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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

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