because the Jews had overlooked a lot. The Jews had had some
funny ideas until Paul came along.
But where, I asked him, did he get his sense of personal repugnance? Didn’t I see how vile a sin it was, he asked, referring back to the New Testament, which condemned not only lesbians and all
homosexuals but also those who accepted in others this most
heinous of sins? And didn’t I understand what lesbians and male
homosexuals were by nature: filled with wickedness, covetousness,
maliciousness, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; backbiters,
haters of God, inventors of evil things, without natural affection,
unmerciful. Romans, it must be apparent, is not kind in its estimation of homosexuals, male or female. Any Christian who meets homosexuality in the pages of the New Testament for the first time
* Revised Standard Version: “real circumcision is a matter of the heart,
spiritual and not literal. ”
is likely to fear homosexuals, hate homosexuals, and despise any
liberal tolerance for that viciousness that God abhors. The New
Testament damns those who tolerate homosexuality; and the New
Testament does say that homosexuals “are worthy of death. ”
In the course of m y conversation with the minister, a group of
women had gathered around us. The weather was beautiful, the
convention exciting, the women were high on goodwill and feminist dreams of sisterhood and solidarity. The women, it must be said, were nice and happy and enthusiastic and everyone was
pretty from radiant smiles and high hopes. The minister’s style
was nice too—outgoing, sincere, warm, expansive, full of prejudiced conviction but without meanness. He did not want to hurt anyone. He hated sin, and especially he found lesbian sin loathsome; but it was a conviction pure in its detachment from individual human beings— he had never seen one. M any of the women listening giggled as he and I talked. But what about these women, I
asked, or what about me? Are we all damned? Are we bad? Do
you know which of us is lesbian? Are we all full of envy, murder,
strife, deceit, m alignity? Are we without natural affection or unmerciful? He looked up and around and his skin crawled. He reacted to the sight of us suddenly as frightened girls do to mice or bugs or spiders.
The women’s movement, he said, was a communist conspiracy,
an internal poison in America. The communists wanted abortion
legalized in the United States in order to exterminate Americans
and to damn us in God’s eyes. The Russians invented abortion and
they insidiously had the ideology of abortion planted in the United
States by agents and dupes; and the liberals and the Jew s spread
it. And now the communists had new tactics— lesbians in the
women’s movement. It was a Russian plot to turn the United
States into Sodom and Gomorrah so that God would hate the
United States and destroy it and the Russians would win; and
Marx, the anti-Christ, had been a Jew , and a lot of lesbians were
Jew s, he was no anti-Semite, he had married a Jewish girl but
of course she had been baptized and had accepted Christ. The
Bible—meaning the New Testament because the Old Testament
had really become irrelevant since the New Testament fully revealed what had been concealed in the Old Testament—was the only hope for America’s survival because it revealed God’s will. A
strong and righteous nation depends on fulfilling God’s will. God’s
will is that wives obey their husbands, who are as Christ to them.
Husbands must love their wives; wives must obey their husbands.
