The first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans contains what most readers consider the Bible’s clearest condemnation of same-sex relations. Recent scholarship reads the same text and finds just the opposite. Who is right? To most readers, the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans...
bible.org
One of the problems with the American brand of religious freedom is that anyone can call themselves a "preacher". It used to be that there were universities that prepared ministers with education on the Bible and exegesis- an understanding of the context and interpretation of the Bible.
Most of the ministers talking about Romans don't know the context. They don't understand that homosexuality in the ancient Mediterranean didn't exist in the context of the way it is viewed today. Homosexual conduct, usually by heterosexual men, was viewed much differently by the Jewish people who had been under rule by pagan Romans.
Romans is an epistle written to Roman Christians who lived in a society where pederasty and homosexual prostitution was a part of the culture. The context of Romans is that Christians should not be part of the pagan culture of Rome. It's one of the reason the early Christians were lion food... at least until Constantine converted to Christianity.
There's a whole history of the early Christian church debating whether all of the members of the Church should be celibate and circumcized. Many modern day Christians just seem to skip over that whole section of the Epistles and pick out the verses that confirm their biases.
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