Donald Trump was ranting about sanctuary cities today on Twitter. You know what wasn’t a sanctuary city?
Sodom. Sodom was not a sanctuary city. It was bitterly xenophobic. They tried to attack angels sent by God because they thought the angels were immigrants. And they also had a beef with Lot because Lot, though he lived there for a long time was still considered a foreigner. This is what the Sodomites told Lot when he tried to protect the angels:
“This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” Genesis 19:9
See, they were going to deal badly with the angels. In fact, they try to break Lot’s door down. This is not an invitation to a homosexual orgy. This is a violent encounter with people who deal badly with foreigners and immigrants. This wasn’t a sexual offer of any kind, it was a xenophobic hate crime.
And that xenophobia is why Sodom was destroyed. There were other inequities in Sodom, such as their gross wealth disparity and the refusal to aid the poor and needy. The other inequities are spelled out in Ezekiel 16:49-50:
“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”
Sodom was a very wealthy town, but that wealth never made it to the poor.
Not a single act of homosexuality (consensual or rape) is recorded in passages about the town of Sodom. While there is a slight argument to claim that a homosexual rape was unfolding, it must be emphasized that the act was an attempted rape and was not an attempted consensual homosexual act.
This wasn’t about members of the same sex falling in love and having consensual sex and neither was it even about gay men engaging in consensual pre-marital one night stand, and neither was it about gay men having a homosexual orgy of any sort. All of those situations are consensual acts. If we insist on seeing homosexuality here we can only interpret the story as an attempted act of male rape.
In biblical times one tool that the wicked used to oppress foreigners, particularly the men, was male rape. It was meant to show immigrants that they were inferior and at the mercy of the violators’ intent to subjugate them.
And let’s also note that the research into what is called “male rape” (that is with a male victim) is that most men who rape other men engage in heterosexual behavior in their consensual sex lives. So, gay men are a minority of the perpetrators of male rape.
Rape is, and always was, a crime of power, control, and subjugation. To the extent anyone can say the story of Sodom was about homosexuality, then it could only be said to be about non-consensual homosexuality (rape) where the motive for the crime is not sexual attraction towards the same sex, but xenophobia.