked-as-religious-observance some sort of legitimacy because yeah, the rest of those laws are kept in varying degrees by millions of people.

don’t fight homophobes by saying ‘look at all of these other ridiculous laws’ – those laws matter to a lot of people, including me, a jewish lesbian. instead, say ‘do not stand idly by your fellow’s blood (leviticus 19:16)’, ‘whoever humiliates another in public forfeits their place in the World to Come (avot 3:11), ‘one shall not say to a person words that hurt them or cause them pain against which they cannot stand (sefer hachinuch, mitzvah 338)’, ‘do not do to others that which you would not wish them to do to you. this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary (gemara shabbat 31a)’, and what is perhaps one of my favorite verses in tanach, ‘to what is good and just is more preferable to God than sacrifice (proverbs 21:3)’.

Amazon can afford to throw money from exploited workers towards random shit like making an MMO and trying to destroy libraries. Libraries cannot fight that kind of financial might. It's our job to see amazon, tell it no, and choose libraries instead. As often as we can.

⚔🔥⚔

randomly picked color palette challenge from yesterday’s drawfee uwu

Let him have his emo moment