# Dan McClellan — Sodom & Gomorrah Is Not About Homosexuality **Summary.** A short McClellan video reading Genesis 19 in its own ancient categories — inhospitality and dominance-assault against outsiders — instead of the modern category of "homosexuality," which the text's authors had no access to. (Source: Lit · Sodom and Gomorrah is not about homosexuality.) --- ## Key claims and arguments **1. Sexual orientation is an anachronistic category here.** The concept of a fixed sexual *orientation* is less than ~200 years old; Genesis 19's authors had no such framework. Reading the story as a verdict on "homosexuality" imports a category that did not exist when the text was composed. > [!quote] > "[Sexual orientation is] an understanding of sexual activity that is less than 200 years old, and so they had no access to this particular framework… It is an act of power, not of sexual desire." **2. The episode is about power, not desire.** The threatened assault on the visitors is an act of domination against vulnerable outsiders — a violation of the ancient honor-and-hospitality code, not an expression of attraction. The Bible's own later references (e.g., Ezekiel 16:49) gloss Sodom's sin as pride and neglect of the poor and needy, supporting the inhospitality reading. **3. Method: read the text in its own categories.** This is McClellan's standard hermeneutic — the same move he makes against the Genesis "gap theory" and against over-reading John 2:15. Let the source's framework set the terms; don't retroject doctrine. --- ## Analysis for this wiki Belongs to the wiki's [[Dan McClellan]] / critical-scholarship thread and is a textbook instance of the vault principle *Anachronistic Categories Distort Interpretation of Ancient Texts*. It has DEIB weight: the anachronistic "Sodom = homosexuality" reading has been used to mark LGBTQ+ people as the archetypal sinners, so naming the category error is also harm-reduction. Pairs with [[Deconstruction]] coverage as an example of how historical-critical reading reopens a "clobber passage." > [!note] Tradition > Academic / critical scholarship engaging popular usage. Argues from philology and the history of categories, not a confessional position.