The story of Sodom springs to mind

Fundamentalist sectarians are claiming that coronavirus is God’s punishment. Sodom usually comes up in that context, although the Bible offers plenty of other punishable offences as well.

Since my religion is as mainstream as they come, I feel uneasy about biblical literalism, and uneasier still about drawing too many parallels. However, if I weren’t so prejudiced, perhaps I’d see their point.

If you recall, God punished Sodom for the sin that has since borne its name. To be fair, God didn’t mete out his punishment arbitrarily, on Abraham’s say-so.

Following proper forensic procedure, he sent two angels to investigate the patriarch’s accusations. Abraham’s nephew Lot put the detectives up for the night and gave them supper.

However, before the comely angels lay down, the denizens of Sodom besieged Lot’s house and demanded that he deliver the angels into their hands so they might ‘know’ them.

Trying to mollify the libidinous Sodomites without violating the sacred law of hospitality, Lot offered them his two virginal daughters instead. But the men wouldn’t swap the real thing for palliatives.

The daughters must have been bitterly disappointed about that delay in their sexual initiation. Hence, when the family escaped Sodom, leaving behind Lot’s wife in her saline incarnation, the first thing those minxes did was get their father drunk and ‘know’ him on two consecutive nights.

That, however, is a separate story. The real point is that, compared to today’s world, Sodom is an exemplar of sanity and probity. So fine, some chaps wanted to practise an alternative lifestyle with two angels, whom they supposedly mistook for young men.

But were they? After all, angels are heavenly, rather than earthly creatures. Since only the latter were designed to procreate, angels are androgynous. However, depending on their mission, they can appear to be either male or female. It’s possible therefore that Sodomites mistook them for girls, which absolves them of that particular sin, if not of attempted rape.

Here we reach the kernel of our story, which turns the tale of Sodom into a ganglion of prophesies.

For, according to Rory Stewart, Tory ex-minister, women’s prisons are housing 1,500 ‘male-bodied’ inmates who self-identify as women. In other words, their male bits are in working order.

Hence they resemble angels in their ability to switch effortlessly from one sex to the other. Alas, when they do find themselves in women’s prisons, their behaviour isn’t exactly angelic.

Says Mr Stewart: “When I was Prisons Minister, we had situations of male prisoners self-identifying as females, then raping staff in prison.”

That’s where the Biblical parallel ends. Rather than suffering sexual violence, it’s the gender-bender angels who do the raping. And it’s not just the female warders who get that treatment. Other inmates suffer it too.

For example, in 2018 a convicted male rapist self-identifying as a woman found himself as a tomcat among the pigeons in a female prison. There he promptly raped several women, using the traditional male technique.

Government and prison officials swear they’ll do everything humanly possible to protect female warders and inmates from those feral ‘women’. I’m sure they will, but that’s not the point.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that God’s patience sometimes wears thin. When a place becomes too insane for his liking, he expresses his wrath with fire and brimstone or equivalents.

Have you made that assumption? Good. Now compare Sodom with a world where the stories I’ve just told are not merely possible but increasingly commonplace.

A world where the sin of Sodom is no longer a sin, but an alternative, in some ways preferable, ‘lifestyle’. Where demonic freaks can emulate angels by claiming to be women while remaining predatory men. And where the few remaining sane people can’t cry havoc and let slip… well, they have no one to let slip.

You must agree that the comparison isn’t in our favour. So we should get down on our knees and thank God that he only punished us with coronavirus and not, say, bubonic plague.

Then of course we don’t believe in God and his punishment. We believe in… I’m sure you can complete the sentence on your own. There’s got to be something we believe in.