sin - Homosexuality is "worse than murder"?

A sign at a recent rally protesting New York's 2011 Marriage Equality Act reads

Judaism considers male homosexuality a worse sin than murder

I imagine that this is a minority opinion, but does it have any support at all in Jewish thought?

Answer

I'd bet that sign was referencing the theoretical punishment that a Jewish court could have administered, during Temple times, under Jewish self-rule, when such events were exceedingly rare and shocking, and with overwhelming evidence:

Male-to-male sex is punishable by death by stoning.

Murder is punishable by decapitation.

The Talmud states that of those two methods of the death penalty, the former is more severe; hence, if a man raped and then murdered another man, we apply the more severe punishment, in this case stoning.

Trying to use the severity of forms of death penalty to determine what's "better than" or "worse than" in G-d's book is not so simple. Working on the Sabbath is also theoretically punishable by stoning, yet the Sabbath must be violated to save a life (whereas you can't murder someone to save a life). Similarly, Judaism allows the bystander to use lethal force if necessary to prevent an attempted rape or murder; but the bystander has no business using force to prevent consenting adults from doing whatever they want. (See Rambam, Laws of the Murderer & Preservation of Life, 1:10--11).