I didn't respond to this noble post at first because it seem to beg for an essay I'm intending to write one of these days.

In a nutshell, though, love the lord your god with all your heart mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself, that is all the law and the prophets.

There is no relationship holiness concept to prop in there there as a distinct addition; there is no biologically prescriptive "god's plan" worshipping evolved mammalian reproduction. One may imagine these things but they are not in the law and the prophets.

Love is the standard; love IS the criterion. Love IS holiness. But love that is not love is not love! The holistic part of holy love is that it forms a whole for both parties involved. If you proffer your love sentiment in the direction of an animal but it can only give back an animal sentiment that isn't a true complement (in fact, the animal has no understanding of most of your love sentiment: it knows it gets strokes and food but even my dog knows that), then what you have is a love that is un-whole, lopsided, a mismatch; in short, a romanticism, a sentimentality, a superstition (the relation that links these words is very subtle but with thoroughness you can find it.)

In the case of loving a mistress or a concubine or by-wife, which we know God has allowed to two of the three people of the book, old-order Jews and muslims, this sets up an opposition to the "wife of your youth," the one who pledged with you and gave you all; in short, it is schismatic, divided, alienating, superseding. Am I to believe that this instrument that caresses one and cuts the other is love? The Lord disqualified it for us Christians.

The man and his daughter engage in a classic Canaanite excess of breaching their original relationship to add on yet another - now there's a mixed-crop field if there ever was one. But though they proclaim a desire to grab at everything and stop at nothing, making child spouse and grandmother concubine, that's only the beginning of the trouble. They also combine all their recessive alleles so whether or not the child they produce seems healthy, it is in fact a cocktail of concentrated mutations; no harm done if it is the only one, but add to that again a few times (and why not in lovin' Canaan)and your get your hemophilics and so on. Is it loving to produce deliberately genetically endangered offspring? Interesting question, but certainly when combined with the relationship superfluity that goes with this scenario, it's easy to suggest not.

But same sex partners who love each other! They can devote themselves to each other; they can spare innocent members of the opposite sex who would probably find them highly pallid spouses. Everything works in their favour to make an undivided holy love and bliss. Reproductively they are no worse off than the heterosexual couple with one sterile partner, and in any case, anyone studying Malthusian population charts can see instantly that excess reproduction is the main true source of human discord, warfare and injustice. Yes, the miracle that just wouldn't quit til it ate all the food and starved (something we have got around now with modern supply, but it will find us again eventually if we go reproducing at classical rates like folks do in Egypt even today - watch Egypt as your example of this reproductive miracle over the next 20 years.)

What do the biblical quotations against the Canaanite excess of adding men in where women are wanted have to say to same-sex partners? Nothing! Their love is not a Canaanite excess, it is the simplest and purest expression of the love that God has grafted into their nature. Unconflicted, undivided, unalienated, non-superfluous, as generous as covetous, giving and taking in harmony so profound that if it were not divine love then God would need to study it to learn a new depth of love. But that's a laugh line, God made this love and for that we sing our praises.

Glory be to God in the highest, the creator, the boychild, and the holy spirit.