April Goodwin’s Jan. 27 column about her friend Frank going to hell because he’s gay, and Dan Conner’s subsequent letter, are yet more in a long line of aggressively ignorant misuses of the Bible that must be addressed before this misinformation does further damage.

I don’t doubt Goodwin’s column was sincere but she ought to know more about the Bible before using it as a weapon. The truth about the Bible must be told.

For the record: the Bible never condemns gay men and women or their acts. Never.

Modern day Bibles have unfortunately mistranslated the original Greek and Hebrew texts, which do not ever even MENTION homosexuality, since the concept was completely unknown to them.

The word didn’t even appear in Bibles until the 1940s. There are, in actuality, no references at all to gay men and women in the original texts of the Bible. Not one.

For example, the sin of the people of Sodom was a lack of hospitality to strangers, as the Bible says in several places.

That story is not about being gay, it’s about being unkind to strangers.

At that time in history, conquering armies often raped the soldiers of the armies they defeated. And that is what the men of Sodom did to the angels.

They weren’t gay, they were mean and disrespectful.

Surely, Goodwin and Conner don’t think that all soldiers at that time were gay, do they?

Most of the references that are used against gay Americans are actually about pagan rituals and prostitution, not about gay relationships.

Some of the common references aren’t really about sexual acts at all, though they’ve been translated that way. None are about loving same-gender relationships.

Unfortunately, as long as Bibles with these mistranslations are around, people like Goodwin and Conner will indulge in sound-bite religion and will continue to believe God disapproves of gay Americans.

The truth is neither God nor Jesus has weighed in on this issue yet — perhaps because it shouldn’t be an issue to begin with.

Scott Miller

St. Louis