As a young adult struggling with an understanding that God supposedly created all males to be hetero and that sin or Satan corrupted the good in some males to make them homo, I found myself deliberately choosing to avoid looking into the legitimacy (or even the illegitimacy) of the arguments put forth by “liberal” Christians to support such an anti-Biblical stance (that these liberals would even want to be called Christians was of course suspect in itself). I didn’t want to slide down a demonic, deceitful, slippery slope, where a single lie might sound ok, only to make room for another lie and another and another until I was completely deceived. So, perhaps, I gave myself too little credit to be able to make objective judgment calls.

I had not yet been exposed to fake-quotes from Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

The quote may not be from Arisotle, and I may not have been educated at all at this time in my life.

In any event, after some 15 years I did eventually decide that I would look into the various ways that liberals defended homosexuality in order to disprove the arguments… and embrace my misery definitively.

As I started looking into the various Bible “clobber passages,” however, I started to find that using these passages to condemn same-gender attraction, relationships, and sexuality was untenable. It requires a myopic view and a proof-text mentality. In many cases, especially in the New Testament, the words were largely vague and not at all central to the main point being made in the passage (listed as an example of some bad thing, but with an obscure word and without any context to clarify the meaning). I sortof didn’t want to pursue looking into these passages anymore as it seemed like maybe there was more truth to this slippery slope notion than I thought.

It was around this time that I felt God ask me: Why can’t you let Me be God and permit Me to speak on My Own accord instead of telling your God what My position is on this topic? So I continued my investigation.

Some used Romans 1 to clobber the gays, but the whole passage of Romans 1 is predicated on those who turn away from God to worship idols - not those who didn’t wish to be gay to begin with and still worship and trust God. I looked at another and another until I realized this opposition to Gays based on the Bible was nothing but a house of cards - built on bigotry and fear.

Recently, while trying to find a blog I read by a very Roman Catholic guy during that time of my searching who did an amazing job of dismantling anti-gay interpretations of these passages, I stumbled across two highly valuable recent publications.

The first is a well-written blog post which references the second resource: A fantastic research paper put together by 20 PhD-types, many Roman Catholic, directly challenging the Vatican to take a Biblical stance and ditch anti-gay rhetoric with a highly impressive, thorough analysis of the passages from multiple perspectives. I am shocked by how directly they oppose the Vatican and by the academic prowess employed in their handling of the content.

Gay Christians of any background or denomination would do well to read it.

Ultimately, people will not really have their perspectives changed by convincing academic arguments. Change of heart comes from our experience as humanity. But having an academic justification for one’s position certainly doesn’t hurt anything. You can still find many people online proof-texting their homophobic agenda, but their arguments are not sound and their interpretations do not honor the obvious intentions of the passages.

You can be gay and a Bible-believing Christian. This isn’t a contradiction anymore than being Gay and male. We may only be a significant minority, but we are in no way illigitimate.