Time Flies When You're Batshit

I've blogged a bit about Yehuda Levin in the past few months, as have many others round the J-blogosophere from time to time.

But it occurred to me that his name sounded vaguely familiar. So I did some digging. Turns out I was right; I did remember yet another stupid homophobic thing Levin was involved with way back when. And if you thought him being Pat Buchanan's House Jew wasn't bad enough, hold on to your yarmulkes.

Dateline: March 1997. Place: Yehuda Levin's brain, aka Crazy-Town.

Two right-of-center groups of Orthodox rabbis are threatening to boycott the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as long as the Washington, D.C., institution includes material about gay victims of the Shoah.

In a congressional hearing last week, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a representative of both groups, urged Congress to withhold the annual $25 million to $30 million in federal funds to the Holocaust museum until it finds "a way to stop elevating the status of homosexuals to Jewish people."

"It's a perversion" to include material about gay victims of the Holocaust, Levin told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior and Related Agencies. "Do we have a prostitutes' exhibit?"

If Congress does not comply, Levin said, the rabbinical groups plan to issue a religious edict banning visits by its members to the museum.

The boycott threat, however, has sparked reproach from more mainstream Orthodox rabbis nationally and in the Bay Area.

"Any statement by Jewish leaders, particularly rabbinical leaders, calling to not attend a place like the Holocaust museum is inappropriate and inexcusable," said Rabbi Howard Zack of Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland.

Rabbi Jacob Traub of Congregation Adath Israel in San Francisco warned that the groups' position should not be viewed as indicative of an Orthodox rabbinical consensus.

The stance "paints an unrealistic and unclear picture of the priorities of Orthodox Jewish life," he said.

The Washington museum "remains a recollection of the horrors suffered by all the victims of Nazism," Traub added, including "Jews and gentile, straight and gay, religious Jew and secular Jews."

Issuing the boycott threat were two New York-based groups, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada and the Rabbinical Alliance of America, each of which claimed to have more than 600 members.

A local source, however, said the groups have far fewer members and are considered fringe among mainstream Orthodox rabbis, who are mainly affiliated with the New York-based Rabbinical Council of America.

...In a statement issued Monday, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, said, "We strongly urge people not to visit museums that maintain exhibits glorifying homosexuality.

"We declare that the Torah absolutely prohibits the viewing by anyone, especially children, of such homosexual exhibits that insult and desecrate the memory of the millions of innocent victims of the Holocaust."

Between 10,000 and 15,000 homosexuals were killed by the Nazis.

To compare that number "with 6 million Jews or even Gypsies and others targeted for elimination is an outrage," Levin said in an interview.

Homosexuals "were not rounded up, were not gassed, and many were paramours of guards" at the labor and death camps where they were imprisoned, said Levin, who last year served as honorary chairman of Republican Patrick Buchanan's presidential campaign.

Each year, Levin addresses the anti-abortion protesters who march in Washington on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

Levin, who lives in Brooklyn, also ran for mayor of New York City in 1985 on the Right-to-Life ticket, and is considering a run in the city's upcoming Democratic mayoral primary.

He said inclusion in the Holocaust memorials is part of a strategy by a "political homosexual network" to gain mainstream acceptance.

...Rabbi Steven Dworken, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, which represents more than 1,000 Orthodox rabbis, including Traub and Zack, also took issue with Levin's groups.

"No one has a right to kill someone else and annihilate them no matter what their beliefs are," he said.

According to Orthodox Judaism, homosexuality is "an aberrant lifestyle and cannot be accorded any type of legitimacy," Dworken said. "However, to try to dissuade the U.S. population from learning the lessons of the Holocaust because of this would be a mistake."

Funny thing is, Levin has no trouble whoring the Shoah out for his own pet political causes- be they regarding gay marriage or abortion. So maybe this was somehow poetic justice.

Anyway, it's good to know that time is forever passing, but nutjobs are forever.