Every verse they use, taken apart, honestly.

The men of the city surround Lot’s house and demand that he hand over his two guests so they can rape them. That is the crime Genesis describes: a mob threatening sexual violence against vulnerable travelers.

Scripture itself names Sodom’s sin elsewhere, and it never mentions same-sex love. Ezekiel 16:49 says: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Jesus references Sodom in the context of towns that refuse hospitality to his messengers (Matthew 10:15).

Whatever else is happening in Genesis 19, it is the story of attempted gang rape, not of two people in a mutual, loving relationship. Reading a modern debate about orientation back into it is a choice, not a translation.

These two verses sit inside the Holiness Code, laws meant to separate Israel from the surrounding Canaanite religious practices. The Hebrew idiom used (literally “the bed of a woman”) is about a man taking the sexual role of a woman, which in an ancient honor and shame society was about status and humiliation, not about the existence of same-sex orientation.

The word translated “abomination” (to’evah) is the same word used for eating non-kosher food (Deuteronomy 14:3), dishonest business scales (Proverbs 11:1), and a woman wearing a man’s garment. It is a ritual purity category, not the Bible’s word for grave moral evil. Christians who quote Leviticus 18:22 typically do not keep the laws two verses earlier about sex during menstruation, or the mixed-fiber rule in 19:19.

The code assumes every person is an Israelite man with a wife, property, and social rank. It has no category for the thing it is now used to condemn: a person who is same-sex attracted by nature, living in a mutual, faithful relationship. You cannot extract a rule from a world that did not know the situation you are in.

Paul’s whole point in Romans 1 is that humanity exchanged the worship of God for idols. The sexual language is part of his description of people who abandoned what was natural for them, as a symptom of that exchange. The phrase he uses, “against nature” (para physin), is the same phrase he uses in Romans 11:24 for God acting against nature to graft Gentiles in. It is not a technical term for sexual orientation.

The concept of sexual orientation did not exist until the late 1800s. Neither Paul nor any biblical author was describing a stable, God-given attraction between two people of the same sex. Paul is describing people giving themselves over to excess: the rhetoric of a first-century Jewish man arguing against Greco-Roman idolatry, in a world where sexual exploitation was a tool of power.

And the passage does not stand alone. Romans 2 turns immediately on the reader: “You have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others.” Anyone using Romans 1 to condemn a neighbor has walked straight into Romans 2.

The Greek words in question are malakoi (“soft ones”) and arsenokoitai, a word Paul appears to have invented. It shows up in no surviving Greek literature before him, and it seems to be built from the Greek translation of Leviticus 18:22 (“male” plus “bed”). Nobody knows precisely what Paul meant by it. The earliest Christians after him who used the word applied it to pederasty and to the sexual exploitation of slaves and prostitutes.

Malakoi is used elsewhere for weakness or self-indulgence: the morally soft person, not “the receptive partner in a covenant relationship.” Both words sit in vice lists alongside greed, gossip, drunkenness, and cheating, in letters written to a city where sexual access to enslaved people and boys was routine and unremarkable.

The word “homosexual” did not appear in any English Bible until the 1946 Revised Standard Version. The word itself was coined in German in 1869. Translating arsenokoitai as “homosexuals” is a twentieth-century decision, made by translators who believed they were clarifying, and it changed what millions of people heard the Bible say.

Deuteronomy 22 is a collection of everyday rules for an ancient agrarian community: what to do if you find a stray ox, how to build a roof railing so guests do not fall off, what not to wear while sowing seed. Its clothing rule addresses a world where what you wore signaled your place in a rigid social order, and where ritual cross-dressing was part of Canaanite worship.

It says nothing about gender identity, a concept the ancient world did not have. To apply it to a transgender person today is to stretch one line far beyond its context, while ignoring the hundreds of neighboring commands the same readers do not keep.

Scripture does have something to say about people whose place in society is fixed against them. Isaiah 56 records God promising the outsider and the eunuch “a place in my house” and “an everlasting name.” The Bible’s pattern is God expanding the circle, not guarding the gate.

There is no passage in scripture that addresses what we are actually talking about today: a person with a stable, unchosen same-sex orientation, living in a mutual, faithful, consensual relationship. Every relevant text comes from cultures where same-sex acts were understood as excess, domination, or cultic practice, never as an identity or a love story.

Meanwhile the Bible is full of same-sex love that it praises without comment: David and Jonathan, whose love scripture says “was more wonderful than the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26); Ruth clinging to Naomi with words now read at weddings (Ruth 1:16-17); the centurion whose beloved servant (pais, a word used for a younger male companion) is healed by Jesus, who praises the man’s faith above anyone in Israel (Matthew 8:5-13).

And the weight of scripture’s moral teaching lands somewhere else entirely: “The greatest commandments are these: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-40). “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).