I am rather upset at something that happened on a different board, and akennett’s argument deserves to be analyzed on a different level than the drive-by homophobe, and I do not feel competent to do that dispassionately at the moment.
Suffice it to say that there is some merit in what he says, but that I see some fundamental weaknesses in the premises.
There is one other thing that has plagued these arguments, which was alluded to above but nowhere dealt with – and that is what people mean by “homosexuality” – bo et al. are using it to mean the self-identification on the basis of romantic and/or sexual attraction and orientation; akennett is (mostly) using it to mean “the state of engaging in homosexual acts, or desiring to.” While any romance or marriage has a strong sexual component, even if sex is not practiced (in the romance), that romance or marriage stands for substantially more than just the sexual aspect. A fair portion of how I define myself is in relation to my wife, our “kids” (no blood or legal relation but an emotional one corresponding to that felt by parents and adult children) and their kids, and this is by no means delimited to what we happen to do in bed, or even kisses and caresses – today, for example, we played a table baseball game, discussed a couple of threads, had a good laugh over an e-mail about embarrassing moments forwarded by a good friend we originally met online, analyzed the spaghetti sauce Barb had concocted for dinner (some regular constituents of her normal sauce were missing, and the substitutes gave it a rather unusual pizzazz, and we figured out what to increase, decrease, etc. in future sauces to keep that new and intriguing taste) – she met with a lady from church this morning, we discussed what cigarettes to buy when to maximize value… just normal everyday life. The point to all this is that typically matt_mcl and Potter, gobear and goboyfriend, and Mr Visible and Mr Visipartner, would be doing much the same things, with the specifics changed to meet their common interests and tastes.
As for what the Bible says, the key message to me is that one should take Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and having done so, keep His commandments. And the primary one is radical love of God with all that is in one, and the nearly-as-important second one is that one should love one’s neighbor (which, it is made clear, is every other human being) as oneself. This lesson gets driven home over and over again, notably in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, where any deed done or not done “unto one of the least of these” is considered by Christ to be done to Himself.
So, to take this to an extreme, if you care to say that the deeply felt love for one’s beloved spouse is immoral to any human being, you are telling Christ that He is immoral for loving us.
I concede that most of Judaism and Christianity has historically regarded “homosexuality” – lumping identification, orientation, and behavior into one – as immoral. Moral theologians today are trying to deal more accurately with the psychology of the subject, rather than taking a broad-brush interpretation of a few Bible verses and using it to condemn an entire group unheard. Many of them stand by Scripture but urge understanding and compassion. Some radically reinterpret the Scriptures (and I stand with these) in terms of selfish gratification of lust and not the specific act being what is condemned.
But whatever avenue of dealing with the question you take, as a straight person you have one abiding duty towards your gay brother or sister, and that’s defined in the Summary of the Law. Nothing else in the Book will excuse failing to keep that commitment – and “loving” him or her by failing to understand him or her and his/her motivations while telling him/her that his/her love is “an abomination” is twisting the meaning of the word so far that (to pre-emptively invoke Godwin) one could say that Hitler loved the Jews and not have much farther to stretch one’s definition.
I will respond tomorrow morning.