You write very well Robert so I've been going around this debate belatedly to see how you argue your case. The only trouble I have with your reasoning here is the bit about Paul suddenly being the liberator. I've just been reading straight through all of his letters (instead of line by line analysis) and a couple of things strike me.
In so many ways he was clearly way ahead of the rest of the pack, although he isn't consistent about this and I'm pretty sure that he only gradually realises the need to stop circumcision in the developing church. In Acts early on he actually encourages a gentile to be circumsized while later on in his final letter he insists that the brethren, in typical Pauline dogmatic fashion, resist the 'cutters'. [Once he had made up his mind about something . . . .] However, in almost all moral matters he remains adamantly Jewish in his approach. . . .which isn't to say that, had he lived longer, his thinking might have moved further from his own moral upbringing . . .
Sometimes I wonder if he didn't see Greek homosexuality merely as a perverse aspect of the pagan package rather than as an essential outlet for naturally homosexual men. In his own strict upbringing it is unlikely that he ever came across anyone who spoke openly about homosexuality and, if Paul was himself heterosexual, he would have had the same jaundiced view that all heterosexual men tend to have. It was clear that his view of sexuality generally was both frank and prosaic, albeit grudging. "Marriage, whilst not at all ideal, is better than degeneracy" is about as far as it goes, although it's important to remember that these letters were written with particular localised problems in mind. [Can we doubt that, however clear he may have been about his vocation and the rightness of his own writings, he would have been astonished to know that they are now a part of holy scripture and treated by some as the actual word of God?. . .
The fundamentalist view that 'if it's in the bible it's the word of God' is very difficult to countenance. My own Catholic feeling about this is that the overwhelming problem for the Protestant churches (and Islam also) is that their view of 'sacraments' is still overly influenced by the negative enlightenment reaction against Aquinas and medievalism in which the eucharist has to be downplayed as being too 'magical'. (Interesting shamanistic links here perhaps). Scripture has to leap into that very important breach and becomes somehow too important for its own good . . .
There was an excellent programme on British television last sunday in which well-known leaders of the three main religions spoke about their faith. They all had one problem in common: how to deal with fundamentalism in their respective communities. The Jewish leader went so far as to say that in the Jewish faith it is actually considered blasphemous to believe that the Torah can be understood without the need for interpretation. This I had never heard before. I wonder if that was Saul the pharisee's view too? If so, how ironic that his own writings should become such a stumbling block for us for that very reason . . .