I grew up in a family that is about as homophobic as Phil Robertson and the Westboro Baptists, only they're not quite as boisterous about it; at least not in public anyway. They have also conveniently convinced themselves that their homophobia is really just their unique Christian ability to "hate the sin, but love the sinner" (even though these very same Christians adamantly refuse to accept that people can "hate Christianity, but love the Christian").
The sexual superiority complex necessarily relied on by such Christians is, of course, blanketed beneath the lambs wool of the Christian humility of serving "God." They interpret their fear of those who are different, in other words, as simply proof of their intimate knowledge and love of God. And the only thing such Christians are more sure about than that their own personal version of "God" exists, is that such a "God" would never want people to be homosexual - no matter how many homosexuals He continues to create. For Christians, the problem is not how God designed sexuality, but that he gave us "free will," even though he hates when we use it in conjunction with our sexuality.
These same Christians insist that the Bible is unmistakably clear about God's displeasure with homosexuality - which for them, God makes abundantly clear by treating Sodom and Gomorrah like the the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Of course, Christians were also cock sure that the Bible was equally "unmistakably clear" about God's displeasure with witches, and those who questioned a geocentric universe, or even that God saw slavery as morally acceptable. In fact, much like those who burned Bruno at the stake and condemned Galileo for contradicting such Biblical 'facts,' many southern Christian preachers, prior to the Civil War, argued that those who challenged the explicit sanctioning of slavery by the Bible were challenging the very will of God himself. Indeed, that's what pro-slavery southerns like John C. Calhoun and pastor James Henley Thronwell argued at the time.
Yet even though these Christians today (like those in my family, unfortunately) think it is so obvious that those Christians were so "unmistakably" wrong about slavery, witches, and a geocentric universe, and agree that the Bible passages that were used to support such ideas clearly needed to be reinterpreted in light of modern scientific understanding, they automatically reject any such need to reinterpret the biblical passages they tenuously rely on to condemn homosexuality - regardless of how much scientific evidence suggests they should.
According to St. Augustine, refusing to interpret the bible in light of scientific understanding is not only the worst thing a person can do, because it makes such Christians look "ignorant and unlearned," as he put it, it also proves how often "Christians are mistaken in a subject." As Augustine continued:
"Reckless and presumptuous expounders of Scripture
bring about much harm when they are caught in their mischievous false opinions
by those not bound by our sacred texts. And even more so when they try to
defend their rash and obviously untrue statements by quoting a shower of words
from Scripture and even recite from memory passages which they think will
support their case ‘without understanding either what they are saying or what
they assert with such assurance.’(1 Timothy 1:7)”
Christians assume that homosexuality is "unnatural" in large part because Thomas Aquinas labored for several long years to mold Greek philosophy to fit Christian theology, despite the fact that Greek civilization never saw homosexuality as the "sin" that Aquinas would use Greek philosophy to "prove" it was. Aquinas not only failed to realize that homosexuality was quite natural to many other cultures - according to anthropological studies of civilizations like Greece and Rome, as well as Asian, African, and even ancient American Indian civilizations - but it was also quite natural to thousands of animal species as well.
Aquinas claimed that homosexuality was a "special sin... against nature" despite the fact that, not only has science shown homosexuality to be all too natural in over 1500 different species of animals, including the closest genetic relative to human beings, the bonobo, but Aquinas himself supported pederasty as a perfectly natural and moral means of men teaching boys how to be real men!
Yet rather than heed St. Augustine's admonition that we must only interpret the Bible in light of scientific understanding, as we have done with slavery, the sun, and even those mentally handicapped people from centuries ago that Christians once burned at the stake as "witches," Christians reject all scientific evidence that in any way diminishes their personal preference for "loving homosexuals" by "hating homosexuality," even though such a distinction is merely a way of burning alive the former in order to save them from the Sodom and Gomorrah that awaits them for failing to hate the latter.
Indeed, fire was used on "witches" so that their death here on earth could be experienced as a kind of purgatory. Christians actually believed that by burning their neighbors alive they were actually saving their neighbor's sinful souls from eternal hell. Even the priests who protected other priests who they knew were raping children within the Catholic Church did so because they believed they had a greater moral obligation to protect their Church than to protect children. Burning witches as a means of trying to save their eternal souls, which Christians did because they were convinced their religion gave them divine powers of revelation to know who had sold their soul to the devil for special powers and who had done the same thing for their God for similar such powers, was the medieval equivalent of Christians showing how much they loved witches by hating witchcraft.
Even more ironic is how, between vows of celibacy that sometimes lead men to castrate themselves, like the great saint Origin, and all for an immaterial intelligence that commands us to "be fruitful and multiply" - as if refusing to follow such a command is somehow a source of pleasure for such a divine intelligence - is far more "unnatural" than people following the most basic element of being human. That no other species on the planet is even close to being as guilty of being as stubborn as the Christian in maintaining an understanding that was designed mostly during the same era when witches were burned and slavery was seen as some God required, only proves that the most "special sin" of all "against nature" may in fact be Christianity itself.
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