I have to admit, I'm getting fatigued with writing the basics of gay-positive Christianity here over and over, especially since no one who takes the opposite standpoint has budged an iota in response. They still think God's going to crack me over the head for being a good boyfriend to my boyfriend (which includes, gasp, sex) for 30 years. The Society of Friends church received the message from the holy spirit that gay love was also legitimate and relationally optimized love (unlike adultery or incest) in the 1950's, long before there was any hint of gay liberation in the secular English-speaking world. There are now hundreds of thousands of people who attend gay-positive Christian churches, in a few cases with mostly gay congregations, but mostly just mainstream churches with people from the neighbourhood. Yet here, there is talk about gays who become sexual crucifying Christ again, a bone-chilling reminder of the history of antisemitism.

I've always postulated that thinking God is anti-gay helps some people here to control their impulses to have sex with boys. I feel a little guilty about risking upsetting that useful artifice. It's hard, though, to avoid that minority-group feeling, the one that makes black people seem a little jumpy about racism sometimes. I respect everyone here and even think they are fine human beings, so my residual outrage is only manifest as a slight odour of cordite over my writings.

St. Paul is actually the liberator of gay love. He's the one who specified that the ancient prohibition was against heterosexual-by-nature people who took up same-sex acts as an ancillary lust. To interpret his writings as condemning all male-male sex is incredibly perverse, and requires a moment of complete oblivion about the difference between love and non-love.

Yes, Aionios, you have it brilliantly right here. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." If gay love is not love, there IS no love. There is no way to dismember gay love out of the house of love without bringing the house down. Especially not with scriptures that are clearly and plainly written about people who are not homosexual BY NATURE, AS WE ARE.

If you can't recognize gay love as identical to the heterosexual love that animates heterosexual marriages (as opposed to opposite-sex marriages where not all partners are heterosexual), then you can't recognize love. You've intellectualized a barrier and veiled the obvious. All the quiddities about absolutely distinguishing sex from love, which is a bit like insisting that milk is only pure curds and pure whey, all the attempts to jam all those loving and generous and heartfelt moments under the rubric of lust, are just medieval philosophical flotsam that still clutters up our lives.