Mood:  amorous

In Genesis, God informs Abraham that Sodom will be destroyed for its wickedness, and Abraham asks God why he will destroy both good and bad people: what if there are fifty good people in Sodom? God relents and promises to spare Sodom, if they can find fifty good people there.  Abraham haggles all the way down to ten good people and God agrees.  Two angels are sent to Sodom where they visit a good man named Lot.  Being angels they must have been  such beautiful men that the people of Sodom got so excited they stormed Lot’s house and demanded that his two visitors be given to them for sex.  Lot offers his two virgin daughters instead, but the people insist on the men! Some men force their way into the house and are blinded.  Thus, the origin of the word sodomy.  You will have to read the rest of the story yourself – down to Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt.  Come to think of it, this unnatural act was introduced to the Philippines by the Chinese!  In 1598, the archbishop of Manila wrote the king of Spain about the Chinese practicing sodomy among themselves and spreading the habit throughout the archipelago.  In the same year, Antonio de Morga, a civil official, wrote to Spain calling for restrictions in the movements of the Chinese who were causing so much trouble in terms of crime and other practices including sodomy.  Even Augustinian missionaries in Iloilo were horrified by the practice because they believed that if God’s patience was taxed, he would repeat what he did to Sodom.  Miguel Benavides, archbishop of Manila and founder of UST, was one who insisted on tougher measures.  In 1603, he requested that a new parian (a community of Chinese settlers built for them) be set up to segregate the Chinese and protect the Filipinos, both male and female, from this sin against nature.  He advised the king to expel the guilty from the islands and allow only merchant Chinese into the colony.  He also asked that these few Chinese be placed on ships in the harbor during the night!  But because the Chinese were indispensable to colonial life as artisans, carpenters, merchants, etc., poor Benavides was a voice in the wilderness.  He lamented that morals were lax because of greed and complained that sine they protected the Chinese who ran flourishing poultries in Quiapo, the Jesuits were thus blinded by commerce and looked the other way while sodomy and other sins were committed in their midst.  Obviously, the Spanish chroniclers were sinophobes who blamed the Chinese for every imaginable crime in Philippine society – from disease and kinky sex to economic sabotage.  The accounts reveal the way people thought in the 16^th century and show how much we have progressed or retrogressed. Was sodomy indeed brought by the Chinese?