Sex Festival in the Holy Land

T.A. sex festival showcases sexual culture, accessories

By Haaretz Staff and Channel 10

Haaretz.com/Channel 10 daily feature for February 7, 2008.

A Tel Aviv sex festival known as the "Sextival" last week aimed to reveal everything that Israelis wanted to know about sex, but were too embarrassed to ask.

While the Sextival may not have appealed to all sections of Israeli society, one participant said that at least her family were proud of what she did.

Same-sex families

Judaism does not recognize same-sex parents and therefore, the High Court decision to recognize their adoptions undermines the foundations of a Jewish state, National Religious Party Chairman Zevulun Orlev said on Sunday.

"There is no choice but to fix the legislation to determine that a family comprises a man and a woman," Orlev said.

The panel reopened Sunday the debate on a lesbian woman's right to adopt her partner's son, in response to the state's petition against a previous court ruling in 2000.

Nicole and Ruthie Brenner-Kadish formalized the adoption in California, and then petitioned the High Court, asking it to instruct the state to recognize the adoption.

As opposed to Orlev, Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On said that "the decision is one more step toward the annulment of the institutionalized discrimination of same-sex couples. It's about time the state recognize these couple as they do adoptions completed by couples that are not of the same sex."

In its 2000 ruling, a three-justice panel sided with the Brenner-Kadish couple, and ordered the Population Registry to list both of them as the child's mothers. An Interior Ministry official refused, however, saying that "biologically speaking the existence of two parents of the same gender is impossible."

In response, the court ruled at the time that "the Interior Ministry position that registering [the child] would be clearly wrong is nothing more than different packaging for the position against recognition of same-sex adoptions, a position that cannot guide the registry official."

A short time after the ruling, the state requested an additional hearing on the matter, with an expanded judicial panel, arguing that adoptions by same-sex couples should not be recognized due to the fact that they create a same-sex family - an institution that has no legal standing in Israel.

The nine-justice panel does not include the court's only two religious justices, Eliyakim Rubinstein and Edmond Levy. According to a court official, Rubinstein could not preside over the case due to the fact that he served as attorney general when the original petition was filed, while Levy had asked to be removed from the deliberation due to his large case load.

Dan Yakir, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel attorney representing the couple, had urged the court to reject the state's request for an additional hearing due to the harm it would cause the Brenner-Kadish family. The child in question, Matan, is already 11 years old, and the couple has two other children - both of whom are listed as having only one of the women as their mother.

Yakir added that an additional hearing on the matter is unnecessary, given that the court also recognized a similar adoption by a lesbian couple in a 2005 ruling. Haaretz

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