Michael White on Homosexuality and the Bible

The Galveston County Daily News (not, I must admit, a paper I was familiar with) from Texas has a story featuring L. Michael White from the University of Texas at Austin:

Scholar says debate can't ignore Bible
By Kelly Hawes

. . . . “The movement to recognize gay and lesbian people in churches has stopped talking about the Bible,” he said, “whereas the other side says it’s all about the Bible. The two sides are like ships passing in the night.” . . . .

. . . . “The words that we often assume are found in the Bible are not even really there,” he said.

The word “homosexual” was not coined until 1869 as an effort by the medical profession to arrive at a more neutral term than “sodomy” or “sodomite,” White said, and even those words did not come into being until the 11th century, almost 2,000 years after the first portions of the Torah were written. Nonetheless, all appear in some translations of the Bible . . . .

. . . .White was even more emphatic in his analysis of a verse in the New Testament book of Romans that has been interpreted as a condemnation of homosexuality. White says he and many other scholars believe the verse actually refers to a practice called “pederasty,” an ancient Greek tradition in which older men had sex with young boys.

“It is to pervert the New Testament to try to make those passages apply to homosexuality in general,” White said.

Still, he said, it would be wrong to deny that the Bible frowns on homosexual relationships. Of course, it also frowns upon the presence of menstruating women in church, and it celebrates the murder and mutilation of a woman whose only sin was to have been raped . . . .

As a whole the article doesn't do badly to summarise White's lecture (I am guessing), but this paragraph is less careful. There is nothing about "menstruating women in church" that I can think of and what on earth is the other reference to? I'm probably being thick after a hard-working week, but I can't think what it might be referring to.