Paul is talking plural there...did ya see?
He is condemning orgies and pagan worship. It is blatantly obvious.
I have already convinced people...I don't need you to change your opinion, my audience is to gay and bisexual people and to supportive straight Christians!
Well, I am glad that you have a clear sense of who your audience is. One thing that I think needs to be said though, is that your argument often seems somewhat disingenuous. For example, I have seen you write more than once, that "it is not even mentioned in the Bible
as such" or something very similar to that (excuse me if I paraphrased incorrectly). Other times you seem to clarify somewhat (though not completely) that by "it" you mean monogamous homosexuality. The problem is that such a statement would reasonably lead one to believe that you are saying that homosexuality is not mentioned, or condemned in the Bible. This statement, if it were what you meant, would be easily refuted by quoting scripture. A perhaps more intellectually honest way to approach this issue would be to say that "while homosexual acts are mentioned in several places in the Bible in an apparently condemning way, many reputable scholars believe that these passages instead condemn homosexual orgies and/or sexual acts in the context of pagan worship." If your goal is truly to educate gay Christians, it seems that this extra level of intellectual honesty would encourage them to consider more fully both sides of the issue and to do what their own consciences dictate in light of what the Bible teaches and what their own relationship with God demands.
There are many people whose sexual attraction is primarily or exclusively homosexual who have chosen to live a life a celibacy rather than to do something that they believe that the Bible teaches is dishonoring to God. I hope that you would recognize this as a valid choice. It seems that in trying to pretend that this is not a difficult issue scripturally speaking, you dishonor people who are so compelled.
Now returning to the back-and-forth on the issue at hand: The scripture I mentioned earlier according to the NIV reads: "In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."
You are right that Paul speaks in the plural. But, I still don't think that that really demonstrates any special contextual understanding. For example, consider the following statement: "Men typically engage in sexual acts only with women. But some men, namely homosexuals engage only in sexual acts with each other." I believe that this is an objectively true sentence that does not foreclose on the possibility of monogamous homosexual or heterosexual relationships. It is just to say that men, as a class, excluding those identified as homosexual (and the unmentioned bisexual and asexual), engage only in sexual acts with women. Some "typical" men choose to have relations with only one woman, while others may choose to have multiple women. The next sentence speaks of one group excluded by the first sentence and suggests a parallel to heterosexual male behavior, sometimes monogomous, sometimes not.
In the same way, Paul says certain men, as a class (those of whom he apparently disapproves), chose to replace their natural sexual relations with women (as a class) with sexual relations with other men (as a class). The plural here is used to suggest that he is talking about different classes or catergories of people (namely men and women), not suggesting that the actual sex of which he was speaking occured necessarily in groups.
One final observation, Paul uses the plural of women in that passage as well. The passage could be understood: "They substituted sex with women, in order to have sex with each other." It seems fairly clear from the statement that he approves of sex with women (notice the plural). If we accept that your analysis of the use of the plural, then that would imply that he approves of men having multiple female sexual partners. Since the Bible elsewhere teaches that a man is to have one wife, and that he is not to have sex with anyone but her, this would be a biblically incomprehensible conclusion.
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