At that moment, kindly old Lot comes out and addresses the men. He announces that he'll happily throw them his two young daughters--"which have not yet known man"--so long as they leave the two angels unmolested: "Let me, I pray you, bring my daughters unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes," he pleads. But the men rebuke Lot.
Let's stop here for a moment. For centuries, Church dogma has encouraged Christians to conveniently overlook Lot's astounding lack of paternal concern for or, for that matter, love of his own little girls. By pointing the finger again and again at the perceived homosexuality of the men, Christians have lost sight of this chapter's depiction of the vilest sin imaginable--a father's offering of his own children to be gang-banged by an entire city of men--even though it is written in plain text on the sacred page in front of them.
Because the men want to "know" the angels, the logic goes, they are homosexuals. But what kind of logic is that? The only way these Sodomites can get to "know" these celestial beings, homosexually, is by, well, "sodomizing" them. But why would God create angels with anal orifices? Surely no one shits in heaven.
The story continues: The next morning Lot, his wife, and his two daughters fled the condemned city. As they made their way into the surrounding mountains, "the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah fire and brimstone out of heaven." Lot's wife, very understandably, looked back at the inferno engulfing her home. For this act of disobedience, she was turned immediately into a pillar of salt, leaving Lot a widower. So much for the sanctity of that marriage!
So Lot shacks up with his two daughters who are, as he had proudly announced to the sex-starved Sodomites, virgins. They live in a cave in the mountains of Zoar. It is here where heterosexuality rears its ugly head. The girls, now young women, start to bemoan their barren wombs. Beset by the pangs of maternal instinct, they conspire to get their father drunk and have sex with him--in order to propagate.
So the eldest gave him wine, "and lay with her father; and he perceived not that she lay down, nor when she arose." The next night the youngest did the same thing and, again, "he perceived not when she lay down, and when she arose." The two daughters, no longer virgins, got what they wanted: pregnant with boys. The eldest bore a son named Moab, who begat the Moabite tribe. The youngest bore a son named Ben-ammi, who begat the Ammonites.
Now, let's interpret these passages literally: God destroys Lot's legitimate marriage over a minor infraction, then allows incest--yes, incest--to replace it. Hmm. Father-daughter incest, the most repugnant manifestation of heterosexual lust, is how Lot is rewarded by God for his "virtue"? And, seeing as the Moabites and Ammonites were doomed to destruction, kindly old Lot was even robbed of a legacy of which he could be proud. Does this make sense? And what's all this about Lot not "perceiving" his daughters having sex with him? The guy's old, stone-cold drunk, living 3000 years before the introduction of Viagra, but he's still able to get a good enough woody going to deflower and impregnate--via orgasm--both his daughters.
Chapter 19 of the book of Genesis is a savage portrayal of the Lord Yahweh's contempt for people who lead typical, married, family-oriented heterosexual lifestyles. Clearly, it would have been better for Lot and his family to perish in the flames alongside those ravenous men who, despite all their faults, were virtuous enough to refuse to gang rape two innocent little girls. That the Lord Yahweh "saved" Lot only to condemn him to a life as an alcoholic widower making babies with his own flesh and blood points to something much more detestable in His eyes than the assumed homosexuality of the occupants of Sodom. Only those blinded by religious dogma and a desire to point judgmental fingers at others can deny the irrefutably literal truth of Genesis 19: God hates straights.
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Addendum: This essay has generated more email than any other on my web site. Most are from people I would call evangelical or "Christian Right." While a few have condemned me for what they perceive as a blasphemous "taking out of context" of this chapter, by far the majority of readers has sought to engage me in on-line dialogue about this issue as well as others. None has agreed with the position I take in this article (which should be read as a humor piece first, a theological debate second) but many have devoted much time and energy drawing from a Bible they obviously know well and take seriously to create a counter-argument to mine. Some have expressed an apparently sincere desire to lead me toward a path of salvation, to bring me out of the darkness they see me as inhabiting. These Christians, while possessing a very different world view from my own, have nonetheless touched me in a very human way. I appreciate their desire to have me accompany them in the afterlife.