Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/63

 quite minor offenses). Let us note, for other example, the story of Onan. There is absolutely no ground in the incident of Onan and the spilled seed, for regarding masturbation as a moral obliquity. Onan was not punished for what was a moral sexual dereliction per se; but for unwillingness to marry his brother's widow, and to raise up a family for his brother's name; a breach of religion, of Oriental civil-custom, in Onan's early day. Onan, like many men, has his name used as a reproach against him and his posterity, by an injustice to the man and the action. We can admit that the Mosaic Code put similisexual passion and its gratification in line with grave moral, social, religious offenses, with rape, murder, idollatry, bestiality. But such a juxtaposition and the death-penalty for homosexual relations should never have been taken by later and non-Israelitish peoples as referring such sexual intercourse, between men and men, or women and women, to the unnatural, or to the ethically vicious.

There is interest in our also noticing here that though Moses so plainly includes bestiality as an offence, laying stress on feminine intercourse with a beast, he makes no allusion to similisexual passion between two women, general as it must have been in the Egyptian and Hebrew social life.

We are thus brought all at once to a peculiarly important, a startling but irresistible conclusion. Our general fabric of modern and Christian law, directly and indirectly, being so considerably informed with ideas and provisions of the Mosaic Code, in spite of the weight of Roman and other legislative codes that enter into modern legislation and ethical feeling, we realize that the attitude of Christian civilization and of Christian morals toward similisexual love and its