obviously they haven't either read the bible or given it any objective thought. A loving God wouldn't eternally torture gay people for having a loving, nurturing, beneficial and harmless same sex relationship.

Does the Bible forbid gay relationships? Maybe. But if God didn't want there to be gay people, He shouldn't have made us. Who seriously believes that being gay is any more of a choice than being black? Besides, not even the most fervent Christian would want to live in a Biblocracy. Covet your neighbor's wife, or even his kitchen appliances, and go to jail? If that were government policy, how many informers would it need on the payroll to monitor the neighbors' comments about saucy Serena (or her Sub-Zero?) Does God's idea of civilization look like East Berlin in 1981? The Bible is about you and your soul, and if you think your neighbor is going to hell you can't stop him. And if you think gay relationships are immoral, surely it's the physical act that bothers you, not the signing of licenses, not the public vows of love and fidelity, not the matching tuxedos. Not the smiling faces. Yet few will make the case for police investigations of what people do between the sheets. "Same-sex marriage," wrote Maggie Gallagher in National Review, "asks religious Americans," by which she means Christian Americans, "to surrender a core belief -- not only Leviticus (disapproval of gay sexual acts), but Genesis (the idea that God himself made man as male and female and commanded men and women to come together in a special way to image the fruitfulness of God)." But Christians are surrendering nothing. They remain free to disapprove of homosexuality just as they remain free to disapprove of their neighbor's alcoholism or adultery or bad taste in lawn ornaments. They also remain free to move to a country that enforces religious views. [emphasis added] While I'm sure the religious right bristles when we call them the American Taliban, in a very real way they share with the Taliban and Iran - and even the Inquisition - the desire to have the state enforce religion (one religion) on the entire populace. Absolute religion corrupts absolutely.

They can read it from cover to cover. If they start interpreting it, they have to be a religious scholar and I don't see many of them walking the planet these days. The Bible is an historical tome. It has been edited so much that it is impossible to read it from cover to cover, much less understand why they used the parables they did to teach people over 2,000 years ago. It's great, it's informative, but it's HISTORY and it is subject to error and interpretation. How can you seriously argue what was said in different languages from centuries gone by. It's hard enough to interpret Shakespeare and that was only about 600 years ago and he spoke Olde English only.