When a book has been translated as many times as the Bible has been, it's easy for things to get lost in translation. Some subjects can also be politicized.
For instance, Phoebe, a patroness of paul in the early church, is referred to in the Greek version of scripture as "diakonos" in Romans 16:1. This is the same term translated as "deacon" in reference to male church leaders, but you'll note that the verses that describe Phoebe are translated as "servant," even though the tense and usage of the words is exactly the same as the usage translated as "deacon."
If you review the English translations currently available, all of them use "servant" in Romans 16:1, but deacon elsewhere for "diakonos."
Political decision or "inspiration"?
It's hard to say. The bible spans almost 2,000 years of widely shifting cultural dynamics. The verses that have influenced a diminished role of women in the church have also been shifted by translators who chose words that reflected the desire to put women in a limited role, as recently as the NIV translation.
MOst people don't even think beyond a single English translation to consider the possible shifts in word and contextual/cultural meaning in these passages that have occurred as the books of the new testament have been translated from their original aramaic into hebrew, then latin, then greek, and then into the King James's English translation, and then modern english translations.
There was an obvious agenda even with the King James edition:
James gave the translators instructions intended to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy.[9] The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England.[10] In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew text, while the Apocrypha were translated from the Greek and Latin. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the text of the Authorized Version replaced the text of the Great Bible – for Epistle and Gospel readings – and as such was authorized by Act of Parliament.[11] By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version was effectively unchallenged as the English translation used in Anglican and Protestant churches. Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorized Version supplanted the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English speaking scholars.
Authorized King James Version - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Link includes a lot of information on the problems with English translations of the Bible).
It deserves to be said that the oldest versions of any new testament book currently in existence date from 100+ years after the books of the new testament were purportedly written...many from 300 or more years since the death of Christ.
We don't have ANY of the original versions of these books and letters. Even authorship of some of these books is suspect. And, modern versions eliminate the apocryphyal books, which up until the 1800s were standard.
There have been enough politically motivated shifts just from Greek to English to modern English that saying definitely what the Bible says on any particular moral issue is pretty difficult.
What I would say is this...on a lot of these subjects...it's between you and God. It's up to you to take these issues up with God and come to a place of accountability with him. That's an individual process that each person has to go through. Pretending that you're entitled to tell others what they should believe, as if this is all black/white is simply ignorant. A lot of it isn't black/white, which is why the Southern Baptist denomination (in which I grew up) used to emphasize unity in the essentials (apostle's creed) and tolerance in the non-essentials.
It's a shame that fundamentalist perspectives on this subject have lead to such ignorant dogmatism. In a lot of ways, that ignorant dogmatism does more harm than anything else to the cause of Christ, but that's just my take on it. YMMV.
p.s. Buford has made it clear in this thread that he's here to troll, and that's about it.
