Doug, the explanation I provided here is the very one passed down from generation to generation, the very argument in effect even at the time of Jesus - and the only one Jesus would have been familiar with. I did not make this up, Doug. Also, please note that I am a Litvish rabbi - an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, not a liberal one: the explanation I provided is the most right-wing Jewish explanation on the books.
Remember, first of all: the OT is a Jewish work; Jewish culture and thinking are at work here. If we want to understand the original OT laws, we have to think like Jews, not as Christians.
Logically, given that the NT was not written at the time, we have to take the OT words alone as our basis for our initial argument as to what the 'original' laws were all about. Given that, we only know that men were forbidden to have sex with other men while women were not forbidden to have sex with other women.
If homosexuality were to be forbidden outright, we would have expected statements to be made regarding male and female homosexuality side by side, as the Bible states other laws, such as, "A man may not wear a woman's garments and a woman may not wear a man's garments."
Given no prohibition against female homosexuality, we must ask why the prohibition against male homosexuality? The prohibition must not have anything to do with homosexuality itself but rather something else. The obvious 'something else' is the spilling of seed: men spill (waste) their reproductive seed while engaging in homosexual relationships but women do not spill (waste) their seed during homosexual relationships.
At the time, it was believed that men had limited reproductive capacities, and that wasting semen was therefore quite wrong; a man who purposefully engaged in sexual behavior that could not possibly impregnate a woman was seen as purposefully ignoring G-d's commandment to "be fruitful and multiply'". On the other hand, women were believed to have unlimited reproductive powers, up until a certain age, and so it was thought that women could engage in sexual behaviors that did not lead to impregnation without defying the commandments.
Judaism is very concerned, even today, about keeping G-d's commandment to be fruitful and multiply. The Torah is quite explicit about the importance of not spilling seed: it is recorded that G-d took the lives of men who spilled their seed. It is quite logical that the law prohibiting male homosexual acts is all about just that - the prohibition against the spilling of seed - and, in deed, that is exactly the explanation of our Jewish Sages going back literally thousands of years.
I have explained the prohibition to you as Jesus and his followers would have understood it.
Rabbi Benjamin