Dear Editor,
I was pleased to see a book review of Rebecca McLoughlin’s excellent The Secular Creed. One of the things referred to in the book is same-sex attraction and this caught my interest. Ought we to distinguish between same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual attraction, which seem to me to be two very different things. In my life I have experienced occasional same-sex attraction, but that has never been sexual attraction. I doubt that I am alone. As a child, I admired and even hero-worshipped certain men who were good role models. I had one or two male friends as distinct from the majority of boys who seemed to have a kind of gang-culture, often sport-based. Later in life I have been drawn to one or two individuals of the same sex in the sense that I felt a strong kinship with them.
David, Israel’s premier king, sadly had plenty of marriage partners, yet described his love for Jonathan as better than any of these liaisons. Are we to understand that as meaning that his love for Jonathan was homoerotic? I think not. That same David revelled in the Old Testament teachings.
