Right-wing Women

* To a base mind and to improper conduct.

X Strife.

§ Though they know' God’s decree that those who do such things deserve

to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.

There is nothing like this in the Old Testament. According to

Maimonides:

Women are forbidden to engage in lesbian practices with one

another, these being the doings o f the land o f E gypt (Lev. 18: 3),

against which we have been warned. . . Although such an act

is forbidden, the perpetrators are not liable to a flogging, since

there is no specific negative commandment prohibiting it, nor

is actual intercourse of any kind involved here. Consequently,

such women are not forbidden for the priesthood on account of

harlotry, nor is a woman prohibited to her husband because of

it, since this does not constitute harlotry. It behooves the

court, however, to administer the flogging prescribed for disobedience, since they have performed a forbidden act. A man should be particularly strict with his wife in this matter, and

should prevent women known to indulge in such practices

from visiting her, and her from going to visit them . 1

I asked the minister how Christians who value obedience to God’s

literal word justified such a radical reinterpretation of the Old Testament. The New Testament, he said, was concealed in the Old Testament; nothing in it was really new in the sense of being original; the New Testament made God’s real meaning clear; the Jew s had become blind to the spirit of the law — enter the Holy Spirit

and the revealed word. I suggested that the anti-Jewish tone of

some of the New Testament might be considered new and that it

was possibly related to what I at least considered a new attitude

toward lesbians: Jew s and female homosexuals, politically united

by damnation for the first time. In Romans, Jew s are abandoned

by God the Father; the covenant of manhood, sealed by circumcision, loses its meaning:

For he is not a Jew , which is one outwardly; neither is that

circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:

But he is a Jew , which is one inw ardly; and circumcision is

that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter. . . *

Romans 2: 28-29

The Gentile gets God’s masculinity (a new God, God the Son)

without an outward mark. The cutting of the penis no longer

means masculinity; it begins to resemble castration. All the feminized creatures—Jews, unnatural women (lesbians), unnatural men (homosexuals)— are linked together in Romans and are promised

God’s “indignation and wrath” (Romans 2: 8). The Jews who obey

the law are replaced by the Christians who know the law not by

learning it but by being it. The first Christian hit list of sinners is

compiled: lesbians, male homosexuals, Jews.

Talk of the Jews animated the minister. He was married to a

Jewish girl. He supported the state of Israel: see Amos, ninth chapter. The Jews were up on his pedestal. But the Jews, I insisted, did not abhor lesbians or forbid lesbian acts or damn or search out or

ostracize lesbians: not by law or by actual practice. Christ, he said

at some length and with no small amount of bitterness, had died