Being a gay Jewish woman, I know a little something about being attacked by "Christians" wielding the Bible as a club.
The good news is that people who do this, like all Republican tricksters (because they almost always are) are banking on ignorance.
The vast majority of people in this great country of ours, have not read the Bible, let alone cover-to-cover; and, a good deal of people who claim to be Christian do not know what their religion is supposed to be.
The better news is that the Truth is on our side.
Let's begin.
First, I need to extend my great thanks to advisorjim and his dittiots series, because, without his discussion of the dittiots and homosexuality, I sure would not have gotten here today.
Let's just start with homosexuality. The bullies with the clubs bring out Leviticus 18:22: Thou shalt not lie with a man as thou would with a woman (or words to that effect). Well, GAY PEOPLE DON'T. I am willing to concede that, back when that phrase was written, there may well have been a health issue with bisexuality, as there was with pork and undercooked meat. But that brings up the next point: Christians do not adhere to the book of Leviticus. There are hundreds and hundreds of laws in there which are, let's face it, not pertinent to today's world... like eating pork and undercooked meats... today's Bible would be better off with an admonition against SUVs.
But don't look at us if you want to see what a Levitican world looks like... most American Jews don't follow them either... the Muslims are much better at it than either the Jews or the Christians, which makes me wonder why we're at war with them... but that's an issue for another day.
See, Leviticus, or the Book of Laws, is not part and parcel of Christianity, as Paul got rid of the observance of it in order to lure more people to the new faith. But, what a lot of folks don't understand is the reason that most Jews eat shellfish and shake hands with people of opposite genders and wear nylon, and that is that the Five Books of Moses are a big-ass Math problem. Each letter in the Hebrew alphabet is a number; each word is a bunch of numbers added together. When you have two words that have equal values, they mean equal things, even if our little minds don't understand it. There have been thousands and thousands of scholars arguing over every single word in the Torah for hundreds of years to come up with "standard" Judaism which looks very little like what Leviticus looks like. When every word in a number and ever sentence is another number and you search for equivalences, the literal words become allegorical, and this is the aesoteric side of Judaica. But, see, Christians don't have that. It's all literal to them. So, in order to combat Lev 18:22, it might be fun to point out Luke 17:34-5, and let them hem and haw and say that God didn't really mean that.
But the truth of the matter is that there are some pretty cool gay people in the Bible. King David and King Saul's son, Jonathon were a hot little item there in the second half of I Samuel. And no one in the world can convince me that Ruth and Naomi weren't an item, too... their vows of love are still used in weddings everywhere: whither thou goest, I shall go; thy god shall be my god. Yeah. They were just related by marriage. Uh-huh. I'm buying it.
But the bigger issue is that the people who preach hate in the name of God, especially the ones who claim to be Christian, are not Christian. They are anti-Christian, and their god, of course, is the anti-Christ. That right there should be enough to get the vast majority of people who think that they're Christian to wake up and smell the coffee.
Jesus was a very loving guy, and he wanted people to follow Leviticus (Matt 5:17) but was much more concerned with God's love than His rather impressive vengence. You can be assured that, if he were around today, we wouldn't be the hypocrites and the Pharisees. Nosireebob.
Here are some quaint little verses to toss at people throwing verses at you...
Lev 19:18
Mat 5:44-7
Mat 7:1
Rom 3:10
There are literally thousands of verses to tell the person quoting verses at you to go away.
But the long and short of it all is that Jesus never once said "Thou shalt tolerate thy neighbor" It was love thy neighbor as thyself, warts and all, Jack, even as you would have the Lord love you, for whatsoever you do to the least of thy brothers you do also to me. The message of Christianity is to love every last person as you would love the Lord, because that's what you're doing.
Leave Leviticus to the Yeshiva boys who will, in a couple of hundred years, with the use of ever more powerful computers, tell you what the math really means.
My bet is that it will be "love is pretty cool".