I am greatly disturbed by the many letters supporting the Southern Baptists’ boycott of Disney on the premise that the Bible condemns homosexuality as sinful.

That’s just not true, and it’s time someone stood up to this widely agreed-upon lie.

As important as the Bible is, and as widely quoted (and misquoted) as it is these days, shouldn’t we know the truth about its passages?

The Bible does not condemn homosexuality. The original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible never even mention homosexuals, and they certainly never condemn monogamous gay relationships in any way.

Yes, there is a passage that says a man shouldn’t “lie” with a man as he lies with a woman — it was considered culturally wrong for a man to take on a woman’s role (being sexually passive) in any way because women were considered property, something less than human, and certainly not equal to men.

By putting himself in a woman’s place, a man was demeaning himself. But this passage says nothing about the state of being gay or about being in loving gay relationships, only about outdated cultural sexism. One can be gay without “lying” with anyone. Gays who are not sexually active are still gay.

Aside from this passage, the Bible only condemns the same sexual acts for gays as for straights — prostitution, pagan rituals and rape.

The original text of the Bible does not say God destroyed Sodom because of homosexuality — it says the city was destroyed because of acts of rape and inhospitality. The people of Sodom raped the travellers/angels just as most conquering armies of that time raped the soldiers they defeated.

Unless the Bible thumpers are going to assert that every soldier at that time in history was gay, they have to give up the ridiculous and ignorant assertion that the crime of Sodom was homosexuality.

So much of the original texts of the Bible were never made into what we read today. What was included and excluded was based on political battles and who was in power at the time. The King James version, in fact, tries to sidestep the gay issue entirely because King James was gay.

Today, we read mis-translations of mis-translations of mis-translations, none of them taking into consideration the cultural and historical contexts of what was written, all of them distant bastard cousins to the original texts.

But what I really can’t understand is the so-called religious folks’ obsession with homosexuality. They seem to talk about it more than gays and lesbians do. It all makes me wonder — who are the ones with the problem?

Scott Miller

St. Louis