I'm pretty ticked off at both sides of this issue. I cannot swallow the claims of those who oppose the event on the grounds that it will "defile the Holy city". The three religions that dominate the city all consider each other anything ranging from run-of-the-mill heresy to vilest idolatry. And yet they somehow manage to tolerate each other's public demonstrations. Why is walking down the street holding a placard saying "It's OK to be gay" so much more despicable to Jewish sensibilities than monks marching through the Old City on Xmas carrying effigies of their messiah on life-sized crosses? I flatly disbelieve the complaint that the parade is a gross immodesty. If modesty was the real basis for opposing a parade, then the opponents would lobby for enforcement of public lewdness laws and for reasonable controls on the behaviors sanctioned among the parade's participants. They would not be trying to nullify any and every public expression of queer identity. I cannot respect a party that refuses to tolerate the respectful expression of opposing viewpoints.

On the other hand, the organizers of the Pride event can't pretend that they don't know from past years that this kind of vitriolic reaction would be provoked. Perhaps they are too full of their desire to prove a point of principle to care whether or not their actions help or hurt our cause in the long run. I certainly don't think that a bill in the Knesset to ban pride parades everywhere in the country is a step forward. (Unless the intention is to highlight how Israel's commitment to Democratic principles is a farce. But that's a whole 'nother rant.) I agree that it's a tragedy if queer people can't publicly support each other as a beleaguered minority in the capital of our nation. But it's a greater tragedy to lose the patient because you were attacking the symptoms instead of the root causes of the disease.

I don't have much respect for this dispute right now because I don't see that either side is having much respect for the other. If the queer and religious factions in this fray would actually enter into a dialog with the intention of finding a way for the GLBT community to publicly affirm their right to exist but without offending the tender sensibilities of certain religious factions, I think it could be done. But it would require serious compromise on both sides, and thus serious maturity on both sides. I'm not overly optimistic in the short term.

Tim sent me a link to an article of interest to all of us who chafe against the custom of not eating kitniot on Pesach. The article does a good job of expressing the reasons why I personally think the custom is a bad idea. Namely, the prohibition is so awfully ill-defined, which not only offends my aesthetic affinity for categorical neatness, but also has caused the custom to bloat like the Blob, forbidding a series of foodstuffs that are progressively less like actual chametz, with no end in sight. The article also nicely summarizes Becca's pet peeve about the prohibition, citing how it creates an arbitrary and useless division among people. It's all the more annoying in that it often keeps people from eating at their friends' houses over the holiday.

I haven't checked out the credentials of this Machon Shilo outfit well enough to have an opinion about their qualifications for making the ruling that they do, but they've got me enthusiastically agreeing with the logic and philosophy that they express on this issue.

This Friday, the Jerusalem Pride and Tolerance Parade will finally take place, after much unfortunate delay. I'm heading up to Jerusalem tomorrow to participate and see for myself what the whole tremendous fuss is all about. I have a couple friends who won't be marching because they don't believe it will send the right message nor advance the gay political platform, I have a friend who's not marching because he's a bit apathetic and figures he's seen it all before, and I've got a couple friends who actively discouraged me from going on the grounds of immodesty. I strongly doubt that the predictions that the parade will be nothing but a wild spectacle of gratuitous lewdness are anything more than the incitant exaggerations of hate-mongers. After all, the weather in Jerusalem these days isn't exactly conducive to dressing in thong bikinis and loose-mesh tank tops.

I admit that I could be wrong. If it turns out that there's no significant segment of the parade which manages to conform to the standards of physical modesty that should be reasonably expected from a modern secular liberal culture, then there really will be no place for me in the parade, and I will respectfully refrain from marching. But I really doubt that such will be the case, and I greatly look forward to sauntering down the avenue this Friday, waving a great big rainbow flag.

Last night I had an interesting dream. I dreamt that I was visiting Rebecca's house to play with Ashira, but Becca had another younger baby there for me play with. He had jet black hair and eyes and faintly olive skin and gorgeous expressive lips. There was a healthy glow about him, despite the fact that his small body gave the impression of fragility. I swung him around in my arms and tossed his head back as he squealed with delight. But then I noticed that his heartbeat felt unnaturally fast, so I switched to less energetic kinds of play for fear of the poor boy's health. Soon after, I was talking to Rebecca again, who explained to me that the baby is an orphan, and his unusually fast heartbeat is actually normal for him due to a congenital anomaly which caused him to be born with two hearts. Since each heart beats independently, it seems like he has twice as many heartbeats as you'd expect. Becca then revealed to me that he could be weaned very soon and that he would be eligible for me to adopt. My heart melted right there on the spot. I had fallen in love with him in the short time I'd spent with him, and couldn't resist the thought of taking him home and giving him all he needed. But I then said to Rebecca that I had serious reservations about the tremendous practical difficulties involved with raising a child before I'd found a partner. I wasn't sure that I was up to the tremendous task of single parenthood. The last moment of the dream was me thinking to myself that despite the difficulty, I couldn't pass up an opportunity like this for my sake or for the boy's sake.

Since I tend toward the cigar-is-a-cigar school of dream interpretation, I'm going to assume that my subconscious is just feeding back to me my impatience to have children. I've been able to feel my biological clock ticking for years now. I remember the secret daydream that I harbored throughout my childhood and adolescence, how all I really wanted was to grow up to be a stay-at-home dad and house-spouse, despite the indubitably clear message sent by Western culture that my only valid role as a man would be as a bread-winner. Now that I'm all grown up, I don't think I'm going to let the world dictate terms to me anymore. Screw building my life around my "career". I'm not going to settle for anything less than making my dreams come true.

Today in Gemara shiur, the text touched tangentially on the phenomenon of the ilonit, a woman whose congenital biology prevents her from ever experiencing puberty. Occurrences of this apparently had been observed a sufficient number of times for the Talmudic sages to have developed a method for definitively establishing whether or not a person was affected by this syndrome, in addition to deducing the legal implications of such a condition. Since I'd recently read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (excellent book, by the way), I suspected that this class of woman might share the same intersex condition as the protagonist of the novel, namely 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. I thought of this because the Tosafot commentary on the passage mentioned that this condition could be diagnosed with certainty at 20 years of age and that the presence certain masculine characteristics might hint at the condition even in childhood. Since I don't know the full details of how this determination is made, I couldn't make a truly educated guess about whether an ilonit is the same as a person with an 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, but I was curious anyway.

So to try to confirm or deny this speculation, I hit up Wikipedia to give myself a booster shot of knowlege about intersexuality. As I read, I became amazed at how complicated the issue is. I mean, I knew there was more than one type of hermaphroditism and more than one possible aetiology for most of those types. But when the article started rattling off nearly a dozen different chromosomal patterns that could potentially manifest an intersexual phenotype, I was a bowled over a bit.

However, the real shocker was learning about chimerism, where a single organism is composed of more than one population of genetically distinct cells. This can happen naturally if the embryos of fraternal twins fully fuse into a single embryo. In this case, the organism can be considered its own twin! Chimerism might be invisible to the naked eye, or could manifest as an anomaly as slight as each eye being a different color or as radical as a hermaphrodite with a full set of functioning organs of both the male and female varieties. A regular circus sideshow, folks.

The question that then arose in my mind was, "why doesn't the immune system of a chimera attack the cells of a different population?" In searching for an answer to this question, I found a really good article on chimerism which implies that nobody knows the answer yet. It certainly would be an incredible breakthrough in immunology if we could figure this out. It could mean organ transplants with no risk of rejection or even a cure for diseases where the immune system fails.

Nature simply never fails to fascinate...