It seems that I have just bought into the dreaded and egregious Gay Agenda.
Honestly, words fail me.
Hey, Benedict XVI can’t hang on forever. Wanna run redfoxum or whatever that unpronouncable string of consonants he uses for a screen name is for the next Pope? It seems he has a hotline on what God really meant.
I always pronounce it “Btfsplk”, or “Joe” for short.
Why not just reply to him instead of running to the Pit?
I’m all for yelling at people who don’t agree with me about homosexuality, but I’m honestly having trouble seeing what was so pittable about whatsisname’s post.
If he thought that interpretation was good or moral, I could see a pitting. Could you point me to church-sanctioned gay relationships over the past 1500 years that would cast doubt on his contention that the church interpreted the Bible as he said, not as you say? Or does your hotline to what God really wants better than 1500 years of Christian leaders’ hotlines.
Because then he wouldn’t get to use his nifty idea for a thread title?
Wasn’t there a book about that topic bout five-seven years back, Voyager?
Boswell’s “Same Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe”. It was 10 years ago. The book more on point to that, though, was his “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality”, which is about 25 years old now.
Boswell’s views were certainly minority views, though (and it didn’t help that he died right after Same Sex Unions came out), and I don’t think it particularly shocking or offensive to say that, in general, Christianity has traditionally viewed homosexual activity negatively, or that the gay rights movement was largely responsible for this change in attitude among some Christian denominations.
Thanks. I partake of neither Christianity or homosexuality, so I only now vaguely remember reading the review in the Times Book Review.
Nitpick. Christian (symbol for not equal to)* Catholic. I doubt Lutherans/Episcopalians/Presbyterians/Baptists and other assorted folk going the Hell would appreciate the connection the the Pope. 
Debating homophobic bible-literalists = feeding trolls = negotiating with terrorists = trying to teach a pig to sing = something else about pigs and pearls.
As long as you even bother to engage them, the battle remains unwon. Until they’re standing out in the dark going, “Hello? isn’t anybody gonna argue with me? Hello?” you’re still playing by their rules.
They built the closet, let them live in it.
Just bought into it? Poly, you are the SDMB’s C.S. Lewis of the Gay Agenda!
(And tho we disagree on the issue, that’s kinda a compliment.)
Well, IBM’s mainframe “logical not” is Alt+0172, ¬, but that character never made it into ASCII based machines, so different coding languages use !=, =, or <> to represent “not equal.”
The old “equal sign with a slash” is not a standard ASCII function, but you can step out to Unicode and use U+2260 to produce ≠ (provided your text editor, your font, your browser, and your screen actually cooperate to display it). I can see in preview all the symbols I’ve entered, but I do not know how many can be seen by all the viewers at home.
Nice mantra. Mind if I use it, maybe even as a sig?
In Windows:
Um, no.
I think I may have some gays orgainze our next staff meeting, because lord knows we never have an agenda.
It’s pretty much board etiquette. It’s not nice to derail a discussion in Great Debates, and you will get your wrist slapped if you do. Lines like “It seems he has a hotline on what God really meant.” may garner a warning from a mod on name calling.
The Great Debates forum is for just that. The pit arose specifically as a forum where you could tell someone that they where a moron and not hijack or derail a thread.
So he wasn’t “running” to the pit. He was doing what he’s supposed to do.
Oops, sorry. Didn’t realize “Um” was a subject of a thread. I should be more careful in the future.
What I meant to say was “No, NO!, please God NO!” 
It seems to me that waht Poly was objecting to was the the contention that critical analysis of the standard Biblical passages which are commonly cited as condemning homosexuality is “revisionist” or is driven by a “gay agenda.” The former is certainly not the cae, and while one of the leading scholars in that direction was a gay man, the number of people who have reevaluated those passages with the tools of historical and lingustic criticism are by no means only homosexuals, nor are they necessarily agenda driven.The fact is that a number of those passages are absolutely not clear at all in what they are condemning and anyone who claims that they are unambiguous dondemnations of homosexuality is either undeducated about them or has a personal bias in the matter. There are some very good, non-trivial reasons to dispute the way those passages are interpreted and it is not a reasonable debate tactic to try to dismiss those arguments a priori as “revisionist” or “agenda driven.” That’s just hand-waving and well-poisoning, not reasonable debate. The arguments need to be addressed on their own merits, not waving away the person making the argument as “agenda driven” does not refute the argument.