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RE: Which is why we have to appeal, not just to Scripture, but to “how Christians have understood this for 2,000 years.”

I don’t think it has anything to do with the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. One can profess to believe in it and yet ignore what scripture teaches. Just as one can profess to believe in what the Roman Catholic church teaches and not ignore it.

If the clear teaching of scripture isn’t going to convince these people, neither will “how Christians have understood this for 2,000 years.” convince them.

How do you account for Roman Catholic Politicians who favor gay marriage?

Here is what Nancy Pelosi said for instance: “My Catholic faith ‘compels me’ to support gay marriage”.”

So much for 2000 years of church teaching.

I entirely agree with you that some people , like Nancy Pelosi, have entirely and defiantly closed their minds. She will not listen to Divine law. She will not listen to Natural Law. She will not listen to Canon Law. She thinks she is a law unto herself.

This "2,000 years of Church tradition" thing would mean less than nothing, I fear, to one of her obstinacy.

(This is one reason why Catholic Bishops must beheld liable for pastoral malpractice, for allowing the continuing sacrilegious reception of Communion by these people who despise the Lord of Life. It would be pastoral kindness to exclude them formally from the Catholic community, as a difficult but shocking way to make them aware that they are in spiritual peril of the most terrifying kind.)

However, there is a surprising subset of people out there who are convinced that what I'll call "hetero-normed homosexuality" -- in other words, homosexuality lived in accord with some of the values of traditional marriage (with monogamy, fidelity, a life-long bond) ---is a new thing never addressed in Scripture, which, they say, dealt only with rape, prostitution, pederasty and the like. They say no Biblical figure, OT or NT, ever alluded to, or even imagined, let alone condemned, a consensual marriage-like bond between two equal adults pledged to a union of life until death.

Such people need to see that 2,000 years of Christian teaching shows the authentic way in which we are to understand these Scriptures, since Jesus Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide the his church.

You may be familiar with Dr. Albert Mohler, a respected Baptist theologian (much respected by me!) who has concluded the same. Faced with this surprisingly large group of exegetes with this revisionist view of what the key words mean in Hebrew and Greek, he argues "Does not God guide the church? And has not the church been absolutely opposed to genital relations between two people of the same sex, from the times of the Apostles until now?

He argues on the basis of "the mind of the church" as the key to correct exegesis. Which, I think, is wisdom on his part.