"Leviticus 18:22 calls for the stoning of gays" (we're assuming for these purposes that it does say that) + "Leviticus 18:22 is 'God's perfect law'" = "I believe gays should be stoned."
But also, if he reads the Bible, he knows that what God tells someone to say or do doesn't reflect God's permanent opinion on a systematized category. It's abundantly clear that God deals absolutes but for discrete who/what/where/when/why, and the language used is important. The extrapolation, to surmise in reverse, or what is more specifically a
hermeneutical extension, Kirk makes is his own.
But it's actually worse than anti-literal reading.
Kirk is saying it's death by stoning to be gay. The passage only says its just death, stoning is Kirk's fantasy, and we don't even know the immediacy of the death penalty. But the crime is specifically "a man who lays with another man
as he would a woman". That caught my attention. My Bible uses dynamic equivalence to maximize literalism across time and idiom. It's important to know that they didn't make mistakes in their wording. They were extremely deliberate in their phrasing.
Leviticus is full of very precise rules, and the extrapolations are pretty narrow, and if you're reading carefully the directionality of interpretation of strictness is towards less strictness. There's an entire catalogue of illegal incest, which gender in which relation. There is no reason to believe there is implied equal directionality: for example, no man with his aunt does not mean no woman with her uncle. (And fyi definitely no mention of cousins, it was pretty minimal). And they go out of their way to mention edge cases. For example "no man with his sister" and then later, "no man with his sister even if different mom", and then later: "no man with his sister even if they grew up in different households".
It's not a disorganized mismatch of scoping, it's so deliberate. Believe me, they recognize scoping, and they aren't afraid of repetition, nor the use of too much paper to say the exact same thing.
So I got curious, lay as another woman. A word literal translation is pretty difficult:
"And with a male not you shall lie the lyings of a woman .. abomination it is"
which is more like
"And with a male you shall not lie down the lyings of a woman, it is an abomination"
The context before and after, made extra clear in Numbers, is of course the maintnance of a society. Leviticus and Numbers are so clear about power dynamics, and making sure that every warrior age warrior bodied male was his own man, ready fight and lead. It extends to self-sales into slavery, the Jubilee and the return of both freedom and property, the rules against Usury, which incest is wrong, which incest carries which penalty, which sacrifices go too far, which sacrifices get cheaper alternatives to not crush the poor, which illnesses and foods must not contaminate the core people (the central warrior men), how a man must wear his hair and beard, which parts of the field must be left unpicked for the poor and foreigners to scavenge, in Exodus which specific foreign woman can't be wives, and on.
The word lying above, is never plural again, generally used to mean sex, but often literally just like, a bed to sleep in, a bed to rest in, a grave to be dead in.
In Exodus, Moses starts introducing laws. In Leviticus (next chapter), those laws get reiterated, updated, new ones come in waves throughout the book etc. And furthermore there are implied legal expectations of people living in the times of Genesis.
These laws are designed with the expectation that what is not legislated is basically legal with authority given to whatever male master owned that land or those relationships. But the one super super clear trend, is that Moses is making sure he can maximize the military power and the inter-warrior peace of his people.
THERE CANNOT BE DOMINATION WITHIN.
So what does this mean? The banned act is the domination of one "free" or warrior level Israelite of another through sexual context.
While the society may have also had an implicit "penetration is dominance" therefore in their society it was inescapable, it was simple not a blanket ban on gay relations, and possibly not on gay sex (two men outside the house on private vacation traveling the world). It certainly didn't ban female gay sex, it definitely doesn't give any fricks about a possible gay identity which there wasn't language for, because that didn't matter enough to legislate or discuss.
If you understand that the language is deliberately precise, and you understand that God's black and whitedness is specific even when it appears general, by all earlier examples in a book whose order is deliberate, you can read so clearly that nowhere is this a ban on "gayness", but entirely a ban on
subjugation through male to male sexuality. And understanding that even in the book its contextual what God means by each intervention, there is no reason to believe God meant that in a society where men are free and sex isn't subjugation, it carries any punishment
whatsoever.
