I went over to WaPo to read the Episcopal Bishop's response to the Scaife-funded Christianist loons (sorry for the triple redundancy, there) who are splitting the Episcopal church over teh gay (and female bishops (and female priests (and, for you cognoscenti, the 1928 Prayerbook))), and read a lot of Christianist yammering about how homosexuality was against the Bible, the ultimate authority (definitely not true for Episcopalians, but that's another post).
A representative comment:

Church is not a welcoming mat for everyone to trample on its core beliefs. God gave us the bible no person should change the beliefs. Everyone is welcome in church but no one is welcome to change it core beliefs.

But only way downthread came, you know, chapter and verse. Turns out Leviticus 20:13 is the key verse for these bigots. So I thought I'd cite a whole boatload of Leviticus, so you can see for yourself what a selective, twisted interpretation these guys are operating on--and what the consequences of really believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of The God of Your Choice, If Any, must be.

Here goes. Hold your nose, because ritual purity in Palestine, c. 2000 BCE, is strong stuff:

Leviticus 20:8 Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the LORD, who makes you holy.
Leviticus 20:9 If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head. Read more…

From USA Today, the newspaper in front of the door at every hotel in America, the mainstream view:

Religion's only real commodity, after all, is its moral authority. Lose that, and we lose our credibility. Lose credibility, and we might as well close up shop.

It's happened to Christianity before, most famously when we dug in our heels over Galileo's challenge to the biblical view that the Earth, rather than the sun, was at the center of our solar system. You know the story. Galileo was persecuted for what turned out to be incontrovertibly true. For many, especially in the scientific community, Christianity never recovered.

This time, Christianity is in danger of squandering its moral authority by continuing its pattern of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the face of mounting scientific evidence that sexual orientation has little or nothing to do with choice. To the contrary, whether sexual orientation arises as a result of the mother's hormones or the child's brain structure or DNA, it is almost certainly an accident of birth. The point is this: Without choice, there can be no moral culpability.

So, why are so many church leaders (not to mention Orthodox Jewish and Muslim leaders) persisting in their view that homosexuality is wrong despite a growing stream of scientific evidence that is likely to become a torrent in the coming years? The answer is found in Leviticus 18. "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination."

As a former "the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it" kind of guy, I am sympathetic with any Christian who accepts the Bible at face value. But here's the catch. Leviticus is filled with laws imposing the death penalty for everything from eating catfish to sassing your parents. If you accept one as the absolute, unequivocal word of God, you must accept them all.  Read more…