Dear Rabbi Lamm, Thank you for your letter of 16 March. Although I fear I have exhausted your patience and tolerance, I cannot forbear expressing puzzlement over your assertion that your subject was exclusively the Jewish attitude on homosexuality. The “halakhic solution,” which I find the essential contribution of the article, rests on an appeal to secular science, mainly psychiatry, to exemplify some “sticky” Gays to some extent, while preserving the condemnation of homosexuality intact. But where one enlists secular science, is there not an obligation to know the literature of the field and to be guided by the canons of that science and by the authority of the acknowledged experts, whose established position is wholly contrary to the broad and facile generalizations of the article? Where considerations of homiletic and apologetic usefulness leads, I would submit that it should be a matter of indifference to the psychiatric profession whether a psychotherapist is Jewish or non-Jewish. The opinion about Gay mental health which I cited is, of course, not mine, but that of the bulk of the psychiatric profession. I would argue that, within the methodology of your “halakhic solution,” it effectively eliminates as a guiding or mitigating circumstance the finding that “Jewish law” bans homosexuality. But this is not your special pleading, for in the Jewish law homosexuality is a sinful offense, always and eternally condemned. The “halakhic solution” is not a halakhic solution, it remains, I regret to maintain, a contradiction in terms – a category mistake. The grounds for mitigation lie not beside what the human sciences establish about sexual needs and frustrations, but in the stance of moral position, I presume, and a frazzled but real compassion. After all, there may be no solution. I am disturbed, too, by the rejection of civil-libertarian argument. Does objectivity depend on whether the psychiatrist is a psychiatrist or a Jew, and subjectivity depend on whether th…