Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on April 4, 2013

Why having babies is the key to acceptance in a country waging a demographic war.

Participants hold flags during a gay pride parade in Jerusalem on July 29, 2010. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

A refugee lawyer, a transgender specialist, and six other people sit in a circle in an empty classroom on the second floor of Tel Aviv's Gay Center. They are here for the inauguration of Israel's first-ever LGBT legal clinic. The evening's keynote speaker is Frederick Hertz, an American legal expert who specializes in gay marriage. He describes a recent case he handled, in which a gay couple, one of them transgender, got married in Las Vegas as a man and a woman. Then they moved to California and wanted their respective healthcare benefits. "So the question," Hertz says, "was how to register that same-sex couple when they had been married as an opposite-sex couple."

The crowd stares blankly, some playing with their telephones. One attendee, wearing skinny jeans and Converse sneakers, breaks the collective yawn by quoting a New Yorker cartoon, republished in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, to convey how Israelis feel about the American debate over gay marriage: "Gays and lesbians getting married -- haven't they suffered enough?"

But down two flights of stairs, past a photo exhibition of Israeli drag queens and a poster for a Hebrew version of "Angels in America," a much livelier conversation is taking place in the Center's bar. Through a cloud of cigarette smoke and techno music, a group of activists is talking about what really matters to Israeli gays today: surrogacy.

Holding court at a wicker table is Michal Eden, who became Israel's first openly gay elected official when she won a seat on Tel Aviv's city council in 1998. She marvels at the fact that, while surrogacy is illegal for gay couples in Israel, an increasing number of them are paying foreign women to have their babies overseas.

"I'll tell you, I see it as a revolution," she says. "The fact that gay men from Israel can have a kid from India or from the United States and can raise it as part of a family, as a Jewish Israeli gay family."

Yuval Eggert, the Gay Center's executive director, drops by to join in the conversation. He can't stay long, since he is still on paternity leave (having just had a baby via a surrogate in India) and can barely keep his eyes open. "Ah, mazal tov!" Eden calls out.

Also shmoozing with the crowd is Itai Pinkas, a former Tel Aviv city councilman who had a child with his partner Yoav in 2010 via a surrogate from Mumbai. "A gay thirty-something man with a partner and a baby or two can definitely be considered a typical Tel Aviv specimen," he recently declared in a column for the Israeli daily Maariv.

But as gay men of means are increasingly willing to pay the hefty price of traveling abroad to find a surrogate, less well-off gays in Israel wonder why they are still denied the procedure at home -- which has been legal for straight couples in Israel since 1996. The problem is particularly striking in a country that touts its strong record on gay rights. Israel offers broad legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, and allowed gays to serve in the military decades before the U.S. Out Magazine describes Tel Aviv as "the gay capital of the Middle East," and an American Airlines poll recently dubbed it the world's top gay travel destination. Indeed, Israel is so proud of its accomplishments on gay rights that it has even been accused of exploiting them internationally in order to "pinkwash" its treatment of the Palestinians.

See the article here:
Forget Marriage Equality; Israeli Gays Want Surrogacy Rights

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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