| Monday, November 24, 2008 12:06PM | | | | Katrina and the Sodomites | Posted By: Robert Flynn
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| Tags: Sodom, Leviticus, Lot, homosexual, David and Jonathan | Katrina and the Sodomites
Genesis 19:1-38
Two males who appear to be slopes come to the city of Sodom. Lot is sitting in the city gate, a place usually reserved for officials, and invites them to his house. Travel was dangerous especially if you traveled alone because travelers followed trails and robbers could lie in wait for them. When possible people traveled in caravans and hastened from city to city. Cities were also dangerous because there were no homeless shelters, Two-dollar motels or Taka Tacos for them. Travelers were dependent on the hospitality of others.
By offering hospitality, Lot obeys both custom and religious law but the micks decline and say they will sleep in the square. I was a child during the depression and whenever we visited other families my brother, sister and I were told to say “no” when offered food, even pie. Because of custom they had to offer food although it might be the last food they had in the house. If they insisted, then we could accept because they had enough. Lot insists the gooks be his guests and they go to his house.
Before bedtime all the men in Sodom, both young and old, surround the house and demand that the chinks be sent outside so that the male residents can rape them. The mistreatment of aliens is such an abomination to God that Lot feels compelled to offer his teenage virgin daughters so that the villagers can gang rape them, likely causing their death. That’s how bad these Minute Men protectors of the village were.
The attackers threatened to do worse to Lot if he doesn’t allow the wops to be raped. Although Lot is a resident they call him a wetback because he hasn’t lived there long enough to satisfy them. The visitors insist that Lot take his family and flee because God was going to destroy Sodom.
This story has been misunderstood so long that homosexuals have been called “sodomites” but the idea that all the males, the young and the old, in Sodom were homosexual is ludicrous. There is a scripture in Leviticus that may forbid homosexuality; scholars are not in agreement about that, but there are far more scriptures about the treatment of aliens. Ephesians 2: 11-19, for example. Since Leviticus is the favorite law book of some, I will cite Leviticus 19: 33, 34 that says you must treat an alien who lives in your land the same as the native-born. “Love him as yourself.” Leviticus 17:8-16; 18:27; 20:2 says that the same rules apply to the alien and the native-born.
Rules without illustrations are easily forgotten. The consequences of disobeying the First and Second Commandments are amply illustrated in the Bible. Remembering the Sabbath is supported by the story of God resting on the seventh day. Prohibitions of theft and adultery are illustrated by stories of stoning. (More about David and Bathsheba in a later blog) Covetousness is illustrated by the story of Achan. (Joshua 7: 1-26) There are no stories of homosexuality in the Bible unless you believe the story of David and Jonathan is a homosexual affair. (A later blog)
There are rules in the Bible and the Koran regarding treatment of outsiders. This is a story illustrating the reason behind the rule and the consequences of breaking it. The village males want to humiliate a pollock. If it is about homosexuality, the moral is: gang rape and double murder are preferable to homosexual love.
There are stories from Afghanistan and Iraq of US soldiers and CIA agents raping POWs. There have been recent stories of police in America raping suspects with foreign objects. Those are not homosexual acts. They are actions by the powerful to punish and humiliate the helpless.
One of the media stories in our war on Afghanistan was of an America special forces soldier who escaped when the others in his unit were killed. Wounded and needing help to survive, he crawled to a village and the villagers took him in, hid him and cared for him until he was rescued as required by their custom, the Bible and the Koran. If they had come upon him in the mountains they might have killed him.
According to the CIA the Taliban tried to rid themselves of Osama bin Laden but their religious laws forbid handing over to nonbelievers, a Muslim, and one who sought their protection. They and the CIA had not found a way to do so before Bush attacked Afghanistan.
Lot and his wife and daughters fled, but his pledged sons-in-law refused to go and his wife turned back. Lot and his daughters escaped to a small town, Zoar. But Lot was a raghead in Zoar and after the destruction of Sodom he took his daughters and fled to the mountains and lived in a cave. To continue the family line, Noah’s two daughters get him drunk, they must have fled with a load of wine, and one night he impregnates one daughter and the next night he impregnates the other. See, it wasn’t his fault. If this story is about homosexuality, then the moral is: God is more forgiving of incest than of homosexuality.
There is a similar story in Judges 19:1-21:25. An Israelite traveler shuns cities of aliens to stay in a Benjamite village where he and his concubine are given hospitality. Some of the men of the village want to rape him, but his concubine is given to them instead. They rape her to death and her owner cuts her into twelve parts and sends them to the twelve tribes as a sign of wickedness. Eleven tribes gather and take an oath that none of them will give a daughter to a Benjamite. Troops from the eleven tribes attack the tribe of Benjamin, defeat the enemy, burn Gibeah and kill everyone inside it, the old, the women, the children. That left Israel short one tribe so the elders of the other tribes tell the male survivors of the tribe of Benjamin to go to Shiloh and kidnap girls for wives. I’ll leave the moral of that story up to you.
An illustration from the New Testament or Christian Bible is in Luke 9:52-56. A Samaritan village does not extend hospitality to Jesus and his disciples. James and John want to call down fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritan village as was done to Sodom. No suggestion of homosexuality here and Jesus rebuked the two brothers. Maybe fire from heaven to punish sin is not a good thing.
If God does aim natural disasters at the wicked, with considerable collateral damage, it’s likely that Katrina, hurricanes in Texas, floods in the midwest, the California wildfires had less to do with a planned gay parade than it did with Bush’s Wall of Shame to protect the pure from foreign contagion. Biblically, Bush and his fellow barrier-builders are the sodomites.
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