Quote Of The Week

Having spent forty eight hours at his Count's pleasure, I'm a bit behind in my reading, so I didn't really get to grapple with this until a few hours ago. I've talked a lot in the past about how baffled I am over the sheer ferocity of hatred so many in the American Christian right have for homosexuality.  I could go through all of that again, but really, what's the point?  Let's just boil this down to the quickest rebuttal possible:

I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that’s the kind of people they were.

So is it possible, is it just about conceivable, that Sodom was destroyed not because it was chock-full of homosexuals, but because it was packed with vicious packs of gang-rapers?

About ten years ago I started reading the Bible from cover to cover to try and get a better grip on it.  I ended up abandoning the attempt somewhere in Numbers (if only I'd thought about starting a blog charting some ridiculously arbitrary variable throughout the book's run), but I distinctly remember the story of Sodom.  I kinda thought God was being a dick about it, quite frankly, right up until a mob showed up at Lot's door demanding he give up his house guests so that they could rape the shit out of them.   I switched sides pretty quickly after that.

I did always think it was interesting that Lot's retort - the response of the only good man in Sodom - was to say something along the lines of "There's no way I'm turfing out my guests so that you can screw them to death.  You'll have to take my daughters instead."  The general Sodom citizenry might have been pretty unfortunate to be surrounded by homosexual rape gangs, but it turned out to be pretty lucky for Lot's daughters. 

Not that they probably appreciated it at the time, of course.  I doubt that "Hooray!  The men father has offered us to as rape-victims have no interest in the front-bottom!" is likely to have been their response.  I suppose they got their revenge later on, when they got their father too drunk to know what he was doing and then took it in turns to fuck him.

(h/t to Steve Benen).