In 2026 the rainbow flag flies over public schools, corporate headquarters, and government buildings with a regularity once reserved for the national colors.

Pediatric clinics prescribe cross-sex hormones to adolescents and, in some jurisdictions, to children still years from puberty. Dissenters are labeled bigots or threats to safety. The vocabulary is modern—“gender-affirming care,” “bodily autonomy,” “lived experience”—yet the underlying assertion is ancient. Sex is not fixed by the Creator; it can be rewritten by desire, diagnosis, or surgical intervention. That assertion was first put into words more than four millennia ago by a high priestess of the goddess Inanna, later known as Ishtar.

Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad and the earliest author whose name survives, composed a hymn that lists the goddess’s prerogatives in paired opposites. Among them stands the line: “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.” The same goddess, identified in Scripture as Ashtoreth and the Queen of Heaven, received cult personnel known as the assinnu and kurgarrû. Cuneiform texts describe them with the logogram meaning “man-woman.” Ritual descriptions record them wearing mixed or female garments, singing in the dialect associated with goddesses, and performing in ceremonies that inverted ordinary sex roles.

One epic states that Ishtar “turned their maleness into femaleness” so that the people might stand in awe. These were not private citizens exploring identity. They were institutionalized functionaries whose liminal status enacted the goddess’s claimed power over the created distinction between male and female.

Contemporary Assyriology has correctly discarded the older blanket claim that these figures were primarily commercial male prostitutes. Direct administrative evidence for systematic same-sex prostitution as their office is scarce. What the tablets do establish is gender-variant ritual performance under a deity who advertised the power to reverse sex. That is the essential point. The cult did not treat the male-female binary as an inviolable given of creation. It treated the body as material that the goddess could reassign for her own purposes.

The Hebrew Scriptures name the same power and forbid it. Ashtoreth appears repeatedly as the goddess who drew Israel into idolatry (Judges 2:13; 1 Samuel 7:3–4; 1 Kings 11:5, 33; 2 Kings 23:13). Jeremiah condemns the worship of the Queen of Heaven whose cakes and drink offerings provoked the Lord (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19). Deuteronomy 22:5 declares, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” Leviticus 18:22 states, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Leviticus 20:13 repeats the prohibition and attaches the death penalty under the Mosaic covenant.

Romans 1:26–27 describes women changing “the natural use into that which is against nature” and men “leaving the natural use of the woman” and “men with men working that which is unseemly.” First Corinthians 6:9–10 places the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” among those who shall not inherit the kingdom of God. First Corinthians 10:20 adds the decisive spiritual diagnosis: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God.”

The modern movement that treats sex as optional and gender as self-declared reproduces the pattern without the temple architecture. The claim that a minor can be born in the wrong body, that normal puberty can be chemically suppressed, and that healthy tissue can be removed in the name of authenticity is the clinical translation of the old hymn.

Where the assinnu enacted temporary inversions during festivals, clinics now offer interventions that produce sterility in the large majority of cases. Systematic reviews in Europe and the Cass Review in Britain have documented the weak evidence base and the substantial risks—infertility, loss of sexual function, compromised bone density, and lifelong medical dependence. American medical associations have been slower to adjust, in part because any public questioning is treated as an act of violence. The parallel to Molech is not literal fire, yet the structure is recognizable.

Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2–5 forbid giving one’s seed to Molech. Jeremiah 32:35 records that the people caused their sons and daughters to pass through the fire, a practice the Lord says he never commanded. Parents today surrender children to an ideology that promises relief from distress in exchange for the permanent alteration of the body God formed (Psalm 139:13–16). Ezekiel 16:21 calls such children “My children.” The land is defiled by the shedding of innocent blood, whether by knife or by scalpel and needle.

The cultural scaffolding that made this possible is equally familiar. The 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn targeted an unlicensed, Mafia-operated bar engaged in illegal liquor sales and the facilitation of acts Scripture calls abomination. The multi-night violence that followed was later rewritten as a pure uprising for dignity. Once that origin story hardened, every subsequent demand could be presented as the next chapter of justice.

Courts in Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges removed the remaining legal distinctions that tracked the created order. Entertainment quotas treated increased representation as moral progress. Children’s programming embedded the new categories so that the rising generation would never encounter the older ones as obvious. The six-color flag replaced the seven-color bow of Genesis 9 with a symbol of human autonomy over divine promise. Affirmation became the public test of compassion; refusal became the only remaining unforgivable offense.

Isaiah 5:20 names the inversion exactly: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” Romans 1:32 completes the description: those who know the judgment of God that such things are worthy of death “not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”This is not a neutral social development. It is the reappearance of the pattern Scripture traces from the exchange of the Creator for the creature, through the worship of the works of one’s own hands, to the giving over to vile affections.

The goddess who once received attendants whose maleness she had turned female now receives surgical patients and school curricula that teach children their sex is a social construct. The same spirit that staffed the temples of Ashtoreth and demanded children for Molech operates through new institutions.

Ephesians 6:12 reminds the reader that the contest is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. First John 4:3 identifies the spirit of antichrist as already in the world, known by its refusal of the authority of the incarnate Son over the whole of human life—including the body he created male and female.

None of this requires a conspiracy of conscious devil-worshippers in every clinic or classroom. It requires only the biblical observation that when a culture suppresses the truth of God, exchanges his glory for images of the creature, and then both practices and celebrates the resulting disorders, it has already entered the trajectory Romans 1 describes. The ancient hymn still circulates, stripped of its cuneiform and rewritten in the language of medicine and rights. Recognizing the continuity is not an exercise in antiquarianism. It is the refusal to call the oldest rebellion by a newer and more respectable name.

The gospel remains the only exit: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). The fire that fell on Sodom was a warning. The silence that greets the same pattern today invites the same end.