Anyone who’s ever looked deeply into the well of human sexual depravity will recognize that all deviance is measured against the standard of true normalcy: monogamous binary heterosexuality. It is a universal human norm, known in Christendom as the One-Flesh Paradigm, based on Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. Faithful Jews and Christians adhere to this standard, or at least aspire to do so.
The sinfulness/harmfulness of any given sexual act, inclination or relationship is judged by God and His law based upon its degree of its deviance from the standard. The acts, inclinations and relationships most similar to the standard are judged least harshly in the Bible. These include female concubinage (a man having a “mistress” with or without the knowledge or permission of the wife), bigamy (two wives) and polygamy. These forms of deviance are actually tolerated in the Mosaic Law in the way and for the reason divorce is tolerated there. Introducing the terms of the New Covenant about 1,300 years later, Jesus explained that those laxities were temporary accommodations to human weakness in the Old Covenant: “because of the hardness of your hearts.” Humanity wasn’t morally evolved enough to meet the higher standard in the days of Moses, and so God left some wiggle-room in the law.
Make no mistake: There are always negative consequences for violating the standard, even within the limits of the Mosaic law, because anything humans do that is “out of order” has ripple effects that compound over time (just look at the lives of most divorced people and their children). Jesus thus began his Sermon on the Mount by contrasting the letter of the old law with the spirit of the law that He now would expect humanity to faithfully embrace – at least aspirationally. Implicit in his exhortation to that higher standard was the truth that no one could actually meet that standard perfectly except Himself, which was why he explained, “I Am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by Me.”
Now, the other end of the spectrum of deviance – the collection of most-deviant sexual sins cataloged in Leviticus 18 – was NEVER accommodated by God but in fact was always punished with death (physical and/or spiritual). That harshness was re-affirmed in the New Covenant in Paul’s treatise on Christian theology in Romans 1-8, particularly chapter 1:18-32. That remains God’s law to this day, notwithstanding the opinions of any human revisionists. Thank God for Grace and Mercy in Jesus Christ – the only path of escape from that fate.
So when you look down the well of sexual depravity you can see that all the way on the bottom are the most deviant behaviors of all: homosexuality and bestiality, in that order (Leviticus 18:22-23 – the original source of British and American sodomy laws), because they’re the farthest from the One Flesh Paradigm.
About halfway down that well is Epstein’s island, where you can see super rich and powerful adult men preying on “underage” girls collected there for their sexual pleasure. And you can see the sleazy adult women who helped facilitate that. (If you look even more carefully, you can see all the “honey-pot” hidden cameras gathering evidence for blackmail.)
We’re all rightfully scandalized by Epstein Island, but to put it in perspective, the girl victims are sexually mature and technically of marriageable age. The sex they’re involved with isn’t much different from the concubinage allowed in the Mosaic Law. It deserves condemnation, but the bigger question is where are the Epstein Islands of the more deviant kind? You know they must be out there somewhere in real life, hidden beneath the dark conspiratorial clouds of the “pizzagates” and Franklin cover-ups – because evil people of means have always pursued their lusts from time immemorial.
In my research for “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party,” I’ve discovered one of history’s “Epstein Islands” of boys – the Island of Capri, Italy. Here is an excerpt from the 6th edition (in progress):
According to Edward Rothstein, in a July 6, 2002, New York Times editorial titled “Is There a Gay Basis to Nietzsche’s Ideas,” “Richard Wagner spread rumors that Nietzsche suffered from the side-effects of excessive masturbation and, perhaps, pederasty.” The Rothstein editorial was based primarily upon the book “Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche” by Joachim Kohler. The flyleaf of that book describes its thesis: “In a revealing reinterpretation of his letters, diaries and writings, Kohler shows that Nietzsche’s suppressed homosexuality, generating a hatred of Christianity and conventional morality, was a central influence on his work.”
Kohler writes: “The hidden yearning nestling behind Nietzsche’s hatred of morality and of secrecy had as its goal the world of handsome, healthy bodies in a reborn antiquity. … In Italy he found what he had been looking for.” (Kohler:xvi). “In the work of August von Platen, who had inspired his novella ‘Capri,’ Nietzsche found what he needed…In Italy, wrote Platen, ‘love between men and men is so common that even the boldest of demands do not meet with a rejection.’ … Throughout the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth the exiles from Sodom sought a new home in the ‘warm south.’ Nietzsche joined them: ‘I flew across the sea to the south,’ he wrote.” (ibid:161)
[But those weren’t mere rumors.] … According to Macintyre in “Forgotten Fatherland: The Search For Elisabeth Nietzsche,” Frederich Nietzsche never married and had no known female sex partners, but went insane at age 44 and eventually died of syphilis. According to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Nietzsche had caught the disease at a homosexual brothel in Genoa, Italy (McIntyre:91f). [But it might well have been Capri instead.]
… The German police had a secret file about highly placed homosexuals who might be liable to scandal and blackmail. It included dossiers on the armaments king, Friedrich Krupp, one of the Kaiser’s brothers, the Kaiser’s aide, Prince Eulenberg, the Kaiserin’s private secretary, Count Kuno von Moltke and others. [Krupp] was married, but he and his wife lived separately so that he could lavishly indulge his homosexual desires. At his Grotto of Fra Felice, a cave above the sea on Capri, he created a private pleasure palace where he …[became notorious for] seducing minors.
I suspect Portland, Oregon, had its own version of this and still does. In the late ’80s, my wife worked as a volunteer for the Salvation Army in a Portland program for street kids and was told that many of the teen boy street hustlers were “graduates” of a string of “floating brothels” of pre-teen boys. (Word was that once they got too old to appeal to the rich Portland pedophiles they were kicked out on the street.) I think this is much more common than people believe.
We should all treat the Epstein Island case as a tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon and keep looking deeper to find and expose the worse scandals and rescue the victims – using everything we find as evidence that God’s standard has always been right in every respect.
For more on this topic see “The Pink Swastika” 4th Edition here.
