And respectfully, I think that the stuff I changed to red is a common excuse used by people to get around parts of the Bible they don't like; they just say "well I interpret it this way."
When you say that it is "just an excuse used by people to get around parts of the Bible..." you are at best claiming that they are in denial like addicts , and at worst accusing them of outright deception.
You are leaving out the fact that the only way to understand anything is to interpret it. Raw data coming from our eyes, our ears, and our fingertips must be interpreted from light to images, from sound to words, from pressure,heat and pain to texture, temperature and hardness.
Words must be fitted together into sentences. Alternative meanings of those words must be considered to find the most appropriate, etc. It is extremely unlikely that any two people can agree on every aspect of every interpretation.
Still, on things that are relatively clear (and that includes the vast majority of their shared experiences), they can agree on the "underlying truth" and even on most of the details. This is what what makes communication possible.
Because of this agreement in the majority, and how automatic it is, it is jarring to find disagreement in something that seems as clear and unambiguous to a person as the things he does agree with the second person on.
The first impulse is to assume that the person does agree but is lying about it. The second impulse is to assume that emotional (or spiritual) issues are clouding the other person's ability to analyze the raw data objectively, resulting in a faulty conclusion. In many cases we can reject these possibilities and move on to possibilities that involve different legitimate interpretations of the same phenomena.
If we can not immediately reject those first two possibilities, it is possible that the other person is lying or is emotionally (and/or spiritually) blocked from true understanding. It is also possible that
we are the "other person" who is blocked. It is also possible that neither party has found the "underlying truth" in the issue, either because both are too emotionally (spiritually) distracted, or because there is not enough data and both are adding more (but different one from the other) data by inference and analogy.
That makes sense for stuff like eschatology, predestination, age of accountability, things that are not exactly clear. But the passages on homosexuality are fairly clear; there's really no way around it. They are as clear as the teachings on salvation, love, unity, charity, profanity, etc. I don't see any real way around it; I can't see how any Bible believing Christian can endorse homosexual acts.
The teachings on sexual immorality are mostly clear. Clear enough that for most sexual situations Christians can agree whether an action is immoral. There are passages in the Bible that condemn sexually immoral acts which, as described, are "homosexual" in nature. Just as it does sexually immoral acts which are "heterosexual" in nature. In all cases, the acts described would be just as immoral if the partners involved were the opposite sex as if they were the same sex. It is the act, and the circumstances that determine the immorality, not the partner (unless the nature of the partner is part of the circumstances, such as a temple prostitute, or someone married to a third person)
Rape is immoral whether the victim is male or female. Participating in "fertility rites" is idolatry whether with a priest or a priestess of the pagan god. Adultery is wrong whether with your neighbor's wife, or with your neighbor's husband.
Every time the Bible describes a sexual act it describes a sexual sin. But not all sex is sin. We can see the evidence that men blessed of God have had sex within their marriages (though we are not presented with the act itself -- other than in the euphemistic phrase "XXX knew his wife and she conceived...") Paul (in 1 Corinthians 7) even suggests marriage as the way to get a handle on our innate sex drives so that we would have no excuse for unbridled lust.
Nowhere in any teaching on marriage in the Bible, is there a condition set as to who may or may not covenant a marriage. Generally, if the society saw a couple as being married, so does the Bible. Fraudulent bait-and-switch tactics did not invalidate a marriage. Bigamous second marriages were still considered valid, etc.
We don't "endorse" "homosexual acts" any more than we "endorse" "heterosexual acts." Whether the acts are moral or immoral depends on the circumstances involved. When they are a part of a loving, covenanted marriage, they are no one's business but the partners in that marriage.
