That all aside, I just wanted to thank you for this post. It was quite interesting, and reminded me of some problems with my boyfriend’s family.
While his immediate family is rather progressive (his dad is reformed Jewish, his sister is too, and his step-mother is buddhist), his extended family is conservative. Later in life, his father’s sister came out as a lesbian, and it was a struggle for the family to deal with it. His immediately family was rather accepting, but the extended had problems.
I was told it was only 2 years ago that his aunt’s partner was allowed into family photos by his grandmother, because she wasn’t “really part of the family”

…so yeah. I thnk it’s a constant struggle, and even as a Christian I find myself defending my views to others who claim the same faith. Sometimes though, religious texts aside, I feel if we would just use a little common sense, we’d realize what is truly considered a “sin”…and what is just being ostricized because it’s simply out of the norm.

the specific prohabition in Lev against what i will loosely call “male homosexual sex” is refered and described EXACTLY the same way as only a few other proscribed things – and these few things are all of the utmost sin level. because of the words used to describe the act, which equates to something analgous to high treason, if i understand the translations correctly. it is not refered to as a “sin” specifically, although in agrette everything listed is a sin. but these are two different things that are being conflated – the general list of sins, which include many small things that are no longer observed, and then the SPECIFIC TYPE of “crime” that includes this specific type of sex act.

does that help?

“I swear baby, I’m better now! I’ll never hit you again! I’ve changed!” – old testament god

If you reject the notion that the bible is the word of god, doesn’t that make it necessary to stop taking it so seriously? And don’t you have to reject it’s inspiredness, if you’re willing to say the whole hating homosexuals thing is hooey?

Also, isn’t lust present in any sex? Transferring the guilt isn’t the problem. It’s no good to say “I was out of my head with lust” or some variation. You tried something, and you liked it. Stop hating yourself. I say that, but as a former christian I know exactly how thorough the brainwashing can be, and how difficult it can be to remove.

God wanted Moses to eradicate rampant idolatry in the Jewish nation. That whole “ . . . as with a woman” thing condemns a straight man pretending to make it with a woman, such as during idol worship. If you’ll excuse the Christian viewpoint, Paul explains it further when putting down the straight Romans (1:26-28 ) for “leaving their natural relations” (i.e…. as with a woman) and having idolatrous sex with men.

“Homosexual” was coined about 1865, so any Bible translation since then that uses a form of that word is a lie that needs to be emended. ( The King James version is honest.) It premiered in a 1946 English Bible and continues to condemn loving Gays.

Clever.

The Jewish patriarchs would be quite proud of you.

(now im addressing you thru (sin the new testament) jewish perspective, involving christian understandings the context would be different……which im quite willing to go if that’s your interest. actually it disconcerting that there is no one knowledgable about judaism that is making any comments about their own understanding or their own reasoning.)

not all the prohibitions in lev of themselves are sins. and things that are directed to be engaged in, are now considered intolerable evils.

so the question is what is the reasoning that determines which are to still be followed. my understanding is that modern judaism follows almost none of them, while the orthodox follow as many as can be done without being illegal.

my understanding is that for the majority of jews, there was a major change in the compliance of lev when the jews were exiled from palestine by the romans in 70 ad.

That page you cite does have severe formatting and “tl;dr” problems. Its accuracy also leaves something to be desired. To take a trivial example, Leviticus was not written in 1350 BCE, for example—that was when the Ugaritic tablets were being written; the Hebrew people probably didn’t even exist yet as a distinct cultural unit. Leviticus actually derives from the priestly source P—nearly a thousand years later. But as I said, the problem is not the “correct” interpretation of the text, it’s the atmosphere created by popular interpretations of the text.

Why should I have assumed Sam was either gay or lesbian (I didn’t even know Sam’s gender) or Jewish? Nothing in the post said she was: in fact, the post was written in an impersonal style without at any point indicating any personal preference for any of this – so textually, on a re-read, I took it that Sam was straight and Gentile, and writing about the issue purely out of academic interest.

I’d still like to know what Sam actually thinks, rather than reading an informal review of what other people think…