central problem with the permissive responsum is that it adopted a claim that the Biblical prohibition on homosexual conduct is limited to anal sex only based on insufficient support in precedent, the view of only "one sage". Rabbi Roth argued that it is impermissible to adapt such a minority view: What divided us was the question of our right to adopt a legal stance attributed to one sage that the prohibitions against sexual behavior other than male intercourse are rabbinic in status, d’rabbanan, and not biblical, which attribution is itself open to serious question and is denied by most decisors. Rabbi Roth also said that "Even if the prohibition against sexual behavior other than male intercourse is rabbinic in authority and not biblical, what justifies our abrogating that prohibition?" He argued that the Talmudic concept of Kavod HaBriyot, which the permissive responsum used as justification for doing so, is simply not the same thing as the idea of "human dignity" in contemporary liberalism: In almost all of the cases in which the category is invoked, the claim is that X may violate the law out of deference to the honor of Y. In the case under discussion, X is to be entitled to violate the law out of deference to his own honor, for which claim there is no real precedent. What's more, such a claim is theologically weak, since no law-abiding Jew would ever entertain the possibility that his honor would supersede that of God. And in the few cases of application of the category which can possibly be understood to imply that X may violate the law out of deference to his own honor, X is always literally in a social context and in the presence of others. Rabbi Roth stated that in his perception, the supporters of the permissive responsum were blinded by their predisposition to rule favorably and were unable to view the issue with a dispassionate legal mind. How halachically defensible does an argument have to be before it can be considered within the halachic ballpark? We all understand and agree that decisors of Jewish law often approach the subject before them with a predisposition to give a specific answer. There's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. What, then, distinguishes a good decisor from a poor one? The good decisor is able to judge his decision with enough dispassion to see whether his predisposition