Last week President Obama finally admitted the obvious and acknowledged his support for the legal recognition of same-gender relationships. He does deserve credit however for saying that while this is his personal opinion the issue ought to be decided by the states. At present that bodes well for the forces of moral sanity since in every one of the 32 states in which the issue has been decided not by judicial or legislative fiat but by a vote of the citizens such recognition has gone down to defeat.

Black Protestants remain among the religious communities most resistant to recognition with a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey showing that only 33 percent of black churchgoers support the legislation nearly unchanged from the 30 percent support it had in 2001. Blacks were a factor in last week’s passage of a constitutional amendment in North Carolina defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Yet at the same time black support for Barack Obama remains at sky-high levels hovering around the 90 percent mark. One of the least-discussed facts of the Obama presidency is that without this near-monolithic black support Mr. Obama would not have been elected and would be at a crisis level in his public approval ratings.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect that black religious leaders would speak out against the president’s recent pronouncement. But this does provide yet one more reason for social conservatives to work all the harder to defeat Obama in November. So long as he remains in office the black churchgoing community cannot be counted on to join forces in opposing the ongoing effort to steamroll American society into supporting the immoral same-gender agenda. Only Obama’s removal from office will set the black community free to vote its conscience in this matter as it did so crucially in the case of California’s Proposition 8 which overturned the California supreme court’s ruling legitimizing same-gender marriages.

CHOOSING WHAT MOMMY WANTS A while back I discussed the work of Columbia University psychologist Sheena Iyengar on the topic of human choice which began with a study of the levels of optimism in various religious groups. She summarized her findings this way:

Members of more fundamentalist faiths experienced greater hope were more optimistic when faced with adversity and were less likely to be depressed than their counterparts.… The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead it seemed to empower them.… Indeed the people most susceptible to pessimism and depression were the Unitarians especially those who were atheists.

What surprised Iyengar and her mentor Penn professor Marty Seligman was that as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it these findings “complicated the longstanding belief that people who have more control over their lives enjoy greater wellbeing and happiness.” As we discussed then however the underlying premise that religious people have fewer choices to make ostensibly resulting in less control and hence less happiness is simply wrong. So what about the theory that “people who have more control over their lives enjoy greater wellbeing and happiness?” Is that really true? Yes and no.

Most functional people don’t particularly crave control for its own sake and there’s an unflattering term that’s commonly used for those who do. What people do legitimately fear and loathe is being out of control and instead subject to what they regard as the mindless random forces of nature or the arbitrary whims of other human beings the worst of whom are positively nefarious.

But a religious Jew who believes deeply in a loving all-powerful G-d who watches over him and sends his way those life experiences he needs to grow and succeed in this world and the next is happy to cede control — or more accurately to recognize the reality that he never was in control of almost anything about his life in the first place. He doesn’t live in a foreboding world filled with individuals and nations with the power to harm him or with natural disasters capable of wreaking havoc upon him at any moment. That his Father in Heaven is exercising control over his life is a source of succor not angst.

More importantly an observant Jew knows that there is this one small area of his life over which he in fact exerts complete control. It’s called yiras Shamayim the ability to make spiritual and moral choices and it just so happens to be the very purpose of all of Creation. He retains the choice to engage in prayer and repentance in Torah study and performance of mitzvos all of which really work to change things for the better not necessarily in the immediate here and now but unquestionably at some time and place. Why then is it any wonder that in the case of Iyengar’s religious study participants “many of their choices were taken away and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives”?

An experiment that Ms. Iyengar conducted with elementary school children in San Francisco’s Japantown seems very relevant to this discussion. Half the children were American and the other half were the children of Japanese or Chinese immigrants who spoke their parents’ native language at home. During a class activity with markers a third of the children were told to pick whichever marker they wanted to play with a third were told they should work with a specific marker and with the final third the teacher riffled through some papers and pretended to relay instructions from the child’s mother.

A New York Times review of Iyengar’s book The Art of Choosing describes the outcome:

The two ethnic groups reacted differently. The Anglo kids … played the longest when they could pick their own … markers while the Asian children did best when they thought they were following their mothers’ wishes. To the Anglo children their mothers’ instructions felt like bossy constraints. The Asians by contrast defined their own identities largely by their relationship with their mothers. Their preferences and their mothers’ wishes Iyengar writes “were practically one and the same.” Doing what they thought their mothers wanted was in effect their first choice.

Anglos and Asians did share one important reaction: “When the choices were made by … a stranger both groups of children felt the imposition and reacted negatively.” Just because people happily comply with the choices of an intimate … does not mean they want bureaucratic strangers making their decisions.

All one need do is substitute in the preceding paragraphs “Torah Jew” for “Asian” and “Hashem” for “mother” and the connection becomes clear. No one — least of all opinionated adversarial Jews — wants their choices dictated by “bureaucratic strangers.” But serious Jews “define their own identities largely by their relationship” with their Father in Heaven. They hold up as an ideal the mishnah in Avos that counsels to “make your will like His will ” to the point where they are “practically one and the same.” For them doing what their Creator wants “is in effect their first choice.”

The one thing that doesn’t seem to make sense in all this however is the strange complacency of the nonbeliever. He after all has consigned himself to the fate of living in a threatening world of radical randomness forever at the mercy of dangerous forces of both human and nonhuman kinds. If queried about his choice to see his world in this deeply depressing way he might very well respond that “the truth” compels him to do so whatever the cost. Ah what won’t a person do to cling to the truth!

But what of the many nonbelievers who aren’t quite as certain in their unbelief — those for whom proving a negative is the insurmountable logical hurdle that it should be? Shouldn’t they be hoping against hope that they’re mistaken and frantically searching the world over for evidence of a Creator? Where are all the secular Jews clamoring at the gates of kiruv institutions to be shown the truth of Torah if only to save them from the devastating implications for their world of the atheistic alternative?