The other day my girlfriend (yes I am a lesbian) and I were talking about a situation that came about after she "friended" a individual on Facebook. Upon reading her profile and learning she was a lesbian this person began spouting the usual rhetoric concerning homosexuality. There is no one subject (other than the pope and catholicism - maybe) that gets my blood boiling than ignorant religious dogma concerning homosexuality and the alleged condemnation of said peoples in the bible.
Without getting into a deep exegetical or hermeneutical discussion on the subject, consider two very simple points. IMHO the bible cannot condemn homosexuality because:
1] The word homosexual did not appear in any known literature prior to 1869. It is a widely held view that Karl Maria Kerbeny is the first to use the word "homosexual" in a pamphlet arguing against a Prussian anti-sodomy law;
and,
2] To borrow from H. Havelock Ellis (Studies in Psychology, 1897), "'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it." More succintly, "homosexual" is a Greek and Latin hybrid; it is a made up word. From the Greek we get homos, meaning same; from the Latin we get sexualis, meaning sexual.
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