Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19:1-11 has become the paramount retaliating textual weapon used by anti-gay proliferators to silence the morality of homosexuality. Rev. Dr .Wink refers to this passage as the attempted gang rape in Sodom. Homosexuality has never been mentioned as the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sorry to say, but no gay is a descendant from Sodom or Gomorrah (laughs) that city has been buried beneath the Dead Sea centuries ago.

According to evangelical Bible scholar William Brownlee: sodomy (so-called) is basically oppression of the weak and helpless, and the oppression of the stranger is the basic element of Genesis 19:1-9.” In the words of Dr Wink, ‘that was a case of ostensibly heterosexual males intent on humiliating strangers by treating them "like women," thus demasculinizing them. Yale's John Boswell notes that "Sodom is used as a symbol of evil in dozens of places [in the Bible] but not in a single instance is the sin of the Sodomites specified as homosexuality."

In Ezekiel 16:49-49: This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They rejected even God's messengers. Also see Isaiah 1:10-17, Jeremiah 23:14, in reference to Sodom. The sins listed in those places are injustice, oppression, partiality, adultery, lies, and encouraging evildoers. The sin of Sodom had nothing to do with homosexuality, period. Other texts include:

-Leviticus 18:22 (20:13) "You shall not lie with men as with women. It is abomination.”… "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them." Rev. Mel White, the co-founder of Soulforce, after profound research into Hebrew and Greek writings, explains that the holiness code in Leviticus dates back to 3,000 years ago. It includes many of the archaic sexual laws. In addition to this it rules out round haircuts, tattoos, working on the Sabbath, wearing garments of mixed fabrics, eating pork or shellfish, getting one'sfortune told, and even playing with the skin of a pig. (There goes football!) Therefore, according to Rev. White, the holiness code is a list of behaviors that people of faith find offensive in a certain place and time. In this case, the code was written for priests only, and its primary intent was to set the priests of Israel over and against priests of other cultures.

"Abomination" (TO'EBAH) is a technical cultic term for what is ritually unclean, such as mixed cloth, pork, and intercourse with menstruating women. It's not about a moral or ethical issue. Rev. Dr. Wink presents us with some historical analysis by saying that “the Hebrew prescientific understanding was that male semen contained the whole of nascent life. With no knowledge of eggs and ovulation, it was assumed that the woman provided only the incubating space. Hence the spilling of semen for any nonprocreative purpose--in coitus interruptus (Gen. 38:1-11), male homosexual acts, or male masturbation--was considered tantamount to abortion or murder.” For Jewish writers of Scripture, a man sleeping with another man was an abomination. But it was also an abomination (and one worthy of death) to masturbate or even to interrupt coitus (to halt sex with your spouse before ejaculation as an act of birth control). Why these sexual practices were considered abominations by Scripture writers in these ancient times? The Jews were a small tribe struggling to populate a country. They were outnumbered by their enemy. You can see why these ancient people felt it was an abomination to risk "wasting" even a single child.

The Hebrew pre-scientific understanding was that the male semen contained the whole of life. With no knowledge of eggs and ovulation, it was assumed that the man's sperm contained the whole child and that the woman provided only the incubating space. Therefore, the spilling of semen without possibility of having a child was considered murder.

-Deuteronomy 23:17-18, "There shall be no female cult prostitute of the daughters of Israel nor a male cult prostitute of the sons of Israel." These terms, KEDESHA and KADESH, literally mean "holy" or "sacred."  There is no Hebrew derivative of the word "Sodom" in this passage; , since it most likely refers to a heterosexual prostitute involved in Canaanite fertility rites that have infiltrated Jewish worship; the King James Version inaccurately labeled him a "sodomite." The Hebrew words here are references to the "holy" female and eunuch priest-prostitutes of the Canaanite fertility cults, of which Israel was to have no part. Moreover, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary Bible scholar George R. Edwards notes that 'No prophet uses the noun for male cult prostitute or discusses the activity such a person pursued. 

-Romans 1:26-27, Pagan "women exchange natural use for unnatural and also the [pagan] men, leaving the natural use of women, lust in their desire for each other, males working shame with males, and receiving within themselves the penalty of their error." Furnish gives us a perspective by turning to the writings of Paul.  "Since Paul offered no direct teaching to his own churches on the subject of homosexual conduct," says Furnish, "his letters certainly cannot yield any specific answers to the questions being faced in the modern church. ... For Paul, neither homosexual practice nor heterosexual promiscuity nor any other specific vice is identified as such with 'sin.' In his view the fundamental sin from which all particular evils derive is idolatry, worshipping what is created rather than the Creator, be that a wooden idol an ideology, a religious system, or some particular moral code."

Let's go back 2,000 years and try to understand why. Paul is writing this letter to Rome after his missionary tour of the Mediterranean.

In Romans 1, Paul is ridiculing pagan religious rebellion, saying that the pagans knew God but worshipped idols instead of God. On his journey Paul saw great temples built to honor Aphrodite, Diana, and other fertility gods and goddesses of sex and passion instead of the one true God the apostle honors. Apparently, these priests and priestesses engaged in some odd sexual behaviors -- including castrating themselves, carrying on drunken sexual orgies, and even having sex with young temple prostitutes (male and female) -- all to honor the gods of sex and pleasure.

Catherine Kroeger comments in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society that 'Men wore veils and long hair as signs of their dedication to the god, while women used the unveiling and shorn hair to indicate their devotion.  Men masqueraded as women, and in a rare vase painting from Corinth a woman is dressed in satyr pants equipped with the male organ.  Thus she dances before Dionysos, a deity who had been raised as a girl and was himself called male-female and 'sham man."'  Kroeger continues:  "the sex exchange that characterized the cults of such great goddesses as Cybele [Aphrodite, Ishtar, etc.] the Syrian goddess and Artemis of Ephesus were more grisly.  Males voluntarily castrated themselves and assumed women's garments. 

A relief from Rome shows a high priest of Cybele.  The castrated priest wears veil, necklaces, earrings and feminine dress.  He is considered to have exchanged his sexual identity and to have become a she-priest."  As such, these religious prostitutes would engage in same-sex orgies in the pagan temples all along the coasts of Paul's missionary journeys.  'Paul's conception of homosexuality," as Thielicke points out, "was one which was affected by the intellectual atmosphere surrounding the struggle with Greek paganism." Says Scroggs:  "The illustrations are secondary to [Paul's] basic theological structure" (Cf. 3:22b-23, Paul's own summary), and Furnish adds: "homosexual practice as such is not the topic under discussion." Doesn't what Paul says in the beginning of Romans better describe these pagan orgies he meant to ridicule than it does the mutual love and support in the domestic life of lesbian and gay male couples today?

A friend of mine in Florida calls this debate obfuscatory. He lamented bitterly to me saying that, what irritates him most was the catalogue of lies promulgated by some Christians by referring to the Bible's attitude toward it. He writes: There are two kinds of lies. One is a lie of commission in which one actively commits a lie. An example is I stole my friend's money, but I told him I did not steal it. Then there is another kind of lie, and that is a lie of omission, in which one knowingly withholds part or all of the truth. Ads on TV are especially good at this as is the whole world of business. Part of the truth is withheld about their products. And Christians when they discuss homosexuality and the bible are very good at committing what I call lies of omission.
Why should the church and other anti gay whistle blowers create religious ‘conundrums’ when it is obvious in Genesis 1:27, that God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created them; He created male and female. This implies that, our faith says, God created us. He knows our temperaments, our personalities, our talents, gifts, strength and weakness, our thoughts, our ways, our deeds- he knows our total heart. Can we therefore say that God was completely ignorant about the fact that some people are homosexual? Let us stray a bit; if we are told that God is aware and knows our immediate plans and actions, wouldn’t he know that homosexuals were to be part of human evolution on this planet?