The Gay Parade

This country is going crazy this week and I feel like I'm stuck in the middle.
Down my road Haredim are setting fire to dust bins again and throwing rocks at Egged buses - why? Because some homosexuals, bisexuals and transexuals are going to parade through Jerusalem (I'm deliberately NOT using the words 'the holy city' afterwards) to be 'davkaniks'.

They are NOT parading through the old city but in the area of the Knesset - hence lack of 'holy city' as I'm not sure how holy the Knesset area is, or in fact the New city at all. That is not the point though. The point is that Jerusalem has the highest population of Haredim in Israel, and, more relevantly, some of the most extreme Haredim too.

Why choose Jerusalem to parade through? The only reason I can see is 'just davkah' - just because. Yes, the organisers are Jerusalem-based but they could easily have chosen another city - Tel Aviv has had lots of fun with gay parades in the past, Haifa, or a secular suburb of Jerusalem. Yes, the parade organisers want to demonstrate freedom of expression, sexual orientation, opinion, rights etc etc but they could have done this without provoking all of the inevitable violence.

They want to prove a point. The problem is that point is so unintelligable to Jerusalem's ultra-orthodox community there is no point in the point, if you see what I mean. How do you expect people who consider homosexuality as a test that Hashem sends a person to overcome and all sexual practises should be conducted in the utmost privacy (even heterosexual ones), to accept a parade that embraces the opposite of so many Torah values?

Even those sections of the religious community that are 'tolerant' of homosexuality would still prefer not to see it splashed across every billboard and on every street corner, just any person would be uncomfortable to see any couple engaged in sexual promiscuity in public (we still retain an element of appreciation of tznius/modesty, albeit a small one).

So on Friday we are going to see a lot of violence. Although I can understand the source of the anger, I can never understand the persistent resortion to violence by these elements of the religious community. The problem is, it has succeeded in the past and they have every expectation that it will continue to do so.

Should we not give in to bullies, even when we understand their point of view? There are so many alternative ways to express anger and outrage at something other than lobbing rocks at it.