Washington

I have no idea whether there is any statistical truth in my impressions, but I don't believe I have ever heard of anyone Jewish being publicly anti-LCBTQ+. Yet it's the "Old Testament" - the Jewish part of the Bible - where the freakouts about gay sex are. (Even then, many scholars bllieve that those freakouts are not so much about gay sex a about people, men in particular, engaging in sex with priests of non-Jewish religions as a religious act.)

In ht "New Testament, the "Christian" part of the Bible, There are a couple of incidents - not even in the Gospels - which suggests early Christians took a warmer view. For instance, in Acts chapter 10 there is the story of Peter's vision which was ostensibly about kosher vs. trsf food, bu which he rightly (eventially) interpreted as referring to people, and which led him to visit (and baptize) a Gentile, with ehom Jewish law prohibited him coming anywhere near to. And he said, "God has shown me tat I must not call any man [person] common or unclean."

Then there was the story, also in Acts, of Philip, another of the 12 apostles, meeting with and conversion of the eunuch. A eunoch is a castrated male. They did not have opera in the first century, so the odds were that if a man was a eunuch, he had been castrated as part of a religious ceremony neither Jewish nor Christian - a religious act which woulf have had an extremely high ick factor for any Jew or Christian.. This did not stop Philip from preaching to and also baptizing the man.

It is terrible for society, and probably even worse for Christianity, when people confuse their own personal ick factors with God's commands.

I can kind of see people making such a conlation when it waswidely believed that straigh, gay, or trans was a choice. (AlthoughI have never found anyone who can credible answer the question "At what age did you decide to be straight?&quot But now that it has been scientifically studied and the consensus is that a person's gender - the real one, the one that's internal - and sexualpreference - is determined at birth, I simply cannot see how anyone could blame another person for something so putside their control.