BEING GAY WITH GOD IS QUITE OKEY

This morning at my Church's Men's Breakfast, there was a man there who was saying, regarding those of us who are Homosexuals, essentially, hate the sin-love the sinner. If that is as far as he has gotten right now, that is certainly better than many Conservatives, particularly those of the Fred Phelps ilk, who think our deaths are causes for celebration and our Funerals should be protested, along with the Funerals of those who laid down their lives fighting for this country simply because this country does not as a whole support their ideology of 'Kill all the Gays', which is what they really want, whether they say those words aloud or not. The trouble is, all Homophobes, of both attitudes, are completely missing what those passages in THE BIBLE are really talking about. In Genesis, it was not the fact the crowd wanted to rape men that was the problem, it was that they wanted to rape guests. Under Jewish Law, guests were to be treated with such hospitality that one was not even allowed to ask how long they planned to stay until they had been there for three days. Obviously, having such rules, handing guests, male or female, over to a crowd to be raped would have been a wicked act, and even asking for it an Evil deed. So that is what is going on there, and any who doubt me can look up and study the Jewish Laws of Hospitality for themselves. The fact that Lot addresses the two new arrivals as "My Lords" not yet knowing that they are angels, is further proof of these rules. In ancient times, a common military practice by a conquering army was to rape the soldiers of the conquered army, humiliating and degrading them by turning them into women, as they saw it, by penetrating them. That id what 'Thou Shalt Not Lay With a Man As Thou Layeth With A Woman' is about. So, sex, in that time and sense, was all about domination and power, men dominated women, and so one man penetrating and thus dominating another man was the same domination matter and was thus used to humiliate and denigrate the conquered army, and that is what that Commandment is forbidding. Obviously, these days, most of us, accept for The Southern Baptists, have a much different view of male- female relationships, and it is HIGH TIME that our understanding of Homosexual relationships caught up. One thing is true throughout all of the above sited passages and the discussions in Paul and maybe elsewhere. Sex was seen as a tool of power and domination. There is no sense, in Scripture, of a loving, mutually Affirming Relationship between two people of the same gender, and it seems to me that that was not even how male and female relationships were for the most part understood. So, now that our understanding of male-female relationships has changed and evolved, unless we're Southern Baptists, it is well past time that our understanding of same sex relationships of a loving, mutually affirming nature, between two consenting adults (forced and children are obviously still beyond unacceptable) caught up and we all realized that, in and of itself, BEING GAY, WITH GOD IS QUITE OKEY.