The disgraced former US Congressman and now NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner paid a campaign visit to the Munkatcher Rebbe – a man known in the haredi world for his extensive ongoing efforts to keep known haredi criminals out of prison. The rebbe warmly greeted Weiner and gave him a very public blessing – the hasidic rebbe equivalent to endorsement.
Anthony Weiner is famously intermarried and is infamously fresh out of a sex scandal involving emailing pictures of his genitalia to various women.
Even so, the rebbe had no problem publicly blessing him and showing all the signs of formally endorsing him – things he would never do with Christine Quinn, one of Weiner's fellow candidates and the front runner in the race.
Why?
Because Quinn is a) a woman and b) a lesbian, and even though the Torah does not explicitly forbid lesbianism – Maimonides even rules that if a man's wife is discovered to be having a lesbian affair, the man does not have to stop her if he does not want to – this from a rabbi who endorsed judiciously administered wife beating for several other offenses.
But to hasidim, all homosexuality is a toeivah, abomination, even if the Torah does not specify that it is.
And no self-respecting hasidic rebbe would have a friendly public discussion with aq woman.
And there's one more reason why Weiner was greeted so warmly while Quinn probably won't be greeted at all. The videographer has edited out most of it, although you can hear a tiny bit of it at the beginning of the video – Weiner's shameful and irresponsible endorsement of metzitzah b'peh (MBP), the dangerous mouth-to-bloody-penis sucking done my most haredi and some non-haredi mohels after cutting off the baby's foreskin.
Update 12:20 pm – Here is the full video from a different videographer [via: nycelects.com]. The MBP discussion starts at 4:02 and finishes at 8:57. (I'll have more information related to this in a separate post later today or Sunday.)