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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993                   TAG: 9302110059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A16   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: JERUSALEM                                LENGTH: Short

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KING DAVID ACCUSATION SPARKS FUROR

Debate in the Israeli parliament, rarely decorous these days, turned into bedlam Wednesday when a liberal member, arguing for equal rights for gays and lesbians in the army, suggested that ancient Israel's greatest king, David, was a homosexual - and quoted the Bible to try to prove it.

Mourning the death of Jonathan in a disastrous battle with the Philistines, David calls him "most dear to me" and says, "Your love for me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women."

But even as Yael Dayan, one of the Labor Party's iconoclasts, began quoting from David's famous lament in the Second Book of Samuel, Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party shouted at her and other liberals: "All of you are sick! All of you should be hospitalized!"

The ensuing tumult surpassed even the angry denunciations of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that have become the regular fare at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Religious members from all parties called on Rabin and the Knesset speaker to punish Dayan.

- Los Angeles Times

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