“In Conflict With A Man’s Interests”: More Proof That The Religious Right’s “Family Values” Obsession Is Really About Misogyny
One of the great self-justifying myths of the conservatives is that their support for traditional gender roles is not rooted in misogyny, but in “family values.” They don’t hate women and want to keep them down, the argument goes, so much as they believe everyone–including women–benefits if women are relegated to a submissive role in marriage and prevented from exercising reproductive rights. They’re not trying to oppress women for the benefit of men, they argue. They’re trying to protect them.
It’s easy to uphold those “family values” when only women have to pay the price for them. But the real test is when the purported beliefs of the religious right conflict with what men want. Women are asked to sacrifice a lot in the name of family values, such as the right to leave unhappy marriages or the right to abort unwanted pregnancies. But are conservatives willing to ask the same of men? Two recent examples demonstrate that when family values conflict with a man’s interests, suddenly family values aren’t as important as the right generally says they are.
The case of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell is a particularly stomach-churning example. Along with Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, Bob McDonnell was supposed to be one of the great Christian right politicians whose commitment to a fundamentalist view of family life would set an example for the rest of America. The Christian right argument regarding marriage, which Bob McDonnell laid out in his 1989 master’s thesis at the conservative Christian Regent University, is purportedly one of exchange: Women submit to their husbands, staying home to serve their husbands and raise children; and in exchange, men offer protection and cherish women to the point of coddling.
As Dahlia Lithwick explained on Slate, “The thesis was an argument for infusing Christian Republican values into government policy,” on the grounds that traditional marriage is “the best safeguard against immorality and selfishness.” In order to preserve this traditional definition of marriage, McDonnell expected women to sacrifice reproductive rights, independent thinking and employment outside of the home. McDonnell claimed his views had softened since then, but as Lithwick notes, his actual policy positions as a politician suggested otherwise. Not only did McDonnell fight against abortion rights, he also pushed to make divorce much harder to get in the state of Virginia. Even though stricter divorce laws usually serve to make it harder for women to escape abusive relationships, asking women to give up personal safety in the name of “family values” was clearly not too great a sacrifice for McDonnell.
But recent months have put McDonnell’s commitment to marriage and family to the test; he and his wife have been subject to a 14-count federal indictment for public corruption. As Dana Milbank noted, McDonnell was given an opportunity to protect his wife, as the family values set tells us husbands are supposed to do in exchange for women’s submission. But given the choice between protecting his wife by taking a plea deal and going to court, McDonnell chose himself over family values, heading to court. Indeed, McDonnell not only refused to protect the woman he vowed to love and protect, his defense is built around throwing his wife under the bus, blaming her for everything and employing some tawdry sexist stereotypes about women being crazy and weak to sell the argument.
Don’t get me wrong: There is a strong amount of evidence that Maureen McDonnell is corrupt and a terrible decision-maker, and she seems to be admitting she had a cheater’s heart that led her to push one of her husband’s benefactors for illegal gifts. But that changes nothing. McDonnell has dedicated his career to the idea that women should sacrifice everything for the good of “family,” including bodily autonomy and personal safety, but the second he’s called upon to take on the responsibility of a good Christian husband to protect his wife, he ran away and tried to foist as much as the blame as he could on her. Turns out family values wasn’t about men and women sacrificing together for family, just a cover story to excuse male dominance over women.
McDonnell’s corruption charges all came out after he was out of public office. In order to see how conservative voters act when one of their leaders puts the interests of straight men over their supposed commitment to family values, look no further than the state of Tennessee. Rep. Scott DesJarlais is running for his third term for Congress as a “family values” Republican, and his bona fides with conservative voters were proved again when he won a primary last week against another conservative challenger.
All this, despite the fact that DesJarlais has a long history showing that while he firmly believes women should have to lose their basic human rights in the name of family values, he, as a man, has never shown any interest in making even the teeniest sacrifice for those same values.
DesJarlais has a 0% rating from NARAL. He believes women who are facing an unwanted pregnancy that could derail their lives should suck it up and be made to suffer, you know, for “life.” But when faced with the prospect of an unintended pregnancy that could hurt him, he suddenly became a big fan of abortion. DesJarlais encouraged, some would say badgered, his mistress to get an abortion during his first marriage. He also supported his first wife’s abortions.
DesJarlais’ enthusiasm for abortions that helped him is hardly the only incidence of him exempting himself from the family values he wishes to impose on women. During his first marriage, he admitted to having eight affairs, some with patients. He also admitted under oath that he threatened his first wife with a gun. DesJarlais portrays these events as long past and argues he’s a different man now. But he still voted against the Violence Against Women Act, suggesting he has not actually developed any real concern about women’s safety in marriage since then.
Not that the voters mind enough to vote him out of office. If family values were actually about valuing families, voters would demand more of Republican leaders. But that someone as hypocritical as DesJarlais can still win elections shows that family values was never about families; just a transparent cover story for old-fashioned misogyny.
By: Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet, August 14, 2014
“Fundamentalism, The Political Kiss Of Death”: Experienced Veterans Of Culture Wars, Just Not On The Winning Side
Jonathan Rauch writes that Christian conservatives, in response to their defeat in the “culture wars,” are likely to isolate themselves from the wider society.
I think that is precisely what they will do. It’s what they’ve done before. After the failure of Prohibition and their Pyrrhic victory in the Scopes trial, they headed for the backwoods, hiding out in their tent revivals and two-bit tabernacles.
The iconoclastic libertarian, H.L. Mencken, skewered and roasted them with all the glee of the Calvinistic deity in newspapers across the country. They earned every column inch.
Even into the 1960s, they continued their retreat, establishing thousands of “Christian” schools in protest of 1) the ruling on prayer in government schools, 2) sex education, and 3) desegregation of government schools. They wanted the right to pray, repress and hate–three constant traits of the American fundamentalist.
Oddly, it was the victory of Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, who gave them a lust for power–in spite of Carter holding none of the hateful values inspiring his fellow fundamentalists. Once they saw the glimmer of political power, however, nothing could restrain them. The greatest lust is not sex, it’s power.
It is said in Luke that Satan took Jesus to a mountaintop and showed him “all the kingdoms of the world” and said to him, “All this power I will give thee, and the glory of them; for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.”
Jesus resisted, it is said, but for American Christians this temptation was too great. With Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson playing the role of Satan, they were promised political domination of this country, and by implication, the world. The temptation was too great.
In the end, they tied their wagons to the anemic presidency of the village idiot, George W. Bush, discrediting themselves and their message in the process.
America turned against the demands of the Christian Right. The campaign to bring back censorship failed. The campaign to ban abortion fizzled with public opinion now as split as when the battle started. They will never have the nation-wide ban on abortion they seek.
Their crusade against gay people backfired spectacularly–not only did they fail to make it a felony to be gay, but gay couples are legally marrying in state after state.
During the “war” Americans, became more secular and less Christian. More Americans today say they are non-believers than when the Moral Majority set out to make this a “Christian nation.”
They lost because they fought tooth and nail against the oldest American value–individual rights and liberty. Americans have long held those as core values. I won’t say Americans have always lived up to those values–they haven’t, but I will say they always clung to them.
As much as the Religious Right pretends they are patriots, in terms of American core values, they are traitors to the Enlightenment tradition of the Founders, instead they preached an authoritarian religion which, when all was said and done, had no appeal for the American people.
Time and time again, we have been able to judge the final victory of a cultural war by determining the side of the American fundamentalist. The staunchest advocates of slavery were fundamentalists, so much so that the largest fundamentalist denomination in the country originated in a defense of slavery: the Southern Baptist Convention. Fundamentalists supported Prohibition. They tended to oppose equality of rights for women.
During the war against Jim Crow, racist fundamentalists put out pamphlets on the evils of “miscegenation.” Figures such as Jerry Falwell claimed “civil rights” was communistic. Some outposts, such as Bob Jones University, refused to admit black students even into the 1970s. Fundamentalists are experienced veterans of culture wars, just not on the winning side. If anything, their support for a cause is the kiss of death.
By: James Peron, President, Moorfield Storey Institute; The Huffington Post Blog, July 8, 2014
“One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other”: Chris Christie Has Some Pandering To Do In Advance Of His Next Campaign
A pretty significant religious right gathering it poised to get underway in a couple of hours, and the guest list is worth checking out.
Ralph Reed’s three-day Faith and Freedom Coalition conference begins today. This is your social conservative wing of the Republican Party. The speaking lineup:
* Thursday (from noon to 1:30 pm ET): Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Ted Cruz (R-TX)
* Friday (from 9:00 am to 1:30 pm ET): Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Rick Santorum, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
* Friday (from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm ET): Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Texas Lt. Gov. nominee Dan Patrick, and Mike Huckabee
* Saturday (from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm ET): Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
This, by the way, is only a partial list. The list of luminaries who’ll be on hand for the right-wing gathering also includes Herman Cain, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who’s likely to be elected Majority Leader in a few hours.
There are a few important angles to this. The first is that the Republican Party’s eagerness to pander to extreme social conservatives is hardly a thing of the past. On the contrary, there are 10 sitting members of the U.S. House (including half of the GOP leadership team), six sitting U.S. senators (including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell), and two sitting governors, all of whom will no doubt deliver red-meat speeches to this conservative evangelical crowd.
Second, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” Conference is hosted and organized by Ralph Reed, a disgraced former lobbyist. Why would so many powerful Republican leaders want to associate with Reed given his scandalous past? Apparently because much of the political world has decided Reed’s controversial past no longer matters.
And finally, Chris Christie? Really?
The scandal-plagued New Jersey governor can certainly speak to whomever he pleases, but agreeing to speak at a religious right event organized by Ralph Reed, of all people, isn’t exactly an obvious move. It was Christie, after all, who said he’s “tired of dealing with the crazies” after far-right activists criticized the governor for nominating a Muslim judge.
One assumes many of those “crazies” will be on hand for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event today.
Indeed, the director of the New Jersey branch of the Faith and Freedom Coalition has repeatedly condemned Christie for being insufficiently right-wing on the issues social conservatives care about most.
But Christie’s national ambitions clearly haven’t waned, and despite the awkward fit, the Garden State governor apparently has some pandering to do in advance of his next campaign.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 19, 2014
“The Origins Of The Modern GOP”: The Party Of Lincoln Is Now The Party Of Voter ID Laws
Dartmouth Professor Randall Balmer argues convincingly that the origin of the religious right as a political force stemmed from opposition to school desegregation rather than opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision. I don’t think it is well known that evangelicals were largely silent about the Roe ruling at the time it was issued, nor that some of the most influential evangelical leaders at the time were supportive of the ruling.
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
It was actually a ruling by the DC District Court upholding the Internal Revenue Service’s decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax exemption that convinced evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich to rally the religious right against President Jimmy Carter’s reelection. They could hardly make Bob Jones’ anti-miscegenation their rallying call, however, so the modern-day Republican Party was founded on an evangelical “awakening” on what had formerly been considered an issue only for “papists.”
Today, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen is the party of Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich. The party of Lincoln is now the party of voter ID laws.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 28, 2014
“A Theological-Political Vision Lies In Tatters”: Catholicism, George W. Bush, And The Cluelessness Of The Religious Right
Once upon a time, the religious right’s leading intellectuals told themselves an inspiring story. It went something like this: From the time of the Puritans all the way down to the early 1970s, American public life was decisively shaped by the moral and spiritual witness of the Protestant Mainline’s leading churches: The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians.
But then the Great Collapse began, as these venerable churches sold their souls to the counterculture, abandoned the moral and religious tenets of historical Christianity, embraced a series of increasingly left-wing and anti-American causes, and saw their numbers (and then their cultural influence) plummet. Today these churches are an intellectual and demographic shell of their former selves.
This was a potentially disastrous development, depriving America of the theologically grounded public philosophy that it needs in order to thrive. But as luck — or providence — would have it, the decline of the Mainline churches set in at the precise moment when two other monumental cultural and religious developments unfolded: The rise of a politicized form of Protestant evangelicalism and a revival of intellectual and spiritual energy in the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II. The time was ripe for evangelicals and Catholics to come together to form a successor to the Mainline churches.
The public philosophy promulgated by this new-fangled amalgam of evangelicalism and Catholicism (with the former supplying the foot soldiers and the latter providing the ideas) would be staunchly opposed to abortion and euthanasia. It would be strongly anti-communist. It would be passionately pro-capitalist. It would favor using military force to promote democracy. And it would re-describe the United States, its history, and its form of government in providential-theological terms, with the rights espoused in the nation’s founding documents declared to derive directly from medieval concepts of natural law.
Once the country (or at least a sizable majority) embraced this public philosophy — turning it into a governing philosophy — the United States would supposedly flourish as never before, protecting the unborn, unleashing economic liberty at home, defending democracy and fighting tyranny abroad, and most of all bringing the nation back to its properly Christian roots after the silly season of the 1960s.
It is exceedingly odd that Joseph Bottum has written a book — An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America — devoted to elaborating this story as if it were original to him, when in fact it is derived almost entirely from the writings of the man for whom both of us once worked: The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.
You see, I once edited Neuhaus’ monthly magazine First Things. When I quit to write a book denouncing the ideological project outlined above, Neuhaus brought on Bottum (then the literary editor of The Weekly Standard) as my successor. When Neuhaus died in January 2009, Bottum became editor-in-chief of the magazine. (Twenty-one months later he was summarily dismissed by its governing board for reasons that have never been publicly explained.)
Bottum, a published poet, is a gifted prose stylist. That gives a distinctive flair to his version of the story. But the story itself, in every detail, comes straight from the writings of Neuhaus and his small circle of ideological compatriots: Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Robert P. George foremost among them.
In Bottum’s hands, no less than in the essays and books in which it was originally formulated, the story has some explanatory power. The decline of the Mainline churches is indeed a significant event in recent American cultural and political history — and one that has received insufficient attention from both scholars and intellectuals. (My colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty’s thoughtful reflections on Bottum’s treatment of the topic can be read here.)
But the story also obscures far more than it clarifies. For one thing, Bottum can’t seem to figure out if the problems he identifies with post-Mainline America (including the absence of a unifying, overarching moral consensus and the subsequent rise in acrimonious conflict in our political culture) are a result of Protestant Christianity’s inability to defend itself against an aggressive form of secularism, or if, instead, what we call secularism is actually just a desiccated form of Protestantism (hence the reference to a “post-Protestant ethic” in his subtitle). Either way, Protestant Christianity is to blame for America’s problems.
Which is why Bottum (following Neuhaus and the others) turns to Catholicism for a solution.
The closest we’ve come to seeing this theological-political vision in action was in George W. Bush’s second inaugural address. You remember: It was a speech that consisted of a series of sweeping assertions about America’s God-appointed task to end “tyranny in our world.” (Bush made more than 50 references to “freedom” and “liberty” in a speech of 2,000 words.)
For Bottum, this was “the most purely philosophical address in the history of America’s inaugurations,” one that deployed “a Catholic philosophical vocabulary” rooted in natural law theory to “express a moral seriousness the nation needs.”
That’s one way to look at it.
Here’s another: The speech was a crude expression of American parochialism and pious self-congratulation — the kind of address you’d expect from someone who believed toppling Saddam Hussein was a sufficient condition for creating a functioning democracy in Iraq, and who thinks that presidential rhetoric can rise no higher than paraphrasing the lyrics to “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was the speech of a simple-minded man leading a simple-minded administration.
The most interesting and original thing in Bottum’s book is a new-found pessimism about the practical prospects for the theological-political engagement he still favors. But I would be more impressed with this darkening mood if it grew out of a realization that great political leadership involves far more than moralistic sermonizing — and that something as partisan and sectarian as a Catholicized version of the Republican Party platform could never serve as the unifying, overarching moral vision of a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Instead, we’re left with vague, evasive statements about how “Catholicism as a system of thought proved too foreign” to play its appointed role as cheerleader for American exceptionalism.
Poor Joseph Bottum. Poor religious right.
They’re down for the count, splayed out on the mat. And they haven’t got a clue about what the hell happened.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 11, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 