Armageddon Next Time?

If sodomy was going to result in Armageddon, Armageddon would have happened long, long ago, even before the human race existed in its present form. Homosexuality has been observed in lots of animals — lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and whales and monkeys, too. Mammals are programmed by evolution to rut as often as possible. Let’s face it, after eating, shitting, and sleeping, it’s really all we ever want to do. Other activities, like building Notre Dame Cathedral, stamp collecting, writing books on existential philosophy, slaughtering each other, or, um, blogging, are just ways to occupy ourselves during the in-between times, a means of whiling away all those achy blue minutes that, damn the luck, comprise the larger portion of our lives.

Mother Nature says, “Go forth and fornicate,” and we do. If two male chimpanzees fall upon each other in the heat of the moment, whether by choice or for lack of a better option, it’s a matter of complete indifference to the universe. The heavens won’t fall. The good and bad news is that our sex lives are equally irrelevant.

This is the way we are. If there is a God, it’s the way He/She/It made us. I hardly think we’ll be punished by simply doing what is in our most basic nature to do, even if some people don’t do it in ways that conform to the monogamous, heterosexual, lights-out, shades-drawn, missionary position methods favored by dull Christians (methods that they publicly claim to favor, that is).

At any rate, Pat Robertson is warning that God is going to punish us because New York decided to let people marry whomever they choose:

“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,” Robertson said. God “sent an angel down there and He said to Lot and his family, ‘get out now because I’m gonna destroy this whole area.’”

I can see knocking off a rapist for ravishing one of my angels, but there’s no way I would destroy an entire city —commit genocide, in fact — because the gay district threw a party. More importantly, I don’t think I could worship a God that would.

Incidentally, do you know what happened to Lot and his family after they were commanded to leave Sodom? Lot’s wife turned back to look the destruction and was transformed into a pillar of salt, leaving only him and his daughters to carry on. They went into the mountains and dwelt in a cave together, and then things suddenly got really, really steamy:

“Now the firstborn said to the younger, ‘Our father is old, and there is no man on the earth to come in to us as is the custom of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the lineage of our father.’ So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.

The other daughter followed suit the next night, and they both eventually got pregnant. Nice, eh? An entire city perished so that Lot could boink his daughters. Traditional family values. (A sidenote: It seems highly unlikely to me that it was the daughters, and not Lot, who instigated this threesome, but then the Old Testament doesn’t like women much more than the gays.)

I don’t know what’s worse, that Pat Robertson thinks drunken incest is preferable to homosexuality, or that his god is willing to reduce some of his people to drunken incest merely for the sake of killing a few queers, like some bigoted hillbilly with the omnipotent power to destroy. But to continue (with Robertson, not Genesis):

“We’re heading that way as a nation. In history there’s never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived. There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, ‘what’s going to happen to America?” Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us,’” he predicted.

Pat Robertson is right. No civilization that’s openly embraced homosexuality has ever survived, but that’s because no civilization has ever survived, regardless of how it treated homosexuality. Our own “Judeo-Christian” one is visibly limping into the sunset right now, and for reasons that have nothing to do with homosexuality. The pollutants we spew into the atmosphere are a far more important factor in our impending doom than how twenty percent of the population chooses to screw. Go nuclear, spill waste into the rivers, blow up the mountaintops, kill every last fish and chop down every last tree, it’s all good, but if Bill and Frank are allowed to get married that’s it, lights out, game over, we’re all going straight into the flames. How utterly silly.

Whenever a natural disaster strikes San Francisco or New Orleans, it’s because a wrathful God is chastising them for their sins; but if a tornado hits Alabama or a river in Iowa floods, God is conveniently left off the hook. It’s strange. It’s a baffling mystery that I ponder whenever I have nothing better to do, like get laid.

Anyway, there’s bad news for the fundies: the asteroid missed. Maybe next time, Pat.