MadelynIris said:
Agree on the condemnation of those practices. But the argument is weak when used against verses like:
Romans 1:26-27
“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”
Sure, this can be sliced, diced and interpreted many different ways, but it sure seems like Paul was referring to the practice of sex with one's same sex. Not just the aldulterous nature of it.
The problem with your argument here is that Romans 1 is an exact description of a pagan temple orgy! The previous verse gives it away:
"While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for
the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes." - Romans 1:22-23
The main problem with Paul is that he was writing in a regional "vulgar Greek," which, if you're familiar with the differences between "classical Latin" and "vulgar Latin," you'll understand why later translations can be difficult. In fact, Paul's Greek was not discovered in an extra-Biblical source until the 19th century after an excavation in Turkey. Beforehand, it was tradition that Paul's Greek was special and of divine origin.
So, basically, Paul is not afraid to speak in the language of the masses, which means a heavy use of phrases and words that he will assume that his target audience understands. This attitude became the underlying reasoning behind Eugene Peterson's "The Message." I can only imagine how our slang will be translated in 2,000 years!
It has been stated that you shouldn't "pick and choose" from the Bible; that you have to understand the totality of the message. Paul's epistles certainly have to be read that way, because he has a pattern of starting his epistles with thinly-veiled flattery to the audiences he's trying to convert and finishing them by showing how his audience's preconceptions are wrong. The greatest example of this in the Pauline epistles is in his appropriation of the phrase, "the Law." Paul's contemporaries would have believed "the Law" to mean "Mosaic Law," whereas he firmly believed that Jesus changed "the Law" to refer to one commandment, to love one another.
Romans 1 is an example of that flattery, by appealing to Rome's Jewish Christians' sense of self-righteousness. By making mention of the temple cult orgy, the initial reactions would be that the Jewish Christians are superior and better than those common pagans. However, Paul then goes straight into Romans 2 and rips into the Jewish Christians, essentially stating that they are no better than the common pagan and will be judged on the same level.
The moral of Romans is in Romans 13, which I have quoted from regularly:
"Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,' and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying, (namely) 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law." - Romans 13:8-10
These verses are probably the cornerstone of Paul's theology, whereas Romans 1 is barely an afterthought, written in confusing language. The word translated as "unnatural,"
para-physin, was also used as an adjective for God in another epistle.
No need to argue. I understand the plight. My theology might be bad. I have no horse in this race other than I think it naive to twist Paul into accepting homosexuality -- for goodness sake, he barely accepted heterosexuality. 
Paul looked to the ideal of Jesus, and interpreted that as emulating Him in His entirety--and since Jesus was asexual, then the ideal was to be asexual too. This theology rears its ugly head twice in the future, once with St. Augustine, whose fixation with asexuality likely had to do with his previous faith of Manicheanism's hatred of sex, and again with St. Thomas Aquinas, who expounded on Augustine's hatred of sex with a complete hatred of any and all emotion (also a tenet of Manicheanism). It's because of the latter that we have the modern adjective of "stoic," meaning "one who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain."
Christian homophobia owes itself more to these two individuals than it does to the Bible. Nonetheless, it's origin can almost directly be traced to St. Peter Damian, whose stoic work,
Liber Gomorrhianus--an 11th century "attack on homosexual practices, mutual masturbation, copulation between the thighs, anal copulation and solitary masturbation, as subversive disruptions against the moral order occasioned by the madness associated with an excess of lust"--was actually condemned by Pope Leo IX as "excessive." Nonetheless, extremism was rampant in these days. Damian was also the man responsible for introducing "self-flagellation" as a theological virtue, and, not so coincidentally, this was also the time when clergy celibacy was mandated, with Damian and his allies having great influence in the Vatican during this time. This is why I have issues with the traditional excuse that clergy celibacy was mandated as a result of preventing church property going to their heirs. It frankly doesn't add up, considering the climate involved.
