In his Oct. 21 letter titled, “Same-sex marriage is morally wrong,” Byron Moats says he is against it on “moral” and “biblical” grounds, based on the New, not the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there are pro and con anecdotes on many precepts, including homosexuality. Showing an idiosyncratic conservative attitude, he says, “marriage has always been defined as a man-woman thing. Why should our generation change what has always been?” Because we do not have to keep on with the practices of the past, such as slavery and stoning adulterers.

In his enlightening booklet, “Self-Contradictions in the Bible,” Jonathan Bell quotes passages that present both pro and con, accepted and unaccepted behavior in the early theocratic Hebrew culture. Moats and most religionists know the con-precepts but not the pro-passages alluding to homosexuality.

One pro-passage is of Saul’s son, Jonathan, who declares his love for David, “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David.” (1 Sam. 18:1) who as a lad befriended the boy banished from the village, as had Joseph of the many-colored cloak, who also protected in his youth another boy, accepted, when accused of the same supposed villagers’ unaccepted behavior.

A recent study has shown that a third brother born in a family of boys could likely be homosexual. Could this be Nature’s way of controlling over-populations of various species, by predation, and as seen among many species, by a physical block on excess procreation by homosexuality? Unfortunately, overpopulation has not been realized as a crisis for civilization by traditionalist religions, as it has, by future-concerned science, which has been warning us of an ineluctable “population bomb,” chronically ignored by conservative churchists, in denial. They seem to preach about conception for every coupling, a child-birth for every copulative bungling, and no abortion never.

“On the eve of battle Jonathan strips off his own cloak and tunic, his armor and weaponry and tenderly dresses David in his apparel as a pledge of friendship” (1 Sam 18:4). And when Jonathan is later slain, David elegiacally speaks plainly enough of their bond, “Very pleasant has thou been onto me,” sings David, “thou sweet psalmist of Israel, wonderful was thy love to me, passing the love of women.” (2 Sam 1:26). From this verse, cultural acceptance of sexual diversity and same-sex marriage would seem to be a precept, of tolerance, in the holy book of the Hebrews, in some parts adapted from the theism of the Egyptians’ Book of the Dead, as is the Prayer to Aten of Akhenaton, a precursor of the 29th Psalm.

The homoerotic overtones of David’s life story have been stubbornly ignored by Bible scaldabancos as have the passages about clever, wily, cunning women, brought “out” for us to appreciate in Jonathan Kirsh’s “The Harlot by the Side of the Road.” Past commentators have long celebrated the intrinsic friendship between David and Jonathan as “the ideal male friendship,” but they have refused to acknowledge the possibility that physical as well as spiritual intimacies passed between these two men. “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David ...” The lesson here would seem to be for tolerance, not for a sanctimonious “moral” condemnation, or to be judgmental of the behavior of those “other” people to be “wrong.” Peace, love and acceptance are lessons of the Testaments, not divisive prejudice and exclusion, from the village of self-damned, fear-and-hate-frought  evangelicals or fundamentalists. They don’t seem to learn the lesson of acceptance from Abraham, who provisions Ishmael and Isaac when they are banished from the village to the desert by Sarah when she saw them (t’sahak) “fondling” each other. Abraham saw this as a death sentence by Sarah. He accepted them and provisioned them, and that is the lesson, not Sarah’s intolerance. Obama’s inclusiveness is the lesson, not simple Sarah’s divisive sarcasm.

The words of David’s encomium for Jonathan in the Bible were invoked by the daughter of Moshe Dayan, the war hero of Israel, in the Israeli Knesset, over the rights of gay men and women, under Israeli law. She succeeded in raising the ire, and the blood-pressure, of some of her fellow legislators by “outing” David. She argued on the strength of David’s eulogy of Jonathan that the two of them were gay lovers. She won her case. For equal rights for gays from now accepting law-givers who realized that the stern, narrow-minded decrees against sorcery and homosexuality (Lev. 19:31, 18:22) aren’t the last words on the subject in Holy Scripture. 

Can evangelicals and fundamentalists find the “moral” in the lessons of tolerance in the Hebrew and Christian Holy Books?  Can they realize that acceptance of “others” is more “moral” than intolerance, and that gay exclusion from their heterosexual monopoly on holy matrimony is not “moral?”

Racial prohibitionism is not egalitarian, which our Constitution instructs us to be, as realized by the Supreme Court to finally abolish state laws against miscegenation in 1967. And now California can finally abolish sexual- preference marriage prohibitionism in California,

If 50 percent of American different-sex marriages made under 25 end in divorce, is it not hypocritical for some excluding, prejudiced Christianists to deny marriage for thousands of same-sex couples, since theirs are proven to be more perdurable than heterosexual ones, for same-sex, loving, married couples in their pursuit of happiness?

(Holmes lives in St. Helena.)