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I think you have to distinguish between 'accepting' and approving or condoning any given activity. The church accepts sinners. That is its entire purpose. But that does not imply any acceptance of sinful actions.
I'd step back a bit from the idea of homosexuality specifically, and in particular I want to rid of any identity claims here. 'Gay people' as an identity are irrelevant. Rather, we should abstract back a bit and consider that what we're talking about is sexual morality broadly construed.
Now it seems pretty clear that Jesus, the Bible, God, etc., disapprove of sexual immorality. This is called porneia and it is condemned pretty much everywhere. Porneia covers categories as diverse as adultery, rape, incest, bestiality, prostitution, and more. Nobody seems to think that either being an adulterer/rapist/frequenter-of-prostitutes/whatever, or merely being tempted to any of those activities, means that a person is categorically excluded from the church or from the love of God. A person who has committed any of those actions would be expected to repent, seek forgiveness, do penance as appropriate, and so on, but given that, they are welcome in the Christian community. A person merely tempted to any of those things is, of course, totally welcome - the church is a community that encourages and supports people as they try to live a holy life, which naturally means being aware of and fighting against temptations like that.
The issue at hand is whether or not same-gender sexual activity falls into the category of porneia or not. That's it.
I think this framing is helpful because it lets us get away from toxic disputes about identity. It's not about 'gay people' or about 'homosexuality' or any posited intrinsic trait or categorisation. Those are beside the point theologically. It's only about actions.
So with that in mind, what are the lines around sexual morality that we seem to receive from scripture and tradition?
There's a much longer discussion than I want to have in this post right now, but the short version is that I think that, taking scripture as a whole and putting its treatment of sexual matters into context, it's possible to discern the overall shape of God's intention for human sexuality - that it be monogamous (cf. Jesus on divorce), faithful (cf. any time adultery ever comes up), fertile (cf. OT fertility miracles, Gn 1:28), loving and joyful (cf. Song of Songs), male-female (cf. Gn 1:27 and its use in Mk 10:6-7, Mt 19:4-6), supportive (cf. Prov 31), and so on. There's a visible thread that runs through scripture and which we also see explored in the tradition of the church, though I'm not going to go into that for now. There are other concerns about sexual morality we also see in the Bible (I'd argue there are some to do with honour, violence, and equality, for instance), but you get the idea. There is, I think, a discernible pattern, and I don't see how you can revise it to include same-gender sexual activity without not only contradicting what scripture says pretty plainly, but also doing harm to the overall pattern itself.
You do find some progressive Christian thought on this issue (e.g. David P. Gushee) arguing that they're in favour of this whole pattern, this whole biblical vision of marriage, and they support same-sex marriage because they want to extend its fruits to gay people (notice the identity framing again), on exactly the same terms as with opposite-sex couples. But I don't think that can ultimately work, because these principles are all interconnected. You can't remove one part of the structure without weakening the whole house.
There's a secular argument you can have as well, in terms of some of the fruits of same-sex marriage, or the other social trends that it either encourages or detracts from, but I'd rather leave that to others.
On a final note, I'd like to clarify that I mean absolutely none of this as an attack, personal or otherwise, against Christians who support same-sex marriage, or Christians who may identify as LGBT. (Nor non-Christians either, but this is an intra-Christian discussion.) I want to disagree in a respectful, compassionate way, all the more so because I used to be on the other side of this issue, and it is far, far too common for people to be very bullying about it.
It is incumbent of those who are on the cutting edge to accommodate for those who aren't. Pretending not to know you're on the cutting edge, or [even worse] being proud of doing provocative things for the purpose of being provocative, is not acceptable.
Liberal Christians (and the gay ones that have relationships following that [what is to me, at least] self-evident visible thread of the way pair-bonding is supposed to work) tend to have
an identity of havingmore problems with this. And provided that isn't for selfish/pride reasons "just to see what you can get away with" [which is the thing traditionalists don't quite understand- because if they themselves were doing those things, it would be in the 'testing boundaries for selfish reasons'/'tricking God' category; this is the core of why some things can be sins for some people but not others], and you're conducting yourself by doing your job (and sticking to what a monogamous relationship is supposed to be) otherwise, there's nothing else wrong with it. Eating food sacrificed to other gods has the same inherent issues- where it's technically acceptable, but doing it thoughtlessly emits pollution that hinders your overarching goals as a follower of Christ.And that, complicating Christianity in a way the people you're supposed to be reaching can't handle yet, is a sin in the same way and for the exact same reasons as traditionalists misusing "wives, submit to your husbands" (generally as an excuse to be lazy in the relationship).
(Actually, those two verses in their respective contexts have a lot more to do with each other than I think most people realize, as does the 'women leading in church' thing. Leaders should cater to the default, and people who aren't the default should respect that, because the default is what we're after; your job is to work the margins, their job is to not stop you.)
The reason it's written down is because for most people it isn't self-evident. I think there are people who can do this, and have noticed that "wait a second, apart from fertility [which straight couples aren't getting condemned for the lack of, and traditionally at least there are a surplus of babies to take care of], this isn't actually different if it's 2 guys".
The inherent problem with that is that how sexuality between 2 guys [or 2 girls] usually looks (this is the "find me one righteous man and I won't destroy the city" argument) in a secular environment, but the thing about traditionalists is that the people who are doing that correctly are more likely to be hiding from them in the standard filter-bubbly way that Reds hide from Blues (and vice versa). Not that people who don't function correctly if they aren't doing that are common anyway, much like those mythical women-men that won't function correctly when placed in first-century relationship divisions. Which is why liberals criticize traditionalists for "turn your brain off, don't use your natural talents, you don't have a clearer picture of what is self-evident and what is not [because none of us do]", because all they see is the man burying his talent he was given to invest because he was afraid of doing something wrong with it.
If you Notice those whose houses are not weak yet lack a component claimed vital, maybe their circumstances actually are different?
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