“At the heart of this is the question - is homosexuality normal or abnormal?”
Not at all. The heart of this is the question: How does God define marriage, and thus who, exactly, can a person who represents Him perform a marriage ceremony for?
The easy answer was given by the Founder of the Christian Religion, none other than Jesus:
Matthew 19:4-6
(4) And He answered and said to them, Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning “made them male and female”,
(5) and said, For this cause a man shall leave father and mother and shall cling to his wife, and the two of them shall be one flesh?
(6) Therefore they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.
Jesus also dictated the Book of Revelation to the Apostle John. At the very end, when Jesus states who will be granted eternal life, he excludes people who are sexually immoral. See Revelation chapter 22:15.
Homosexuality may be a normal human temptation but no more or less than the temptation to lie, steal or murder. Just because it is a feeling or desire does not make it moral. People who want homosexuality to be moral are just as confused as when they think that open marriage or taking a five finger discount at Walmart is moral.
And what they think is moral does not change what God tells us is moral in His sight, by which He will judge us, for every person will be judged according to their works.
Revelation 20:12-15
(12) And I saw the dead, the small and the great, stand before God. And books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
(13) And the sea gave up the dead in it. And death and hell delivered up the dead in them. And each one of them was judged according to their works.
(14) And death and hell were cast into the Lake of Fire. This is the second death.
(15) And if anyone was not found having been written in the Book of Life, he was cast into the Lake of Fire.
People who hold themselves out as a representative the author of these words (that is Jesus Himself) are shown to be disqualified when they opposed their meaning so plainly and openly.
That’s great and I agree, but you’re talking to a fellow Christian. In politics you do a SWOT analysis and afterward your greatest attacks will be against the enemies Strength.
The Pink Mafia has been selling the “I’m normal, loving and just like you” civil rights meme. It goes back to the apocryphal Lincoln quote comparing a Negro to a white, but put a dog up there and you can see that a Negro is a person.
They’re deeply invested in this idea and have been using the emotional appeal (the faith based attacks are the same) to promote their agenda. Science hasn’t been kind to them, though. It appears most likely that homosexuality is caused by epigenetic effects during pregnancy combined with environmental factors in the child’s life.
Emphasizing our strength to a secular worldview needs a secular argument without abandoning our God-given truths. Ours should be two-fold: 1. Science is pointing us toward the origin and hence a cure for same-gender attraction and 2. It is unhealthy as a lifestyle - phsyically and emotionally/psychologically not only for the participant, but for children involved with the participant(s) in their role as parents.
Toss in the purpose of marriage - procreation - and the need for children to have the unique traits of both parents and you’ll turn back homosexual marriage. The risk is the mushy middle- those people that know God’s arguments, but for whom the emotional appeal and equivocacy argument hold sway.