by Paul Halsall
First. Let us remember the most important verse for gay people in the Bible. John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Child, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life". And in this same Bible, a book produced, in all its phases, in patriarchal cultures in which marriage and property exchange were completely intertwined, God gave us also the most pro-gay book of the Bible - the Song of Songs. Read it one day: it is about two lovers making love; the lovers are male and female, but they are not described as married, property and progeny and not an issue either. What is important in the Song is the beauty and value of human erotic attraction; this attraction is validated by God, and by Jesus also who continually plays down the importance of traditional ideas of the family. God takes as one of the great prophets of the Old Testament a man who is not a man - a eunuch, the sexual minority par excellence, of the ancient world, the prophet Daniel, who, along with his companions, is take because of his physical beauty to be a court eunuch in the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. This was known to all ancient commentators, for instance St. John Chrysostom, but has been ignored recently. GOD has a place for those who deviate sexually from social norms - gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. In Isaiah 56:4-5, the Lord addresses the eunuchs, and those who do not participate in the dominant culture of preserving name and family through children: "For thus says the Lord: to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast to my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument better than sons and daughters, I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off." Note that eunuchs could not keep the covenant in the same way as heterosexuals - they could not dedicate their first born sons for instance - and so, gay people CAN keep the covenant of the Law of Love - to love the Lord God and ones fellow human beings - but the way they do so might be slightly different from heterosexuals.
The Bible, you see, is full of many wonderful things. You can pull out a few verses here and there that seem, especially in modern translations, to be anti-gay, but this is always a misunderstanding. There are verses, indeed whole books of the Bible which challenge the viewpoint of the fundamentalists who seek to prove their view of the world by selective quotation [ask a fundamentalist where the Bible has any doctrine of the Trinity someday!].
As to St. Paul's apparent attacks. It seems that Paul was disgusted with certain aspects of sex in Greco-Roman society. He was at times a bigot and a prude - he even admits as much when discussing whether women's hair should be covered. He at no time discusses equal relationships between people of the same sex. It is possible that if he had known about them he would still have disliked them; after all Paul seems to condemn prostitutes, but given that we know most ancient prostitutes, whatever their social opprobrium, were forced, usually sold in fact, into prostitution, it does not speak well of Paul, IMO, that he condemned these poor abused people: Jesus never did! We hold Paul as authoritative for his expansionary view of an inclusionary church, for his profound understanding of sin and redemption, for his exaltation of Jesus as Savior. We do not hold his every word and decision, nor those of any other apostle, as correct in every way.
And neither does anyone else! In Acts 9, I think, the Council of Jerusalem laid down certain laws for non-Jewish Christians [so we are not talking OT laws here]. Among the laws was an instruction not to eat the blood or the meat of strangled animals. No Christians observe these laws [what exactly do you think is in sausage? ;-)], and while Catholic's may have an excuse - we believe the Church existed before the Bible and has much say in interpreting it [and WE are the Church !], fundamentalists have no such rationale. They simply ignore it.
In sum: the Bible is *OUR* book. It speaks to us, and it speaks to all people who are "deviant" in their society. It is misused and picked over by fundamentalists, and you should resist going along with their agenda, in my opinion. But above all it teaches the God loves you and wants you to love and be loved. I hope you have found, and will find, Regina, a lover, woman or man, who will bring that experience of God into your life.
The most pro-homosexual text in scripture is
"For God so loved the World that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life"
In other words, all the pro-human texts in scripture are pro- homosexual too.
But that is not what anti-gay folk mean when they say there are no "progay" texts in Scripture. It all depends on how you read it, though.
Try these then: