Is homosexuality a moral or religious offense?
Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach makes a bad case on this video for regarding homosexual practice as a purely religious offense rather than a moral one. Of course, to assert as I will do here that homosexual practice is a moral offense is not to deny that it is also a religious offense. Every moral sin is at one and the same time an offense against the Creator. Take the seventh commandment, the prohibition against adultery, which Rabbi Boteach classifies as a moral rather than religious commandment since it belongs to the second half of the Decalogue. Yet David acknowledges to God in his adultery against Bathsheba: "Against you, you alone, have I sinned" (Ps 51:4). Rabbi Boteach's problem is not that he characterizes the prohibition of homosexual practice as religious but that he does so to the exclusion of it being a moral offense. Here are six problems with his position: (1) In the Levitical chapters on sex laws (18 and 20), the prohibition of homosexual practice appe