I've found Shore's blog and one of his entries is Taking God at His Word: The Bible and Homosexuality. This is the opening essay of his book UNFAIR: Christians and the LGBT Question. He explains why Christianity is wrong to condemn gay people and he does it in a way that is different and harsher (on Christians) than I've seen before. Here are some of the points he makes:
Follow the Biblical directive of compassion, which means advocating for full equality and inclusion, or follow the Biblical directive that homosexuality is a sin? False choice. Check those passages on homosexuality again.
There is no clear and explicit directive in the Bible that gay people should be ostracized. So don't do it. The suffering imposed on gay people by the church is so severe that shunning gays had better be backed by a clear and explicit commandment in the Bible, which isn't there.
The Bible says very little about homosexuality, only 6-7 verses. Yet Christians apply absolute standards of morality with absolute penalty based on them. This is for a "sin" that they have no interest in committing. However, there are lots of passages that insist on love, fairness, compassion, and the rejection of legalism. But since Christians routinely violate these ideals the standard of morality is much lower, taking circumstances and degree of harm into account. Homosexuality is the one exception.
The Bible isn't a rulebook. When one passage is pulled out of context it cannot be clearly understood. The Bible is so old that even the most fundamentalist do not take all of it literally. Claiming moral helplessness because "It's in the Bible" does a disservice to the book.
Using Old Testament passages to condemn gay people should not be done because St. Paul tells us not to do that. Here is one of several such passages:
The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God. —Hebrews 7:18-19There are already so many Old Testament laws we ignore, such as the dietary laws.
As for the New Testament, we've already decided that many of its directives no longer apply to today. This includes women required to remain quiet in church. We no longer use the Bible to justify slavery and denying women the right to vote.
In the same way the New Testament verses describing homosexuality must be understood within their historical context. And the context Paul was writing about was coercive, non-consensual sex between men and boys. This was about power, not love. The same kind of coercion between a man and a woman is also condemned. In addition, the concept of a homosexual orientation was unknown to Paul so he was talking about straight people going against their nature. Paul couldn't have been writing about homosexuality any more than he could have been writing about smartphones.
Because the concept of gay marriage was unknown to Paul he couldn't say anything about sex acts within it. And because all sex acts outside of marriage are considered sin, denying gay marriage condemns gay couples to sin. So Christians cause gay couples to sin, then blame them for that sin. Unfair.
Thinking that gay sex is icky does not make it a sin.
Shore concludes this way:
Christians desiring to do and live the will of Jesus are morally obligated to always err on the side of love. Taken all together, the evidence—the social context in which the Bible was written, the lack of the very concept of gay people in Paul’s time, the inability of gay people to marry, the inequity between how the clobber passages are applied between a majority and a minority population, the injustice of exclusion from God’s church on earth and from human love as the punishment for a state of being over which one has no choice—conclusively shows that choosing to condemn and exclude gay people based on the Bible is the morally incorrect choice.
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