Brody's Notes... Think Progress: NOM Rabbi Blames Gay Marriage For Murder Of 8 Year Old NYC Boy

Sean Savett is an intern for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He is a rising senior at the University of Rochester, where he is a political science major with minors in international relations and history. He grew up in Merion, PA just outside of Philadelphia and is a diehard Philadelphia sports fan. Previously, he has interned in Sen. Schumer’s (D-NY) office, in the Philadelphia Mayor’s Internship Program, and for several political campaigns.

Sean Savett

By Sean Savett | NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) recently invited Rabbi Yehuda Levin to join them at a rally protesting New York’s same sex marriage bill, despite Levin’s long history of offensive comments. Just a few days ago, however, Levin went a step too far, using his religious radio broadcast to blame the murder of an eight-year-old Jewish boy on Jews who supported gay rights and abortion clinics. Here are Levin’s comments:

“Why was this [death of Kletzky] allowed to happen? Let’s think about it. If we go back to the cause, the effect was he was the victim, but the cause was a Jew [Yiddish] that the evil will come to destroy you within your midst. [...] For too long we have been turning our cheek, we have been turning away and ignoring the agenda of the descendants of Amalek [evil] — first they [Gay's] wanted rights, then they wanted adoption, they wanted special protections, and ultimately they wanted marriage — and we all know that we did precious little. If those three or fourth thousand people [who searched for the boy when we went missing], at the direction of the greater Israel and their leaders and their common sense, would have come out, maybe, against the marriage, against this final nail in the coffin of morality…maybe we wouldn’t have had to had this episode of Amalek [evil] replay itself. This is a time for introspection…This came in the very aftermath of the marriage bill, my dear friends, and not doing anything.”

Watch it (around 7:00):

NOM has long associated itself with questionable characters, relying on bigotry and hateful, intolerant rhetoric to oppose the advancement of LGBT rights.