biblical passages

There are six verses in all:

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are among verses that view semen and menstruation as unclean and forbid the mixing of woollen and linen. The high vision of humans made male and female is fine, but there are many points of law listed here that most Christians would not see as binding today.

Romans 1:26-27 is a strong condemnation of moral degeneracy in society, as part of Paul's argument that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Paul's warning of sexual abuse as the marks of moral decline remain just as real and as forceful as in the past. But Paul wasn't condemning committed adult gay relationships because on the whole they were hidden in his day. His vocabulary indicates that he sees homosexual sin as the product of a sick heterosexual world. There are plenty of issues within the gay world that a Christian must challenge, but perhaps not the issues of sexuality itself, which they don't really understand.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 has two phrases among its list of evil behaviour which marked the Corinthians before they were converted. The malakoi (‘the soft ones') is sometimes translated male prostitutes and the arsenokoitoi, the sodomites, may well be a reference back to the Leviticus evils, but no-one knows for sure since it is not used beyond the New Testament.

1 Timothy 1:10 in the context of a diverse list of acts of lawlessness. Fundamentally these three Pauline passages presuppose homosexual acts as acts of exploitation, abuse, older men abusing young men, normal males sexually exploiting other males. It seems to me that they do not address the case of the person with a same sex orientation where the sexual act is in the context of love, commitment and justice. Fundamentally they simply do not address the case of the person with a same-sex attraction. They list certain acts that affected the values they were addressing – the preservation of the family and of the weaker person, and thus do not address the case of the loving relationship between two adult men – and do not even address the case of same-sex attraction between women.

Romans 1 is seen as targeting those who abandon ‘natural relations.'