Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/61

 with all that was Egyptian, morally, socially and religiously. Moses, or whoever, whatever, is typified by Moses, the shrewd, far-seeing law-giver, had his mind fixed on, not only the deliverance of his race hut on its uttermost expansion as a people, a fighting people. There were arduous campaigns before the Hebrews for their establishment as a dominant race. Hence Mosaic laws set severe penalties against masculine similisexualism. The new nation must be made populous as well as prosperous. Every individual male was to count. Every family was to be urged to increase and multiply, or the military occupation of the Promised Land would be impossible. Accordingly the early Hebrew legislation repudiated on a distinctly religious basis, and branded as a moral and religious offence, an impulse that has no natural, no spiritual reasons for such prohibition any more than has the classing of one or another beast as a "clean" or "unclean" article of diet. The Mosaic ban of semilisexualism had a direct relation to economy of sexual powers, and to population.

Naturally one is told by surprised objectors to this plain fact, that the "earlier," "ante-Mosaic," civilization opposed similisexual love; punished mercilessly sexual intercourse of the kind. So we have been informed, when especially the story of Lot and his mysterious guests in Sodom is cited. But such objectors will do well to understand once for all (likely for the first time) that the entire episode of Lot and the wicked men of Sodom does not afford any grounds for arguing that Sodom was destroyed on account of its similisexual tastes and practices, or that Sodom was really given to such. Further, we have no proof that homosexual intercourse was ever special to Sodom, ever was or is an offense to God, even to a Jehovistic concept of God; nor that what the world's statute-books, and pulpit-parlance especially, have