God created Adam and Eve, not Jonathan and Da– oh, wait….

(…I just typed that as “Adamn and Eve”; Freudian slip much? I think it’s pretty clear where the majority of Christian denominations think I’d be going. )

This is not the essay the title might be leading you to expect: I’m not about to argue the case for Jonathan and David (or Ruth and Naomi, for that matter) having been a Biblical representation of loving homosexual relationships. Many have done that before me, many have done it better, and in truth I’m not even sure where I stand on the idea that Jonathan and David were non-platonic, nor is it really of huge concern to me. (I have read some of the evidence, and I do admit that the majority of the sane evidence seems to point to them having been a romantic and sexual couple, but as with trying to determine the true meaning of anything written in a culture vastly different from our own, it’s not conclusive.) What is clear even if one takes the story in the most conservative of lights, however– even allowing for all the ridiculousness involving a passage translated in most Bibles as “they kissed each other” being papered over with the obviously fake “they sadly shook hands”*, and talk about distorting the supposedly infallible word of God, by the way– is that they were two men whose bond of love for each other surpassed their love for anyone else in their lives. 1 Sam. 18:1 tells us that “the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” In 1 Sam. 20:4, “Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, ‘May the LORD seek out the enemies of David.’ Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own life.” And so on, and so forth. You can look it up yourself.

So with that in mind, I have a modest proposal (no, not that kind, though I can’t deny there’s a hint of satire lurking here) to make to those who would have the laws of the United States be rooted in sound Biblical teaching. Putting aside the fact for the moment that I find it abhorrent that any nation’s laws should be based on religious doctrine** rather than common sense questions of whether we can know an action to be harmful, I’d like to see a law supporting– or perhaps more ideally, the lack of a law excluding– those individuals who, feeling the bonds of intense friendship and devotion towards one another, wish to set up a household and/or be considered significant to one another for the purposes of such things as, say, hospital visitation rights, and other social and legal acknowledgements that a particular person is “close enough” to another person for that bond to be accorded serious weight. I would like to see close, serious friendships treated as a vital part of a person’s life and “chosen family”; I would like it to be acknowledged that those who share in such friendships can face serious emotional anguish if their mutual contributions to each other’s lives are not taken into account, for example in decisions of who counts as significant enough to that person to be allowed to be close to them at crucial times of their lives. I would like it if it were acknowledged that, for some people, a close friendship might be the primary bond in their lives, or at least a highly central one, and should be treated as seriously as a bond of marriage or blood. We could call it, say, the “Jonathan and David law”.***

Now here’s an interesting question: how many Christians who believe the Bible is the inerrant and unchanging word of God, and who are currently fiercely promoting measures to make their interpretations of certain parts of the Bible (such as the moral repugnance of abortion) part of a legal code, would embrace a proposal for such a law? I’m willing to bet that the majority of right-wing, fundamentalist campaigners would feel uncomfortable with this law. Some might accept that it’s Biblical, but would not latch onto it passionately; I am highly confident that very few if any of the people asked, in this hypothetical scenario, would immediately put their weight behind such a law in the same way as they do laws regarding abortion (which have a very shaky, if perhaps non-existant, Biblical basis). If they’re truly passionate about what the Bible says, though, they should. If they really want to make the word of God law in their country, they should be feeling as intensely about the rights of today’s Jonathans and Davids, about the Bible’s touching story of a bond between two men so strong that it surpasses “the love of women”, as they do about people’s rights to uphold any other principle that the Bible supposedly favours. (Let’s quietly skim over “slavery” for now.) But there are very few if any people out there who aren’t also engaged in GLBT rights advocacy who are using this story to make any kind of case. Why not? It’s right there in black and white. If the Bible is your holy book, your inerrant statement from your deity, you should be reading it cover to cover and vehemently defending every idea in it.

Jonathan and David’s story is one of the most controversial parts of the Bible today; so controversial it’s been censored by some translators. Few people want to devote themselves to embracing what it tells us, and few except the liberal ever even talk about it. Yet if the Bible is the rich, beautiful message from divinity that is claimed, isn’t it wrong to ignore, overlook or feel ashamed of any part of it? Isn’t it wrong to censor it? Isn’t it wrong to not look at the guidelines it’s supposed to be laying out for our lives and put all weight possible behind making sure that people have the right to live by those guidelines?

Again, please note that I’m far from a supporter of religion-based legislation; this is all hypothetical. But it’s something to think about, isn’t it?

*Maybe in the Harmonian translation….

**At least in worlds where said religious suppositions merely remain suppositions and not known truths. Harmonia is a theocracy for reasons that go far beyond conjecture.

***Edit: Actually, the more research I do the more it seems that Ruth and Naomi’s story is actually an even better inspiration for this hypothetical law. “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” Can any Bible believer read this passage and doubt that friends should have the right to be seen as priorities in each others’ lives?