Q: "Doesn't the Bible say Gay marriage is wrong?"

No. But it does say that most of the people who claim to be God's Best People are going to remake His rules to fit their own egos, make up stories about bad things that aren't, and just be generally the most God-rebelling people on the planet.

In fact, Paul even writes:

"To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled." (Titus 1:15)

And – not a surprise – that includes those who trumpet most loudly that Gays are impure-icky and God isn't ok with them getting married in ways that actually protect their families.

Here are some of their remakes -- not only of God's rules, but also the reality He created -- along with why they aren't true:

Idea # 1: God doesn't like Gay people.

Wrong. God loves everyone, and chooses to save Gay people all the time (as evidenced by the fact that Gay people receive His Holy Spirit all the time, and yet remain happily, healthily, Gay). God just isn't as selfish and self-obsessed as most people want Him to be, so people who don't like Gay people just need to get over the idea that the world is only ok, safe, and normal when it looks, talks, acts, and dresses just like their version of what straight people look like, talk like, act like, and dress like (for certainly there are a lot of straight people who don't want to be associated with the lifestyle choices that Gay-haters think makes them "godly").

More, the only way Gay-haters are able to say that the Bible condemns Gay people is by changing the Bible words from what God put there to what they want it to say instead, and by ignoring the real context of what was being written about. They will answer to God for that -- not only for changing His Word, but also for using their false Bible to make Him look bad, and for driving people away from the real Jesus.

Idea #2: There's one idea of what "traditional marriage" is, and it's always been the same.

Wrong. Here's just three examples:

• Unlike today, only a short time ago traditional marriage didn't involve the government at all. Before that, no government gave a hoot who you married, when, how, or why. Instead, marriage was just like it is in most traditional cultures today: an agreement between people who may or may not have even been allowed to choose each other. Straight couples (even conservative Christians ones) don't live by that today. Instead, they want the government to regulate their marriages so there are tax breaks, legal protections when a spouse is injured or killed, rules about when and how spouses can split, and so on (and these are the things Gay families need, as well, in today's world).

• Modern marriage rules are completely different from traditional versions. In Bible times, for example, people made their marriage agreement, but then lived apart and stayed celibate for some months (that's why pregnant Mary was still living at her parent's home even though she was already married to Joseph, and that's why technically Joseph could have had her stoned to death for adultery, even though they weren't living as husband and wife yet according to our modern rules). Our modern marriage rules say that the marriage is real and can only be broken with divorce once the couple have been sexually intimate with each other. But in the Bible, the marriage was real and could only be broken by divorce way before that, in what we'd almost call the "engagement" period today. Think the divorce rate (especially among conservative Christians) is high now? Imagine if our culture required divorce to break an engagement! There are also a million different ways that people in traditional and modern cultures show they are married, in the expectations they have for each other and that society has for them, and so on. To believe that only one way of being or doing something is the "traditional" way of anything only means one is so self-focused s/he doesn't see they aren't the center of the human cultural universe -- and the only "tradition" that shows is plain old human sin. 

• In Bible times, and in many traditional cultures even today, marriage could be between one man and one woman, but it could also be between one man and two or more women, or even sometimes between one woman and two or more men. It could even be about one man and two sisters (check out Jacob, for example, in the Old Testament). Remember that in traditional cultures, marriage is more about economics than anything (that's why it wasn't until about 100 years ago that the law stopped counting women and children as only economic units, without any more rights than a toaster or an automobile, within a family). So having more spouses meant you had more money, but it also meant you had more workers (spouses, children) to work your farm or business. Today, modern people – including conservative Christians – have rejected this super-focus on economics for happy, healthy family life (and that's not a bad thing). Sure, we want our families to be financially sound, but very, very few of us in western Christian cultures today marry someone we have absolutely no love or sexual attraction feelings for, just because we (or our family) thinks that person will be a good worker in the restaurant we own, or will make lots of babies that (once old enough) we can use to chop vegetables and wait tables so we don't have to hire staff.

Idea # 3: Gay marriages will harm straight marriages, or lead to people marrying animals and such.

Did allowing interracial marrages harm same-race marriages? No. Yet that's exactly the kind of false conclusion this kind of argument demands. No where in any part of the world where Gay marriages have been allowed has it made any difference to straight marriages at all.

And the animal thing? Nowhere in any part of the world where interracial marriages or Gay marriages have been allowed has society or the law degenerated into bestiality, or incest, or anything else normal people find repugnant. The whole idea is insulting and sinful, in the same way that saying "Allowing Black and white people to marry will lead to birth defects and the degeneration of the white race" is.

Idea # 4: Marriage is for making babies (or, for protecting babies already born).

Does any church (even the most conservative ones) or any law test straight people for fertility before allowing them to marry? What about the obvious cases where straight people won't be having children when they marry – like older couples, or people who have had disease or injury or surgery that prevents them from making babies? Does the Vatican't or the Family Faked-Research Council or even the Supreme Court of the USA stand up to angrily denounce non-fertile straight people marrying? Of course not. But that's, they say, because all straight marriages are "still open to the possibility" of making a baby. And that, my friends, is just a made-up argument a child would make. Like, (add appropriate pout) "Mommy! Robby shouldn't get to have any cookies because I might get hungry someday!" Please.

As for protecting children already born, we have to say again that the law doesn't say straight people who don't have school-age or even adult kids aren't allowed to marry. But also needing to be considered is that many Gay and Lesbian people also have children (either from before they realized they were Gay, or because they've adopted children), and those who demonize Gay marriage are actively blocking children of Gay parents from the same protections that children of straight parents get. How typically false-Christian!

Idea # 5: Gay families can be just as protected with civil unions and such – they don't need actual marriage

This would be true, except for the thousands upon thousands of local, state, and federal laws and protections that automatically go with marriage, that do not and never will go with civil unions and the like. Compare that to my wife and I, for example, who had to pay several hundred dollars to a lawyer to draw up legal documents that will hopefully protect us in only six ways (and sometimes people with such documents still have to go to court to enforce them – which doesn't help if your partner is dying in the hospital and needs you NOW). Since no one is going to go to every local, state, and federal legal jurisdiction in the nation and around the world and make them update all their laws, statutes, and ordinances to say "civil union" in addition to "marriage", nothing but an actual legal marriage is ever going to give the protections all families need today.

There's also just the whole bigoted idea -- struck down regarding race and sex -- that "separate but equal" is a good thing. If we don't buy that having "black-only" drinking fountains just as good as "white-only" drinking fountains takes care of any problems racism causes, then we can't buy having "Gay-type" civil unions and "straight-type" marriages take care of any homophobia problems. 

Idea # 6: Churches should say what marriage is, not the government

We've already covered how government is so much a part of marriage now -- and how even conservative Christians like and insist on it being that way. But here's the other part of all that: which churches should get to say? Christian churches? Well, sorry Bud but not everyone is Christian. So, should straight-only marriage laws only apply to Christians, allowing Gay people who aren't Christian to get married? How about other kinds of churches? Should the Moonies get to decide who you marry and how? How about letting the Mormons decide how the Southern Baptists run things from now on?

Which leads to...

Idea # 7: Allowing Gay marriage will force Gay-hating churches to perform Gay marriages (or will prevent Gay-haters from being able to say they hate Gay people)

What a crock. Churches have always been allowed to be as bigoted, sinful, and cultish as they wanted to be.

Ever tried to get married in a traditional Roman Catholic church? Is your intended not already Roman Catholic? Then the Roman Catholic Church can legally refuse to marry you. Want to marry someone of a different race? Maybe you're Jewish and you want to marry a fundamentalist Christian? Or you're part of a rich church and you want to marry a homeless person you met doing shelter work? In most conservative churches, it just ain't going to happen. And no law that says you can't discriminate against people because of their race, religion, economics, and so on has or will ever stop churches from marrying or not marrying people as they chose.

As for the speech issue – anyone checked out the horrid hate speech allowed in racist, homophobic, and sexist websites and books and such these days? Absolutely no one is blocking people from being just as demonic as they'd like their mouths and hearts to be. Same will continue to go for homophobes, as well.

Idea # 8: Allowing Gay marriages will hurt children.

This is a variation of the old "Gay people are pedophiles" bigotry. It's been debunked a million times. Yet there are still people who claim that Black people aren't as moral as white people despite a mountain of evidence showing otherwise, and there are still people who claim that Jews are demonic financial swindlers despite another mountain of evidence showing otherwise. In the same way, there will always be people (including Black people and Jews) who claim that Gay people are more dangerous to kids than straight people are, and so on. That's just part of the way the devil rules things (until Jesus comes again), and the way that religious and non-religious human beings alike buy into his devil-crapola.

Bigotry is a mutant brain leech that just doesn't fall off without a fight.

What this all comes down to is this:

Straight people who believe they are more special than Gay people don't want to admit that everyone is special, and everyone deserves the same rights, responsibilities, and protections as everyone else. As members of civilized society they should know that. As Christians, they should embrace it.  

More, while many people value what they can see and what their bodies can do (e.g., going to a religious building each Sunday morning, avoid saying curse words, having sexual relations that result in offspring, etc.), God actually values what's not so easy to see, and where our hearts are. 

God IS interested in marriage, because He's interested in the promises we make, and how well we keep them and care for those in our charge. Being married – making a covenant with another person whether Gay or straight – means things like: being monogamous, because it's the loving, godly thing to do; sticking it out in our marriage even when our spouse is sick, a pain in the rear end, or even old and/or no longer physically attractive, because that's the promise we made to him/her and to God; and caring as dearly as Jesus would for our spouse and any children that are part of that relationship.

God IS interested in marriage, but not because one person has one kind of genitalia and the other has another kind. God is interested in marriage because God created human beings to bond together, and because our modern culture says we can and should be doing that with one other person in a most special covenanted way – and He means for us to take covenants as seriously as He does.

God is for Gay – and straight – marriage. As we should be too.

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This article written by Lynne at No Junk. Just Jesus. You can contact Lynne at NoJunkJustJesus@gmail.com.

Q: "Does coming out as Gay mean I have to divorce or leave my (straight) family?"

No, it does not.

However, it does mean you need to work with your family to decide what is best for you and them in what was probably already a hard situation for both the closeted Gay spouse and the straight spouse, and which has now become a real stomach-twister – especially if there are children involved.

The Bible, of course, speaks of marriage (a family commitment of two people before God) and divorce (the ending of that commitment). It's often said that while the Old Testament allowed divorce, the New Testament does not. However, that isn't strictly true, and there simply are no black-or-white answers that will serve every situation.

God always insists that His people remain faithful to our commitments – both in our commitment to Him, but also in our various commitments to each other. In the case of divorce, In the Old Testament God also insists that His people take care of and protect those who have been made vulnerable in some way, due to their disconnection from a family unit.

For example, in Isaiah 1:17, God warns the ancient Israelites to (among other things), "defend the orphan" and to "plead for the widow". In ancient Israel, orphans and widows were among those left outside the family commitment that would otherwise have sheltered and provided for them economically, politically, legally, and religiously. Any divorce today can easily result in children and spouses who are essentially left as "orphans" and "widows", economically, politically, legally, and religiously, if we aren't careful in beginning, living, and ending marriage commitments.

In our modern cultures, for example, it's not only common to produce children outside of the protections of marriage, but also to later (emotionally, financially, and even physically) abandon children produced within the bounds of marriage. This has, in fact, become so commonplace that children who remain protected and provided for by two parents throughout their growing-up years seem "odd" in many parts of modern culture.

However, things are not "peachy-keen" within most modern, "traditional" Christian families, either. Two parents may remain married, yet the children are still abandoned (i.e., made vulnerable) to being physically and sexually abused, emotionally abused by ungodly and unbiblical male dominance, religiously abused by cult-like adherence to so-called "Bible-based" philosophies that have almost nothing to do with the real Jesus, and more.

Whether children and other family members are abandoned for all the world to see, or are secretly abandoned within families that pretend everything is "perfect", God isn't pleased.

And neither should we be!

All that being said, there is no, one, "right" answer that I can give you for your situation – and anyone else who tells you there is an easy "right" answer is either a con artist or a fool.

Sometimes in life there is just no answer that doesn't cause pain in one way or another. Sometimes we have to choose the least painful answer, or choose an answer that carries the most benefit to one or more despite the pain it may otherwise bring with it.

For example, yes – divorce hurts children and spouses alike. But so does marriage based upon one spouse's submission to something within the marriage that isn't right somehow. Few these days, for example, would tell a Christian woman being battered by her Christian husband that she must stay within the marriage. And few these days would tell two heterosexuals to remain married if being together made them so miserable that it was causing problems for the children.

Within a marriage between a man and a woman, where one spouse is heterosexual and the other is Gay, something isn't "right" within the relationship. And in this case, since the sexual orientation of both spouses is something God programmed permanently into their bodies, that means however much they may love each other as friends and partners, neither of them will ever have that deep, intimate emotional, physical, and sexual bond that God also intended to be a part of marriage commitments. In such a case, it won't only be the Gay spouse who is unhappy and perhaps looking for an "out". The straight spouse may also wish for that "out", which brings with it the possibility then of finding another heterosexual spouse who may provide that intimate marriage bond.

So, what should you do, then, if you are a Gay person currently heterosexually married?

First and foremost, you must consider all options for the protection of any children you have produced. This means also continuing to provide for them emotionally, and not just with a child support check each month, should you decided to end the marriage. And not just with your otherwise-distant presence around the house, should you decide to remain in the marriage.

You must also, to the best of your ability within your situation, make the decision to keep or break the marriage commitment with your heterosexual spouse. Both of you must have input into this decision. Yes, you are entitled to be who you are. However, you did choose to make this commitment with your spouse, before God, family, and community. You must honor your commitment and your spouse, to the best of your ability within your situation, in the ending of your commitment, just as you should during your commitment.

If you choose to remain within your heterosexual marriage, you must find ways to still honor who you are as a Gay person, just as you must find ways that still honor who your spouse is as a heterosexual person. You no doubt already know how difficult it is to find the emotional and sexual satisfaction all normal human beings long for, when you are living within the bounds of a marriage that doesn't perfectly "fit" you. Your heterosexual spouse no doubt has the same longings and the same difficulties within this imperfect "fit" you've decided to stick with. What will that be for you both? It will what fits you both and your individual situation.

If you choose to remain within your heterosexual marriage, you must also honor the emotional and sexual bounds of that marriage. Remaining married with a Gay lover on the side, or seeking out anonymous or semi-anonymous Gay sex in other places, is simply wrong – it's adultery. And that's just wrong, both within our human moralities, but also, more importantly, to God. Fulfilling your emotional and sexual needs outside of your marriage also threatens real harm to yourself, your spouse, and your family, in countless ways. Want to consider a few? Then think about what your family will go through if you end up arrested and have your name published in the newspaper because you were soliciting Gay sex in a public park. Think about the hurt you will cause your spouse if you bring home a sexually transmitted disease. And think about the confusion and hurt your spouse and children will live with, if it becomes known that you are cheating on the marriage.

Is any of this going to be easy? I can't imagine how it could be! But by choosing to heterosexually marry, you have bound yourself to the well-being and care of another person, and of more than one other person if you have children. And those responsibilities do not disappear simply because you realize you didn't make the best decision.

Make the decisions that need to be made, knowing there will probably not be a painless answer. Make them prayerfully, asking God for strength and forgiveness, as needed. And make them, to the best of your ability within your current situation, with your spouse and family.

Now, what about if you are a single Gay person considering becoming heterosexually married?

Don't do it!

Because of the prejudice of our society, and the unbiblical ways even our so-called "conservative" Bible translations are made, many Gay people choose to marry heterosexually. Some believe they can just make it work. Some believe it will make them straight. Some just want the family recognition that comes from such a union.

All of those are the wrong reason for anyone to marry. And they don't work for Gay people, either.

Consider, for example, the hurt you will bring to your spouse, when you are unable to commit emotionally and sexually with them in a heterosexual manner, in the way a heterosexual spouse would. How are they going to feel if later they find out you already knew you were Gay, but married them and encouraged their heterosexual commitment to you anyway? After all, marriage is supposed to be an open, honest, partnership, and here you've started off from a dishonest position.

Consider, too: who is your spouse going to be able to talk to about having a Gay spouse and all the confusion, loneliness, alienation, and hurt they feel? After all, if you got married because you wanted to escape the anti-Gay hatred of your church community, then your spouse no doubt has only anti-Gay friends and family to try and speak with about what's happening in his/her marriage to you. Will it be any surprise if your spouse either won't talk about it to anyone (and therefore suffers without an outlet to help him/her resolve this), or adds anti-Gay hatred to the angry hurt he or she already feels towards you?

Marrying heterosexually when you know you are Gay is just wrong. Wrong because it involves deception. Wrong because it promises intimacy it cannot produce. Wrong because it makes other people (including children of the marriage) have to deal – now and in the future – with the very painful disconnect of strained relationships or divorce.

It you are Gay and thinking about becoming heterosexually married, think again!

What's the better solution? It's to learn to heal the homophobic self-hate and self-denial you are struggling with, rather than simply dragging others along in it. It's to be open and honest – with yourself, and with those you wish to be responsible to and for.

It's to honor the God who created you to be who He created you to be: a Jesus-loving, Holy-Spirit-filled, Gay Christian living either celibate or married to another Gay person. And it's to honor the God who created the heterosexual person you are dating or engaged to, to be who He created him or her to be: a Jesus-loving, Holy-Spirit-filled, straight Christian living either celibate or married to another straight person.

You must prayerfully find what works for your situation, and then walk with God to accomplish it!

Here are some additional resources you might find helpful:

Gay Husbands - Straight Wives, which includes among other things "Come out to your wife", a "plea to gay men to be honest with their wives about their homosexuality", and "Why not to get married if you're Gay", which "discusses the various reasons why gay people get married, and talks common sense about why they shouldn’t".

Straight Spouse Network,  which includes among other things, online support and reading lists.

God bless you!

Q: "If it's ok to be Gay, it's still wrong to have Gay sex, right?"

This is an argument put out by those who push the whole "celibate Gay" idea.
 
It's supposed to be a more "enlightened" and even "compassionate" way of dealing with Gay people -- admitting, for example, that we are indeed "born this way" and aren't making a conscious, willful choice to be Gay, but still "saving" us from our "bad inclinations".

Some even say that being Gay is like being an alcoholic -- somehow not our "fault", and something we'll have to "struggle" against all our lives, but still something we have to "stop acting on".

Unfortunately for the Gay people who fall for this idea, it's simply false, all the way around. And despite the good intentions (one hopes) of those who push this idea, it's still intensely damaging to Gay people -- just in a more subtle (and therefore perhaps even worse) way.

Let's look at all this more closely.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say, "Thou shalt not be Gay" 

In fact, the Bible just doesn't mention Gay people very often at all, as compared to straight people.
Now, some use that to "prove" that God doesn't care for or approve of Gay people -- that we aren't somehow considered part of His "norm". But think about that: the Bible doesn't talk about women or Gentiles as often, either. And it doesn't mention many other cultural and tribal groups (like the Native Americans, for example, or the Indonesians) at all. In fact, most of the Bible is only talking about the lives and doings of ancient straight Hebrew/Jewish men.

Does that mean that modern people, women, Gentiles, Gay people, Native Americans, Indonesians, and any other kind of people not specifically talked about (or talked about a lot) in the Bible aren't part of God's "norm" or His plan? Or that we only have some kind of "secondary" or "lesser" role to play?

Ridiculous! And NOT supported in Scripture, as GOD gave it to us in its original languages and contexts. Yet it's certainly an idea that unrepentant human hearts would invent to set themselves above others, and made worse because they act as if it's all the Lord's idea!

But you see, most of what's described in the Bible is not a glory-story about a certain kind of human being. Instead, it's a long, repetitious tale of wickedness, of God-rejection pretending to be God-living, of self-centeredness and greed and lust and murder and oppression, all meant to illustrate for all the world that no human being (even among the spiritual, economic, and political "elite") saves even himself, much less anyone else. 

God's purpose in the Bible is to show us how to get and stay right with Him. And that most often involves NOT living and thinking like most of the straight Hebrew/Jewish men described in the His Word -- nearly all of whom were considered (by themselves if not also others) to be God's spiritual "elite", yet who were continually guilty of, among other things:

1. worshiping other gods;
2. combining God-worship with pagan worship;
3. pretending to love and live for God while loving and living first and foremost for themselves;
4. willful disobedience of God's direct commands;
5. being disrespectful to and abusive towards God and neighbor;
6. ripping off and economically abusing their neighbors;
7. pretending to follow God's law but re-inventing His meaning, adding to His commands, and ignoring what they didn't want to hear;
8. murdering those who spoke God's truth, those who had what they wanted, those who were vulnerable to them in some way, and just those they didn't like;
9. having sex with each others' wives and their own family members;
10. having sex with and making their wives sleep with animals;
11. rape (of both men and women);
12. burning their own children alive for (hoped for) material gains;
13. making war for profit;
14. political intrigue;
15. bearing false witness against and lying to others;
16. obsessing after material wealth, control of others, and worldly "success"...

...And so on and so forth until one has to wonder about people who use a few isolated scriptures to supposedly "prove" how "evil" Gay people are – but then completely ignore the thousands upon thousands of scriptures that by the same ridiculous logic would "prove" how much more evil straight people are!

The point of the Bible is to help us see how much we need God – NOT to get us to reverence a certain kind of human being over another.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say, "Thou shalt not have Gay sex" 

There are a few passages that, when interpreted falsely, or twisted completely out of context, or just plain re-written, make it "appear" as if Gay sex is condemned. 

But there just aren't any real passages (meaning, passages as GOD gave them to us) that condemn Gay sex (or straight sex) per se. 

Does that mean "Anything goes"? Absolutely not! See, the Bible does have condemnations of sex – but only when that sexual activity is tainted by lust, or by idolatry, or by both. 

Think about it this way, through this short, imaginary exchange:

Are strawberries bad?

No, of course not.

How about chocolate covered strawberries?

No.

Maybe white-chocolate covered strawberries?

Nope, nothing wrong with any of that.

Well, what about if someone becomes so obsessed with strawberries that they can only eat, think, and breathe strawberries all the time, so that things start to go wrong with their physical, emotional, and even spiritual health? Or what if someone becomes obsessed with NOT eating strawberries, so that they spend their lives in fearful avoidance of any situation that might even mention strawberries?

Or, what about if someone is actually allergic to strawberries, but they keep eating them anyway because it's "cool" and "empowering" to be a "rebel" and do things they aren't supposed to do?

Or, what about if someone uses strawberries to hurt people -- throwing and even mashing them all over people to ruin their clothes and humiliate them, just because it makes the person feel good to cause other people emotional and even physical pain?

Or, what about if someone starts to use strawberries as part of their religious worship, setting strawberries up on alters, praying to and bowing down to them?

I think we would ALL agree that these last four things are all VERY wrong.

But I don't think any of us would say the answer or "fix" for any of these things is to rid the world of one or more kinds of strawberries!

Yet that's what some people do with sex -- and what even more people do with Gay sex. 

They are like people who like strawberries, but don't like chocolate-covered strawberries. And in response to their particular "produce orientation", most people would just say, "Then don't have chocolate-covered strawberries!"

But these strawberry-only folks believe people are only right when they are just like themselves -- even though nothing in God's creation really says anything even close to that. So they invent political and religious movements to convince the world that those who like chocolate-covered strawberries are "perverse", "unnatural", and even "evil". And they even invent medical and psychological "therapies" that claim to "heal" people who like chocolate-covered strawberries and make them "strawberry-only" people, instead.

Truly, if such people weren't causing such horrendous and completely irresponsible spiritual, emotional, and even physical damage to the "chocolate-strawberry" people of the world, we'd just write them off as people with a silly, self-centered, control-freak problem!

But then there's the other side -- the side of people that can be perverse, unnatural, and evil:

• Some people – both straight and Gay – do become obsessed with sex, so that sex is all they can think about, and all they live for (some people have the same problem, but express it in being obsessive about not having sex -- but it's still sexual obsession). And it's not a surprise when their physical, emotional, and spiritual health suffers. Sex and the pursuit of sex becomes their main identity.
  
  
• And there are other people – again, both straight and Gay – who willfully engage in sexual acts that are counter to their natural sexual orientation because they feel "good" by intentionally being "bad" – even though it hurts or dishonors them now and in the future. These people may also do drugs, rape (men, women, and even children), participate in pornography, and break the law, all just for the "thrill" of doing things "counter" to what's "normal" or "acceptable" to decent society. Living evil becomes their main identity.
  
  
• And finally there are some people – once again both straight and Gay – who make sex a part of their "magic" spirituality, just as the pagans did thousands of years ago. Being more "powerful", "wise", "wealthy", and so on through using supernatural means becomes their main identity.

And obviously none of these ways of being are ok. To be spiritually, emotionally, and physically healthy, our main identity must be in Jesus Christ – and not in what feels good to do or not do with our bodies, or in what pleases our worst sin-nature, or in what gratifies our desire to control and acquire in the material world.

But again, here's the important point: in all these sinful ways of being, sex itself is no more the "bad guy" than strawberries were in our imaginary example.

Rather, it's what we DO with sex, how we understand it within the larger context of our lives and God-created human nature, and whether we control our (sexual and other) desires or they control us, that truly matters. 

Everywhere in the Bible it says you are responsible to God -- to produce good fruit for Him in the field He's assigned you to work 

Neither Paul nor anyone else in the Bible ever wrote to condemn Gay people living full, whole, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and yes, even sexually healthy Gay lives. The shackles that other sinful human beings want to burden us with belong to those other human beings – not to God.

But all people – straight and Gay alike – are responsible to conform every part of our lives to God's way – including our sexual lives. Nothing in the Bible says, "The rules against adultery, fornication, and so on only apply to straight people." And – despite what some Gay and Gay-friendly straight people may argue - the sinful and anti-Holy-Spirit exclusion of Gay Christians from so many straight "churches" and fellowships does NOT excuse us from living godly lives.

So, what does all this mean?

It means that every ideal put forward in God's Word is to be our ideal – whether we are straight or Gay; male or female or intersexed; masculine or feminine or inter-gendered; of any racial identity; of any cultural identity; of any tribal identity. GOD's ideals are truly to be OUR ideals! [Matthew 5:48]

And among those ideals are:

1. Recognize that since Pentecost, God no longer lives in places built by human beings, but within our bodies. Therefore, honor God with how you use and treat your body [Acts 17:24-25; 1 Corinthians 6:17-20]
   
   
2. If you are truly called to live a single life, then live your life in a joyful, celibate manner, giving the time and energies you would otherwise spend on family to showing other people the Gospel, helping the needy, and so on [Matthew 19:11-12; Luke 2:36-37; 1 Corinthians 7:32-35]. However, keep in mind that simply being so emotionally unhealthy that you are afraid of getting involved with others, or avoiding intimacy because "the church" says you "have" to, are NOT the same as truly being called to a single life (instead, those things mean you're being called to find emotional and spiritual healing and growth!).
   
   
3. If you believe you are called to a single, celibate life, but are continually "pestered" by sexual desires that lead (or seriously might lead) you beyond your self-control, then prayerfully and seriously consider that God may not have given you the gift of celibacy after all. In that case, it would be more pleasing to God for you to be in a committed, sexual relationship than to "burn with passion". [1 Corinthians 7:7-9]
   
   
4. If you are in a committed relationship, take it as seriously as God does! Stick with it, share yourselves with each other because you belong to your partner just as s/he belongs to you. Don't sexually deprive one another except for short periods of time when you've both decided to give yourself to extra work for the Lord [Matthew 5:32; Romans 7:2; 1 Corinthians 7:3-5, 10-16]

And finally, whatever the life-circumstances you find yourself in, work the mission-field God's assigned to you. Being single or married, straight or Gay, Jew or Gentile – none of those things means anything towards what really counts (though there are plenty of confused and falsely-religious people who want to waste your spiritual time and energy worrying over them!)

No matter who you are, or what God's created you to be, what really counts is keeping God's commands, ministering to and evangelizing those around you, and being filled (and remaining filled) with God's Holy Spirit! [Acts 10:1-11:18, 15:1-31; 1 Corinthians 7:17-40; Galatians 5:6; Colossians 3:1-17]