Weltanschauung Kampf

I recently received the following message:

I have a legitimate question. I am an Orthodox Jewish woman married, thank G-d, with kids. I would not support my children being gay, or gay marriage in any Jewish community. However, why do we care what the non-Jews do? They have all sorts of unkosher behavior that we don’t concern ourselves with. I tell my family that LGBT issues are another part of the world we don’t concern ourselves with. It’s not Jewish. Thanks for the answer.

My response:

Divine Mandate to Promote Universal Morality
As Torah-observant Jews, we are charged with the duty to serve as a light unto the nations by teaching and promoting the universal moral code known as the laws of Noah. One of these laws is the principle of living a righteous family life, which includes the prohibition of various sexual sins. Under this code both homosexual acts and legalization of homosexual marriage are forbidden.

Reducing the Chillul Hashem Committed by Non-Religious Jews
Sadly, many of our non-religious Jewish brethren are leading or supporting the evil LGBT movement whose aim is to legitimize, normalize, and promote the wicked, socially destructive sin of homosexual acts, the homosexual lifestyle, and other related perversions. So we have a duty as Jews to speak out against it—in order to repudiate it, so we as religious Jews are not viewed as guilty by association, and in order to rectify or at least lessen the shameful chillul Hashem (desecration of G–d’s name) that those Jews are perpetrating.

Reducing the Chilul Hashem Committed by Religious Jews
Perhaps even more sadly, many of our religious Jewish brethren were and are also partly to blame for the success and ever-growing expansion of this grotesque movement. Modern-day moral wars are fought not with swords or rifles, but at the ballot box. Although the Jewish vote matter little on the federal level, it is truly critical in local elections in areas with sizable Jewish communities. So when Orthodox Jews choose to vote for leftist, Democrat politicians in those elections (notably in New York) and thereby enable those politicians—some of whom are themselves non-religious Jews and some even (to our great disgrace) self-identifying Orthodox Jews (such as ? Weprin and Dov Hikind)—to win, those Orthodox voters are to blame for all the evil laws legitimizing, normalizing, and promoting these immoral laws and ordinances that those politicians go on to sponsor or vote in favor of. We need to educate our fellow Jews to do teshuvah (repent) and never again vote for such politicians but instead vote exclusively for the most conservative candidate running.

Reducing the Negative Influence Upon the Orthodox Community
In the modern era, very few Orthodox Jews, if any, still live in isolated enclaves sheltered from secular society. The powerful, zealously hedonistic messages currently dominating the secular world seep into our consciousness and harm us and our communities. Worse still, many self-identifying Orthodox Jews lack religious education and spiritual sensitivity and are therefore not particular to draw their values from Torah. They succumb to the temptation of partly adopting degenerate values from the dominant secular progressive culture, a value system of noxious poison sugar-coated in deceptive, pretty euphemisms like love, equality, tolerance, and rights. Even those of us who resist adopting those values are tainted by osmosis, as we learn of these trends through our inevitable interaction with the surrounding world (including the world of our fellow non-Orthodox Jews) and we must exert ourselves to present a rational defense of our traditional stance.

Age-Appropriate Education
As for one’s personal family life, and the specific question of when it would be age appropriate to educate one’s children on these matters: It all depends on the child and the extent of his or her exposure to secular culture. But one can surely educate one’s children even from a young age about the basic principle that Torah is not just an ethnocentric, particularistic religion directed exclusively to the Jewish people, but it also contains a universalistic element, which mandates basic universal laws of moral and ethical behavior for all mankind, which, when possible, we should share with non-Jews.