OK, Andrew, your post is legal, though the censorship you should be concerned with here is mine. Since I have an “almost no censorship” policy, your comment will stay.

But you do a fabulous job of illustrating one of the reason for this series. Because this is a post with words like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “homosexual” in it, you can’t seem to resist writing a broadside against gays in the comments.

The problem with that is that I use the issue of homosexuality as an example in discussing how one interprets the Bible, all the while trying to explain to people how they need to look carefully at how they are using scripture in coming to supposedly Biblical conclusions.

But to people who are in the heat of a debate, such detailed work doesn’t appear attractive. They’d rather just quote texts, such as Genesis 19, for example, in which the primary sin was a lack of hospitality.

49 Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49 WEB)

Now, in our modern world is homosexuality more pervasive than pride? Than gluttony? Then neglect of the poor and needy?

One way to misinterpret scripture is to choose your own agenda and then focus on those parts of the Bible that seem to support what you already care about.

But every item on the list of Sodom’s sins in Ezekiel 16:49 (and I’m aware of the word “abomination” in verse 50), is discussed much more frequently and in much more detail in the Bible than is homosexuality. Does the emphasis of the Biblical writers have meaning in the way we apply their words?

Perhaps we should think more about how a neglect of the poor and needy is a sign of the end.