"…[I]f a group were to come and say ‘We believe in pedophilia, in allowing sex with minors, and we want to hold a happening’… Any call to break the law is problematic and these are the laws of the Torah. Just think what would happen if a religious university were called upon to hold an event for some organization that calls for a certain law to be broken.…”
Zionist Orthodox Bar-Ilan University has refused to allow its LGBT student group to hold a public event on campus to mark Gay Pride Week, Ha'aretz reported.
That refusal is notable for several reasons. First, Bar-Ilan receives public funding but is allowed to discriminate anyway. Second is reason Bar-Ilan gave for blocking the event:
"The university has a religious character and homosexual relations are forbidden in Jewish law.…You can’t permit a call to action that would violate a halakhic prohibition to occur at a religious university. Holding a demonstration….is saying that we are in favor [of homosexuality]…On the contrary, and don’t misunderstand me, but if a group were to come and say ‘We believe in pedophilia, in allowing sex with minors, and we want to hold a happening’… Any call to break the law is problematic and these are the laws of the Torah. Just think what would happen if a religious university were called upon to hold an event for some organization that calls for a certain law to be broken,” Bar-Ilan University spokesman Haim Zisowitz reportedly said.
In other words, Bar-Ilan is saying the Torah's laws carry the same or greater legal import in Israel than secular law does, and he's also equating homosexuality with pedophilia.
That most male pedophile's sexual orientation is to children (often children of either gender), and that their secondary sexual expression is almost always heterosexual escapes Bar-Ilan. What also escapes Bar-Ilan is the idea that religious laws are followed (or not) as a matter of personal preference except in cases in which the state has given control of a particular matter – marriage, for example – to clerics. So that halakha (Orthodox Jewish law) forbids wearing shatnez (a garment made from fabric woven out of both wool and linen) does not give Bar-Ilan the right to deny a student wearing shatnez the same rights as other students.
Past Bar-Ilan's very problematic statement, even though the LGBT group promised the Bar-Ilan the event would take into account the religious sensitivities of the university, the university told the LGBT group it would only allow it to hold a closed lecture – but only if all speakers were pre-screened and pre-approved by the university, and only if those speakers included "speakers, like psychologists and rabbis, who could offer help to the participants” – in other words, only if the event included practitioners and supporters of reparative/conversion therapy, the dangerous discredited 'therapy' that seems to drive gay men to severe depression (or worse) far more often than it helps anyone. Reparative/conversion therapy is banned in parts of the US, condemned by academics who study these issues and by psychological associations, as well.
All that said, Bar-Ilan issued a statement denying it had asked for or demanded that psychologists and rabbis who could offer "help" to the participants be included:
“Together with the Student Association, the gay students group requested to hold a happening on campus to mark Gay Pride Week in conjunction with organizations from outside the university. In consideration of the university’s religious character and in light of the fact that the event the students requested to hold is not related to academic or student activity, the administration informed the students that it would only approve an event of an academic nature in one of the campus halls – a seminar or a panel – that would deal with issues relevant to the gay community. The university offered to assist the students in organizing the event and recruiting the speakers and attendees. Contrary to what the student organizers assert, the university never proposed to bring ‘rabbis and psychologists who could help the participants,’ but only offered to assist in organizing the event. We deeply regret to see the false way in which the organizers have portrayed the administration’s offer of assistance,” the statement read.