“The Devil And Dan Webster”: Yet Another Sign Of The Rightward Drift Of The GOP In Recent Years
It’s very, very likely that Rep. Kevin McCarthy will succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it’s worth noting that the solon most likely to challenge him on behalf of disgruntled conservatives, Rep. Dan Webster (R-FL), is not just a bit to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage, but has strong links to some of the more exotic and destructive of Christian Right cults. At TPM today, Sarah Posner reminds us of this bird’s strange plumage:
[Webster] has a decades-long affiliation with the Institute in Basic Life Principles, the controversial ministry whose founder, Bill Gothard, resigned last year after more than 30 women accused him of sexual harassment. As TPM reported earlier this month, IBLP subjected young followers to victim-blaming “counseling” for rape, as well as grueling work schedules at its facilities for little or no pay, requiring women to engage in gendered tasks that included scrubbing carpets on their hands and knees.
The IBLP, you may recall, is where young Josh Duggar was sent for counseling after he was caught sexually abusing little girls. You see how well that all turned out.
But as Posner explains, Webster’s association with IBLP–and more specifically with the group’s Advanced Training Institute for homeschooling–was a lot more intimate and ongoing than that of the Duggers.
In a 2003 speech at an IBLP conference, “Discover the True Qualities of Leadership,” Webster boasted of how he diligently conducts both his private and public life according to the “commitments” he made to the principles he learned at IBLP seminars. By his own account in the speech, and according to statements in ATI newsletters, Webster began his affiliation with IBLP when he attended a seminar for legislators at IBLP’s Northwoods Conference Center in Watersmeet, Michigan, in 1984. A few months later, Webster said during the speech, he attended an IBLP “basic seminar” in Tampa, Florida. His family later joined ATI, and his wife homeschooled their six children with the curriculum. (Webster’s first legislative achievement in Florida was a bill legalizing homeschooling, which became law in 1985.)
IBLP believes strongly in submission of women to men, and opposes not just abortion but virtually every form of birth control. And they are no slackers on the spiritual warfare front, either:
Webster has claimed that the “Hedge of Thorns” prayer he learned at the legislative seminar has protected him, his family, and his congressional district from Satan. A 1990 ATI newsletter also describes how Webster “began to pray in the name and through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, that God would rebuke Satan and all his principalities from any evil attack in his district.” Webster and his family were featured in a 2002 newsletter, which described how he “looked to the Lord for a campaign plan, studying the Scriptures in Psalms and Proverbs that relate to leadership and government.” He continued to speak at IBLP seminars, including in 2007 and 2010. A former ATI member recalled Gothard inviting the entire Webster family to the stage at the 2007 Nashville conference, declaring, “Wouldn’t it be great to one day have a President Webster?” That, she said, was met with “loud applause.”
Well, the devil is likely to win over Dan Webster in his Speakership campaign. But the fact that this guy isn’t hooted off the podium by House Republicans for the very idea he should join the leadership is yet another sign of the rightward drift of the GOP in recent years.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 1, 2015
“Uncle Sugar As Religious Bogeyman”: Women, Contraception And The Infringement On Conservatives “Biblical Role”
Mike Huckabee’s instant classic in the canon of modern Republican misogyny, denouncing overbearing government bogeyman “Uncle Sugar” for contraceptive handouts to women who “cannot control their libido or their reproductive system” may seem, on the surface, to be merely Tea Party anti-governmentism blended with run of the mill Rush Limbaugh slut-shaming.
Any Republican cringing over Huckabee’s remarks is really about his phrasing, not his ideology. After all, the RNC just adopted the resolution proposed by Committeewoman Ellen Barrosse “to fight back against Democrats’ deceptive, ‘war on women’ rhetoric.” Huckabee may have not been this effort’s best messenger, but in reality he’s an honest one: religious conservatives see “Uncle Sugar” (or, in the more frequently used parlance, “government bureaucrats”) as encouraging women to — gasp! — have lots of sex, when women should only be having sex with husbands, and on their husbands’ terms.
Recall when Huckabee was running for president in 2008, he faced criticism over his endorsement of the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention Family Statement, which read:
A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.
Asked about this in a debate — and in the glare of the national spotlight — Huckabee fudged his answer, first questioning why he was the only candidate to be asked about religion, and then insisting that “it’s not a matter of one being somehow superior over the other.” But fellow Baptists wasted no time in calling out Huckabee’s lie, noting that despite his efforts to suggest he has an egalitarian view of wifely submission, the Southern Baptist statement is undeniably clear that, in Richard Land’s words, “somebody has to be in charge.”
Of course Huckabee isn’t the first Republican called to answer for his endorsement of biblical patriarchy. Just this week, New Mexico Republican Steve Pearce, in a new book, writes that “the wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice” and “the husband’s part is to show up during the times of deep stress, take the leadership role and be accountable for the outcome, blaming no one else.”
In 2011, Michele Bachmann had to explain what she meant in a 2006 speech at a megachurch when she said, in describing how her husband persuaded her to seek a second law degree in tax, “the Lord says, be submissive, wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.” Faced with a national audience, Bachmann fudged and said her marriage was based on love and respect.
In 2010, while running for his House seat, Rep. Dan Webster (R-FL) was faced with similar questions in Alan Grayson’s notorious “Taliban Dan” ad, which unearthed a speech Webster had given at Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles, in which he is seen saying, “wives submit yourselves to your own husband” and “she should submit to me, that’s in the Bible.”
Webster complained his words were taken out of context, as did Factcheck.org and others. The conventional wisdom was that the ad had “backfired;” it was Grayson, not Webster, who had gone too far. But as Kathryn Joyce, who wrote about biblical patriarchy in her book Quiverfull, noted, “submission is a contentious and tricky issue even within conservative evangelical churches,” and that Webster’s emphasis “as those familiar with Christian rhetoric could recognize, is not on the optional nature of wives’ submission.”
A few months later, after Webster had unseated Grayson, I interviewed his mentor Gothard (who also counts Huckabee, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, and Republican anti-contraception darlings the Duggars among his fans). (In the full video excerpted in the Taliban Dan ad, Webster describes how Gothard’s teachings “absolutely changed my life” and are the “basis for everything I do today.”) Gothard, too, tried to backtrack on his authoritarian theology:
Gothard insisted to me (in direct contradiction to materials on his own website) that he does not teach submission. When I asked Gothard whether he teaches that wives should submit to their husbands’ authority, he laughed, answering, “no, no,” adding, that Jesus taught “he who is the greatest among you be the servant of all. That makes the woman the greatest of all because she has served every single person in the world by being in her womb.”
Gothard’s effort to soft-pedal his teachings—by portraying women as venerated objects, and by saying that “authority” is simply “love” and “love” is “freedom”—flies in the face of his critics’ descriptions of the impact of his authoritarian teachings on their lives. In interviews, former adherents to Gothard’s teachings, disillusioned former members of “ATI families,” and an evangelical critic told me that his unyielding theology, including “non-optional” compliance with seven “biblical” principles (the “basic” life principles), compliance with 49 “character traits,” and other periodic Gothard revelations, are contrary to the Bible and have wreaked havoc on their emotional and spiritual lives and those of their families.
Gothard doesn’t deny he teaches adherence to what he calls “the commands of Christ.” And even though he has developed his own highly unusual interpretation of the Bible, he insists he’s not demanding that his followers obey him, but that they obey God (or how he singularly has interpreted God’s word). Following this path, he tells me cheerfully, will bring one “success and health and happiness and joy.”
What is womens’ most important collective role, in Gothard’s view? “Serving” by having a womb. In the Southern Baptist Convention’s view, “nurturing the next generation.” Contraception, especially doled out (allegedly) by “Uncle Sugar,” gets in the way of that role of ultimate “love” and “freedom,” as described by Gothard. In this “biblical worldview,” “Uncle Sugar” puts government above God. But most important, and the reason why the Huckabee is so threatened by “Uncle Sugar” giving women an entirely different kind of freedom, is that Uncle Sugar upsets his “biblical” role as head of the household, the one to whom the wife must submit. And in that sense, Huckabee’s comments reveal not just his fear that the contraception benefit threatens womens’ traditional role, but how he worries that “Uncle Sugar” — and more crucially, women themselves — infringe on his.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, January 24, 2014
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