Matt, stop flaming him. You can find his opinions personally atrocious, but flaming someone is counter-productive. Hearing the fully-fleshed out argument of someone you disagree with is productive because it can cause you to examine your own beliefs or sttrengthen your beliefs by a comparison. Name-calling only means you're incapable of fighting him because you can't mount an argument to reject his views.

Dave TWB has side-stepped a number of issues I have raised, the key one being the condonement of slavery in the Bible. I don't think he has addressed this (unless I overlooked it) other than to say that a Christian pro-slavery view was only predominant in the South. I think its worth looking into further, beyond the boundaries of your regional civil war. For example, a strict adherence to the Bible would mean that a slaver is able to be a good Christian and able to be married in a church, but a homosexual who truly believed that Christ died for his sins was not. This, of course, is ludicrous by our contemporary standards.

One of Dave's arguments - in fact the only one supporting the insidousness of homosexuality - is that AIDS is a gay disease.

I think this is an ethnocentric view, based upon your anecdotal experience and observations. You say that you think 2% of people are gay (at best). Yet I found this on the UN website:
quote:

The Economic and Social Council also began discussion of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Peter Piot, Executive Director noted that ten years or more had been stripped from life expectancy in the worst-affected countries, and that a 10 per cent HIV rate caused an annual loss of around 1 per cent of a country's GDP. Such effects were cumulative. It had been estimated, for example, that by the beginning of the next decade South Africa's GDP would be 17 per cent less than it would have been without AIDS.
quote:

According to World Health Organization (WHO) reports, Africa
is still the major area most affected by the AIDS epidemic (Mertens
and others, 1994). As of the beginning of 1994, nearly two thirds
(about 9 million adults) of all cumulative cases of HIV infection
have occurred in Africa. However, the epidemic is expanding
rapidly in some parts of South and South-eastern Asia and, if the
current rate of infection continues, the annual number of new
infections in Asia is expected to surpass that of Africa. WHO
estimates that there were more than 2 million AIDS cases in Africa
as of the end of 1993, constituting about 67 per cent of the total
cumulative number of cases in the world. Thirteen per cent
occurred in the United States, 12 per cent in Latin America and the
Caribbean, and 5 per cent in Europe. Because the epidemic started
relatively recently in Asia, only 2 per cent of the AIDS cases in
the world occurred in Asia.
See also this very useful statistical guide:
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/aidswallchart/MainPage.htm

That isn't attributable to a 2% population segment. Obviouly I've not given you a comprehensive citation, but it leads me to believe that either there are more gays in the world than you think, or the disease is not chiefly a gay disease.

Even if it was a gay disease, a "disease" itself cannot be a fair example of evidence of a "corrupt" or "insidous" practice which would be capable of denying someone a Christian marriage. A leper has a terrible disease, yet a good Christian leper can be married in a church. To anticipate what you might say, the fact that the disease is capable of tranmission through anal or oral sex is not a relevant factor - anal and oral sex is also a practice amongst heterosexuals. In any event, AIDS is also capable of tranmission through vaginal sex.

I am reluctant to attack you rather than your argument, but I think that your disposition against homosexual marriage is clouded by your personal revulsion of anal sex between male homosexuals. You might also hate going to the dentist or hearing fingernails scraped along a blackboard, but none should impair your ability to objectively regard homosexuality as a behavioural choice.

Speaking personally, I regard the practice was some mild distaste, but my personal feelings simply aren't a consideration. I don't let that get in the way of my views on gay rights - the right to live a lifestyle, sexually or otherwise, as you wish. I refuse to be prejudiced against someone because of their victimless lifestyle.

I'm also, frankly, disappointed to think that a right-thinking Christian can want to exclude a fellow Christian from the goodwill of the Church simply because of a behavioural choice. Relying upon the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is as incorrect as relying upon the Bible for justification of slavery.