AndrewtheFiddler wrote:
The passage that seems to forbid homosexuality is actually telling men not to treat other men as bad as they treat women.
I've looked into that passage--the "don't lie with men as you'd lie with a woman" thing, right? I think the best interpretation there is, that it's an injunction against going to visit temple prostitutes, because they could be either gender and often the supplicant would have sex with them as part of the temple services. It would've been idolatry (and adultery, if the man was married). It's also described as "an abomination", a term that tends to be associated with idolatry.
It could also be a health code injunction against anal sex (not against being gay, but against that specific sex act), which is very high-risk in a world without condoms; this is the same legal code that also stipulates quarantining oneself during menstrual cycles or after nocturnal emissions, for example, and prescribes washing as a way to prevent being "unclean" (contaminated). For pre-germ-theory times, it's very forward-thinking. And it wouldn't have prevented gay men from being intimate in other ways.
There's another passage in the New Testament that's often translated as forbidding "sexual immorality" and taken to mean forbidding homosexuality; however, a better reading of that passage once again forbids temple prostitutes, and adds to that the practice of adult men having sex with young boys (which Paul would've known about, being Greek).
The case against homosexuality is weak if it's there at all--the case for acceptance, love, and equality is extremely strong. I can only conclude that this, much like the way the Bible was used to support slavery, is a case of taking Scripture out of context and away from its home culture, and using it to support "traditional morality" that the Bible never actually supported to begin with.