Am I reading too much in this to say that it distills down as, "It is better to be a slave on a plantation, than a practicing homosexual," or is that misinterpreting?
Your argument is specious.
"It is better to be a slave on a plantation, than a practicing homosexual gambler?" I would say no. Yet gambling is still immoral according to the Bible. Do you believe differently?
Many pro-homosexual soi-disant Christians like to use the fact that Jesus never spoke of homosexuality per se as being immoral. But he did speak on marriage. You can't deny that. And you can't misinterpret his words to mean homosexual marriage is acceptable.
I don't understand why people insist on remaining Christians while blatantly defying Christ's own tenets. It's a shame.
The same thing that slavery has to do with the abortion issue: How is a society going to treat living beings with the 46 human chromosomes, who have committed no crime, who are relatively powerless, or not favored by majority society? I approach the issue of unborn persons as a civil rights issue, I can approach the problem of how homosexuals are treated as a civil rights issue, also.
Yet gambling is still immoral according to the Bible. Do you believe differently?
I'm not a believer in the Bible, and I'm not aware of any passages in it that prohibit gambling. But, if you have found some in there, I'm sure that the Catholic parishes I went to as a kid found some way to exempt bingo from their interpretation. Anything done to excess can be corrupting of the human spirit. Wine in moderation can be beneficial (want me to find a Biblical passage supporting it?) but to excess can lead to destruction. Some interpret the Bible as condemning only drunkenness, some interpret as prohibiting alchohol altogether. Our society currently sees fit to deal with drunkenness, but still allows people the opportunity to see if they're wise enough to use it without parental supervision if they're 21 or over. It wasn't that way during Prohibition, and we see how that turned out. A similar period of "prohibition" of gay people has ended in our country, and society is still figuring out what to do with gay people. Since we no longer have the stomach to throw them in prison, we have to figure out whether we're going to keep them on the fringe, or let them grow up and form stable relationships.
I don't understand why people insist on remaining Christians while blatantly defying Christ's own tenets.
It's all in the interpretation. Clearly, we have circumstances that did not exist in Jesus' time, that no words attributed to him would have applied. Clearly, the fact that homosexuality is mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments mean that it existed throughout history. Certainly, Jesus would have been aware of it, in the Roman Empire of his time. All NT thinking comes from the works of Paul, who never met Jesus, and only claimed to after his death. Paul said a lot of things about women that we have been able to throw off, yet, they were part of "tradition" that persisted for many centuries.