As red-state politicians trip all over each other to toss anti-gay red meat at their right-wing constituents, none seem to have looked very seriously into the biblical texts that forbid these unions. Without such study, anti-gay religious tenets are really nothing more than bigoted diatribes Allow me to fill the void a bit below the fold.
Okay, I admit I'm no scholar of the Greek Bible (commonly known as the "New Testament."), but I have spent some time studying the first five books of Moses, known among Jews as the Torah. In these books, from which both Jewish and Christian thinking spring, there are two sentences that on the surface, seem to forbid homosexual acts.
The first is at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, following the creation of Adam and Eve: "Be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28). An argument could certainly be made from this line that man's purpose is to reproduce. By extension, lifestyles that prevent reproduction must be against the will of God.
But there's a rub. God seems to be proclaiming the commandment twice: 1) be fruitful and 2) multiply. Why would a Supreme Being who rules the universe be guilty of a redundancy? Perhaps each pronouncement says something different. Perhaps "be fruitful" doesn't necessarily refer to reproduction, but rather to acting in a manner that provides fruit (i.e. food) in abundance for all of God's creatures. Surely, we've learned in our lifetimes that overpopulation isn't fruitful for the world's ecology or economy. In fact, it could be considered counterproductive to both.
This postulate is further supported by the order of the two pronouncements. If reproduction of the species were the only consideration, the pronouncements would make more sense reversed: "Multiply and be fruitful." This would tell us that the path to being fruitful could only be fulfilled by multiplying. Yet that is not the case. The order in which these pronouncements are made tell us that reproduction of the species should take place in a fruitful manner.
In other words, we can read the text like this: "When you support abundance for all, you may multiply."
There's one more semantic feature of these pronouncements that shouldn't be overlooked. The word for "multiply" in the original Hebrew text also means "grow great." With this in mind, our text can now be read "When you support abundance for all, you will grow great." One way of supporting abundance for all is to limit reproduction.
The second sentence is more problematic: "You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22). Without getting graphic, it pretty well goes without saying that a homosexual man does not have sex with another man in the same manner as he would with a woman. So let's not go there. The more pointed word is "abomination."
Again, let's turn to the original Hebrew. The word used for "abomination" in the sentence is "tevel." This word is also used to mean the inhabited world. There are three words in Hebrew for earth: "adamah," which refers more specifically to the soil; "aretz" which refers to land, as in "The Land of Israel;" and "tevel," which refers to land or earth which is inhabited by man. One of the key features of land which is inhabited by man is that it gets changed around by man. It gets "mixed up," so to speak, from its original pristine state (i.e. "Take Paradise and Put up a Parking Lot").
Now we can get a clearer understanding of the biblical injunction against homosexuality: it mixes things up. But wait: homosexuals tend to live mostly in cities, which are already considerably altered from their pristine state. So they're not causing any more of a "mix-up" than already exists. Perhaps the injunction refers to those who live in an agrarian society, such as that of the Bible, where maintaining the land in its natural state promotes fruitful crop yields. In such societies, city life can be considered abominable.
So now we can read the text like this: "You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; it is characteristic of city life." However in cities, same-sex relationships help curb the undesirable effects of overpopulation. Which is probably why God created homosexual desires in some people in the first place.