To the Editor:

Perhaps, as Al Bertke has pointed out (In My View, 9/26/95), the King James Version of the Bible does not contain the word “homosexual.”

Is it then neutral on the subject? Listen to the Apostle Paul, writing some time AFTER the Jerusalem Council of 49 A.D.: “… Their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men working that which is unseemly and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet” (Romans 1:27-28).

Your readers would do well to remember the historical roots of the term “sodomite” (homosexual). Sodom was an actual city which was destroyed because “their sin [was] very grievous” (Genesis 18:20).

The only man to escape Sodom’s incineration was a fellow named Lot. Perhaps his name, too, should be preserved in some form to characterize moderns who, like Lot, are “oppressed with the filthy conduct of the wicked” (2 Peter 2:7).

The irony that is lost, even on most Bible scholars, is that Lot might have delivered his neighbors from the destruction if he had eschewed politics and passed on godly morals to his own family, which presumably numbered about ten. (Count them in various translations of Genesis 19.)

In Genesis 18:32, this is the very number of righteous citizens for which God had agreed with Abraham to spare the entire city of Sodom—if the ten could be found and counted!

John Hayden

Jewell, IA