For Brian and also everyone else, below is some information from Dr. Robert Gagnon where he quotes from PRO-gay bible scholars who admit that Scripture condemns all forms of same-sex behavior in every situation. Sadly, they then go on to reject the authority of Scripture in this issue. In any case, read the following:
Those Gentile moralists opposing homosexual practice absolutely were a minority of the elite in Greece and Rome but the fact that they existed at all indicates the absurdity of arguing that any Jew at this time, including Jesus and Paul, might have been open to committed same-sex sexual bonds. The culture of ancient Israel, continuing on in early Judaism, is one that can only be characterized as the most implacably opposed to homosexual practice of any known culture in the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman Mediterranean basin.
Louis Crompton in the massive Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2003) has written:
According to [one] interpretation, Paul’s words were not directed at “bona fide” homosexuals in committed relationships. But such a reading, however well-intentioned, seems strained and unhistorical. Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstance. The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any other Jew or early Christian. (p. 114)
Similarly, Bernadette Brooten (Harvard, Brandeis), a self-acknowledged lesbian who has written the most important book on lesbianism in antiquity and its relation to early Christianity (especially Rom 1:26), at least from a pro-homosex perspective, criticized both John Boswell and Robin Scroggs for their use of an exploitation argument: Boswell . . . argued that . . . “The early Christian church does not appear to have opposed homosexual behavior per se.” The sources on female homoeroticism that I present in this book run absolutely counter to [this conclusion]. (p. 11)
If . . . the dehumanizing aspects of pederasty motivated Paul to condemn sexual relations between males, then why did he condemn relations between females in the same sentence? . . . Rom 1:27, like Lev 18:22 and 20:13, condemns all males in male-male relationships regardless of age, making it unlikely that lack of mutuality or concern for the passive boy were Paul’s central concerns. . . . The ancient sources, which rarely speak of sexual relations between women and girls, undermine Robin Scroggs’s theory that Paul opposed homosexuality as pederasty. (Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 253 n. 106, 257, 361)
She also criticized the use of an orientation argument: "Paul could have believed that tribades [the active female partners in a female homosexual bond], the ancient kinaidoi [the passive male partners in a male homosexual bond], and other sexually unorthodox persons were born that way and yet still condemn them as unnatural and shameful. . . . I believe that Paul used the word “exchanged” to indicate that people knew the natural sexual order of the universe and left it behind. . . . I see Paul as condemning all forms of homoeroticism as the unnatural acts of people who had turned away from God." (p. 244)
Martti Nissinen, a Finnish Bible scholar who has written the best book on the Bible and homosexuality from a pro-homosex perspective and whose work I heavily critique in The Bible and Homosexual Practice (precisely because it is the best on the other side), acknowledges in one of his more candid moments: "Paul does not mention tribades or kinaidoi, that is, female and male persons who were habitually involved in homoerotic relationships, but if he knew about them (and there is every reason to believe that he did), it is difficult to think that, because of their apparent ‘orientation,’ he would not have included them in Romans 1:24-27. . . . For him, there is no individual inversion or inclination that would make this conduct less culpable. . . . Presumably nothing would have made Paul approve homoerotic behavior." (Homoeroticism in the Biblical World [Fortress, 1998], 109-12)
The scholars above are the best on the side of those supporting homosexualist ideology.