However, Libby Anne has brought up the following argument that a fundamentalist father made against women’s right to vote:

The first impact of women voters was really felt after the televised Nixon / Kennedy debates.  Nixon, the superior statesman without question, looked “old” and “sweaty”.  But Kennedy?  He was “cute”! The same thing was true for Clinton.

Incidentally, this guy didn’t make this up himself. He may not realize it, but he’s part of a tradition. William Branham made the exact same argument in 1960:

It shall–also has been an evil thing done in this country; they have permitted women to vote. This is a woman’s nation, and she will pollute this nation as Eve did Eden. Women, given the right to vote, elected President-elect Kennedy–by the woman’s vote, the wrong man, which will finally be to full control of the Catholic church in the United States; then the bomb comes that explodes her.*** … Did you notice the rallies on the television? Nixon to be pretty near all men. All of them wanted to kiss Kennedy (the women), jumping astraddle the cars and everything like that, jumping up and down.

So women can’t possibly understand men’s visual sexuality because they don’t have it, but they also shouldn’t vote because they’ll make decisions based on their visual sexuality?

Ladies and gentlemen, need I say more?

***The strange references to the Catholic church and a bomb are part of Message eschatology. Branham claimed that the End of the World would be ushered in by a one-world government, headed by the pope (the antichrist) and that the United States would be “burnt from coast to coast” in a nuclear holocaust.

However. There is an article floating around on AlterNet that makes the dubious, anti-historical claim that pregnancy is the source of women’s oppression and that birth control alone produces equality. I vehemently disagree. Here’s why:

First, birth control has been practiced much more effectively in past societies than we think. The contraceptive herb silphium was widely known in the ancient world and picked to extinction. If all women needed to achieve equality was birth control, Western history would look much different.

Second, arguments like this reduce society to two functional units, man and woman. Then they remove the woman by occupying her with childbearing. The truth is, no society has ever been structured such that the people on the bottom live the same way people on the top do. There is no homogenous “man” or “woman” in history. Underclasses like peasants and slaves have rarely had the luxury of rigidly defined gender roles. Those who lived on the land had to pull together to survive (and yes, that meant pregnant women working outdoors – God forbid!). Those who served others did many of the same tasks: washing, serving, mending, etc.  That is not to say that a gendered division of labor was wholly absent, but it was not nearly as well defined as it was for the upperclass.

Women could easily have been the rulers of any society that was not already misogynistic. Royalty, nobility and religious authorities lived mostly lives of the mind. They governed, organized, administered and strategized, while their servants and subjects cleared forests, built cities, died in battle, crossed oceans and traveled difficult roads. All that kings and emperors did, women could also do. It’s naive to think that a woman can’t mount a horse and deliver a speech before battle (yes, even pregnant). It’s absurd to think that the royalty of the past maintained their position based on brute force.

Even if pregnancy did prove to be an obstacle to performing the duties of a sovereign, there is nothing preventing a society from honoring mature women as leaders after they have borne children. Nothing, that is, except misogyny. “Childbearing years” make up only about 25% of a woman’s life (perhaps more now, but we owe this partially to technology and nutrition). Even in times of disease and malnutrition, women could be expected to live almost as long as men did, and even longer if they entered a celibate phase of life after a few children. Additionally, malnutrition would stunt fertility and act as birth control anyway.

This brings me to my third point. Celibacy. The governance of many societies, from the Hebrews to early medieval Europe, has been executed by religious officials. For the early Christian church, being a cleric meant being celibate. Why could there not have been a class of celibate women (for instance, nuns?) who ruled the same way that celibate men ruled? Pregnancy doesn’t even feature here. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, roughly 20% of women never married and presumably few of them bore children (as they don’t appear in the records). Why could they not have held public offices, if not for the misogynist belief that women needed the protection of men?

My point is this: I am all for birth control. I am aware that it is one of the factors that enabled me to control my own destiny after leaving fundamentalism. However, I am also aware that my body is not inherently subordinate to a male one. Some will pull the physical strength and size card, but I ask you to imagine a world in which war is not the foundation for society. (Indeed, it has not been the case in every society.) Nor indeed are wars won with strength alone, but more often with brains. Women have brains. We can lead.

The reason birth control is so essential does not lie in nature, but culture. American culture is male-dominated. The structure of society caters to the ideal man: a working, independent individual who does not need to have children. If society favored mutual child-raising, rather than assuming that the man will work and the woman will assume responsibility for the child, pregnancy would not be an obstacle to equality. The career track would be less linear, perhaps, or more accepting of delays. Pregnancy is an obstacle because our society makes it an obstacle. Our society makes it an obstacle because it is a misogynist society. Not the other way around.

Women are inherently equal to men. We are not reduced to our reproductive ability. Misogynists (men and women alike) have used it to justify the suppression of female liberty, but this is hardly the fault of pregnancy. It is the fault of the interpreters of pregnancy, who have been misogynistic. Similarly, racial differences have been interpreted to justify centuries of slavery, genocide and xenophobia, but those meanings are not embedded in the skin or hair. It makes no more sense to blame women’s oppression on pregnancy than it does to blame slavery on height or complexion. Women were no more destined by Nature to be oppressed than were men and women of color.

Let’s knock down a straw pregnant woman while we’re at it: A pregnant woman may be incapacitated for a couple of days while she is actually giving birth. What if a national emergency arises in those 48 hours?! The same thing that happens when a male head of state gets in a ski accident or comes down with the flu: the next-in-command deals with it temporarily. This is not to equate pregnancy with disease, but to point out that contingencies are built into every government, because no human being operates at full physical capacity for 100% of his or her lifespan.

Misogyny persists because people spread misogynist ideas. Misogynist cultures with more resources and better technologies expand, and spread their misogyny to all the cultures they assimilate or communicate with. It could always, always have been otherwise. It didn’t, because history is contingent. Power has momentum and swallows up difference. But none of us can predict the future or explain the past by simply looking at our naked selves in the mirror.

Biology is not history.

I was taught that children needed both a feminine and a masculine parental figure, that the traits of each would “balance” us somehow (even though I was expected to grow up 100% feminine). The worst possible sin against one’s children was to entertain the thought of divorcing one’s spouse.

When I was 13, my parents divorced. It was awesome.

I’m not kidding. You know why? Here’s what preceded the divorce: My father being absentee for the first few years of my life. He actually slept in the car to avoid my cries as a baby at night. Then, when I hit puberty, he decided to get involved. This meant a series of endless lectures about how boys were faithless lechers and would abandon me, pregnant, in the middle of a parking lot, if I so much as held their hands. He also began to point out anything I was wearing that made me look “busty” or “developed,” which made me want to crawl under a rock and saw off my breasts with a kitchen knife.

His demeanor was rigid and authoritarian, then excessively affectionate. This meant that I never knew whether confiding him would result in a cold rebuke or a hug. He once shoved me off his lap and said, “Go away, little girl, you’re bothering me.” I thought he was joking, so I climbed back up. He shoved me away, hard. I was eight years old. My father also modeled the selfishness and lechery he told me were inherent in all men. He ridiculed my mother for her small breasts and once mistakenly picked up one of my bras from the laundry pile and made fun of it, thinking it was hers. He leered at every woman in high heels who crossed our path in public. His office was plastered with pornography. He verbally abused my mother for refusing to cut her hair or wear makeup, telling her that it was her duty as a wife to be sexy for him when he wanted it. It turns out that he really wanted to be able to show her off to other men. He told my mother and me that he was humiliated to take us to the beach in our church garb (I was humiliated to wear the church garb, but shaming us only reinforced our convictions that we should). He grew jealous of my mother’s commitment to her church, and insisted that she have dinner on the table for him at 6:00 every night, which meant no going to evening church services. To save my mother the indignity of being commanded, “Coffee, woman,” I began filling the coffeepot and plugging it in before the meal started. My strategy only got “Coffee, daughter,” addressed to me. He would stand over me, micromanaging the dishes I washed, though he never himself scrubbed a dish at all, or even pushed in his chair.

Before the divorce, my father began gaslighting my mother, telling her that she was stupid and incompetent and that he was doing her a favor by staying with her. Broken down under the weight of her marriage, my mother began to frantically confess all of her sins – including an ancient sin she believed she’d committed against him in the early years of their marriage. She asked his forgiveness. He slapped her across the face. He blamed her for ruining her life. I heard this, and wanted to beg God to kill him already and spare us. But I knew that was wrong, so I didn’t. Instead, I wrote him one of fifteen angry letters disowning him as a parent, and then burned it in the bathroom sink.

Then, to spite her, he took a mistress. This mistress was literally a prostitute, with a daughter my age. He would stay up all night, using the computer in my bedroom to chat with her online. In frustration, I (then 12) emailed her the message “LEAVE MY DAD ALONE.” I was promptly punished and harangued for not “thinking about others’ feelings.” He moved in with her before the divorce went through, and promptly spent all his money buying things for her and her daughter that we had never had. I was glad to be rid of him, but he still showed up once a week to demand one-on-one time with me.

Then there were the little isolated incidents. Once, he told me that he had the right to inspect my naked body anytime to “observe my development.” I told him he had no such right without my permission, and he responded that, as his daughter, I belonged to him and he could do what he liked with me. Nothing further came of it, but I felt constantly insecure afterwards and began locking my door when I went to sleep.

And there was the temper. He could be reduced to screaming rage, object-breaking and vicious belittling without any provocation. I once had to literally beg him, sobbing on my knees, not to hit me after I disobeyed him. He only hit me once, but I knew his potential. He collected guns and knives, and I had a vivid imagination.

The divorce came from him. My mother didn’t accept it, since nothing could undo wedding vows once spoken. She did not, however, contest it legally. There was no property dispute, because by this time we had already had to sell everything to stay alive. His income was being poured into the pockets of his mistress. In short order, we lost our house and all the things in it. We had to give away our dog and move into the basement of my mother’s parents. My mother was devastated and shamed. I was weathered but grateful that at least we didn’t have to live with him anymore.

Both of us fell into a deep depression, having washed up where my mother began her life, isolated from our friends by a two-hour drive and bereft of an income (because my mother had stayed at home to homeschool me). I socialized exactly once a week, and worked the rest of it.

A few months after the dust settled, my pastor made the Second Stupidest Comment to Ever Be Made to Me. It was this:

“Sierra is depressed because she needs her father. She is vulnerable without the head of the household to ward off evil spirits. She has no one to protect her from ungodly boys. She won’t admit it, but deep down she misses him. You must pray that he will return to you.”

This comment was made within earshot, and I could not let it stand. I marched up to my pastor and my mother and declared, “No, actually I don’t miss him at all. I hated him. His leaving was the best thing that ever happened to me.” They stared at me, aghast, then laughed and called me a delusional child. I gave up and walked away. I was 15.

The mindset that divorce is the worst thing that can happen to a child is idiotic. Divorce was the best thing my father ever did for me (although he later recanted and moved back in with us, to my dismay). Living without him for a few years was a haven of tranquility that I never knew in his presence. In the worst of our circumstances, with family blaming us for our “weird religion” and how it drove away my father, I was just glad to know that I could go about my business without avoiding, serving or placating him.

The absence of a father was my most treasured possession in those empty years. Not being subject to his control and his temper, not listening to him belittle my mother and criticize her every feature, not fearing a physical assault, not feeling obliged to pay some sort of Biblical respect and obedience to a man I despised – that was my prize. I loved his absence more than I could possibly have loved the man himself. His absence allowed me to gain confidence I had never had.

In some ways, I’m grateful for my father’s failures. They allowed me to instinctively recognize the culture of purity balls and pledges for what it is: lace-trimmed patriarchal incest. The thought of my father literally controlling my sexuality, of his being the one to decide what men were worthy of me, made my skin crawl. I wanted a good man to help me get away from him – which would have been impossible if he were “guiding” my “courtship.”

My father’s blatant claim that I was his property, and most importantly my church’s failure to veto that claim, told me all I needed to know about my status in fundamentalist Christianity. I insisted that my body was mine. They taught me that it was my father’s until I was married, and then it was my husband’s. Literally, ownership. I learned that a wife could never refuse sex with her husband, or deny him the number of children he wanted. “Your father has no right to make you sin,” they said, trying to reassure me. As if that was any comfort! I didn’t want to sin. I wanted to be free. My body was mine; I lived in it, not he. But that didn’t matter to anyone at my church.

I’ll undoubtedly get some comments saying that divorce is certainly acceptable in my situation, because obviously my father’s behavior was abusive. The thing is, my church made no allowance for divorce because of abuse. The only acceptable divorce was a man divorcing a woman for infidelity. A woman could not divorce her husband, ever, for any reason. Do, please, explain to me the sense in pairing this lunacy with the courtship model and expecting to get good results. Marrying a woman to a man she hardly knows, vetted by her father no matter what his character, and divesting her of the option to leave if the worst happens, is a despicable, misogynistic prison built by merciless men with “Jesus” on their lips.

Divorce is not what breaks a family. It is only the seal placed on a family that has broken itself. Sometimes, the children need divorce to protect them. They are being broken by one of their parents, or both of the parents together. “God hates divorce,” the fundamentalists parrot to each other.

Really. I ask you, how do you in good conscience worship a God who prefers the upholding of an external ideal (“marriage”) over the health and mental soundness of the children that union produced? You who counsel women to stay in abusive marriages because her children “need a father,” you might as well drop all pretenses and slit the child’s throat on an altar to the idol you call Marriage. You who uphold marriage as an inflexible Law – what would you have done with Jesus?

Divorce did not make me angry, helpless, depressed and scared. My father did those things. Divorce did not make me leave the church. The church did that. Divorce has never, ever hurt me. Indeed, it was welcome. A blessing.

Divorce, for a little while, was my salvation.

I’ve written a few times about how the modesty doctrine hurts women. Now it’s time to switch lenses. The modesty doctrine also wreaks havoc on the minds of young men in the Christian patriarchy movement. Here’s how:

1. It teaches men to be afraid of women because their sexual power is too great to be resisted.
2. It teaches men to despise women and hampers their relationships.
3. It teaches men to be afraid of their own bodies.
4. It teaches men to control and criticize women in order to protect themselves.
5. It teaches men to be paranoid about their sexual orientation.
6. It teaches gay men that they don’t exist.

Before we go any further, a definition. The “modesty doctrine” is the belief that women need to cover their bodies to prevent men from being attracted to them, because sexual attraction leads to sin and death for both.  The modesty doctrine is not the same as wearing conservative clothing. You can do the latter without believing the former. It is the belief, the mindset of the modesty doctrine that is so harmful. Not the clothes.

1. The modesty doctrine teaches men that they are constantly under assault. Advertising images of sexy women in skimpy clothing feel like clouds of fiery missiles  hurtling into their brains. They have to avert their eyes everywhere they go just to avoid the images, and on top of that there are actual women wearing skimpy outfits. They feel like they can’t get away from sexual stimuli. When you’re taught that merely seeing something can defile you, guarding your eyes from “evil” becomes your eternal chore.

For boys going through puberty, this is especially painful. They can’t participate in mainstream culture (if they’re allowed to in the first place) because the music, television and movie industries bombard them with sexual images.  The solution, according to fundamentalist preachers, is to “change the culture” by telling women to cover up. But this is disingenuous. Once you’ve planted the idea that feeling attracted to a woman is sinful lust, you can’t walk away that easily. Women who already do dress “modestly” are the next targets. Are they drawing attention to themselves with fashionable jewelry or luxurious hair? They should cover up and wear plainer clothing. Young men at Message youth camps would complain if a girl had on sandals or nail polish because her feet and hands were too attractive. Were they just trying to be mean? Some might have been, but not others. Many of them were just hypersensitive to the opposite sex (you know, like almost all teenagers) and very, very afraid of falling prey to lust.

Men who are raised with the modesty doctrine learn that everything women wear is directed at them. When an “immodest” woman walks by, it feels like both a test and an assault. My best friend from church got a job at Wal-Mart when he was 17, and he complained to me endlessly about how women at his workplace would tease and flirt with him. I was treated to a detailed account of how one of the women (also a teenager) stood behind him and ran her fingers across his lower back. He went stiff as a board and tried to brush her off as politely as he could. Perplexed, she asked whether he might be gay. He related this story in helpless frustration. He couldn’t figure out how to avoid female attention without acting like a jerk, and his co-workers couldn’t understand how a heterosexual man could want to avoid female attention. He felt like he was hemmed in by demons and armed with a toothpick.

2. Young men can react to this pressure by learning to despise women. Even as they are being taught not to look at women’s bodies, they are being taught to look at women as bodies. They are encouraged to speak hatefully about the scantily-clad models on magazine covers and billboards. Pastors scream about filthy harlots from the pulpit. The specter of Jezebel is raised and crucified once again. In Message circles, young men grow up hearing Branham’s crackling voice crying that “immoral women” are lower than dogs and livestock. This translates easily to hating girls who just happen to wander into their sight “immodestly” dressed. My male friends used to vent their frustrations by mocking “fat” girls who wore shorts, because “no one wants to see that.” It didn’t occur to them that it would be hurtful to me, a thin girl, to see them dehumanize other girls. Now, as I look back, it strikes me that they really believed that women only wore skimpy clothing to attract them. Everything women wore was directed at them, personally, because they were men.

Walking down the street for them must have been like fending off endless trays of hors d’oeuvres at a party. Only the hors d’oeuvres were poisoned, so it was urgent that they turn down each offer, graciously if they could, but most of all firmly. Every woman who walked by was offering, inviting, enticing them to sin. If their bodies responded, they were in peril for their lives. The “fat” girls were easy targets for these boys. Although they were still “offering” (by not dressing “modestly”), they were like sardines on a platter: lacking allure, they were easy to turn down and laugh about afterwards. Finally, the idea of being friends with such a girl or listening to what she had to say became ludicrous.  She had already said everything she could possibly want to say to a guy when she put on a pair of shorts.

(I won’t go into detail about the horrible ramifications of teaching young men that women are constantly offering themselves for sex just by being visible. But I’m sure you can imagine what I might say about that.)

3. The modesty doctrine teaches men that the worst possible danger lies between their own legs. They are taught to fear their bodies and natural urges. There is no such thing as an innocent sexual thought for an unmarried Christian man. There is most definitely no masturbation. When a guy actually courts a girl, he must walk the impossible line of learning to love her without wanting to kiss or touch her at all. Courtships and engagements can be blindingly short for this reason, but what happens afterwards? A man who has been taught to avoid feeling attracted to all women, including his fiancée, now suddenly has to be passionately attracted to his wife and able to perform. This sounds like a recipe for a lot of false starts, fears and failures of communication.

4. The modesty doctrine does not give men any tools to deal with unwanted sexual attraction. It only tells them not to feel something they can’t help, and then tells them that they could go to hell for it. They do not learn to take a beat and let it pass, to move on and forget about it, to live their lives with the security of knowing that they are in charge of what they do. They literally believe that they can be moved to animalistic rape by the curve of a woman’s knee.

Evangelical Christian culture teaches men that being faithful to their wives is an incredible challenge. Evil women are lurking everywhere, waiting to pounce and drag them into their dens of sin. Women’s sexual power is so overwhelming that, at any moment, they could topple into the devil’s pit. Worse yet, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it other than pray and avert their eyes. No wonder they feel helpless. No wonder they’re afraid.

It is this perpetual peril that drives evangelical men to ridiculous lengths to rid their world of sexual stimuli. The only way to prevent the inevitable (adultery or fornication) is to keep women under wraps (literally). Men become micromanagers of their wives’ and daughters’ clothing. My pastor once chastised his 11 year old daughter for wearing her sweatshirt off her shoulders (with a t-shirt underneath). “Either take that off or put it on,” he ordered sternly, warning her that boys might see the sweatshirt and think about her taking all her clothes off. I was mystified that this had even entered his mind. Because the Christian patriarchy movement invests men with such significant power, their fears take precedence as the laws of the home. Because it’s impossible for a man to fully protect himself, the job falls to all the women around him to make sure he doesn’t turn into a sex-crazed werewolf.

5. The modesty doctrine gives men contradictory messages about masculinity. The doctrine teaches them that they need to protect themselves from sin by avoiding feeling attracted to women. American culture, on the other hand, tells them that the only way to prove that they are masculine is to be interested in sex with women (along with violence, beer and mechanical things). Christian boys feel like sitting ducks for abuse from their peers, who assume that they are gay because they avoid participating in the rituals of adolescent sexuality (like flipping through smutty magazines and checking out the cheerleaders). Since conservative evangelical groups consider being gay an even worse sin than having the hots for a girl, these boys are trapped between a rock and a hard place. They are terrified that gay boys will be attracted to them, and terrified to be attracted to girls.

My teenage best friend was constantly trying to assert his heterosexuality. Not only could he not date (taking away the “I have a girlfriend” excuse), he couldn’t spend time alone with female friends, return the playful glances of his coworkers or have a crush on a movie star. He therefore plunged headlong into identifying as a “nerd” whose intellect left no time for girls. The truth was that his family had forbidden him to court until he finished college. While in college, perceiving visual assaults on all sides, he locked himself in his room for almost the entirety of a six-week study abroad program in France. The reason? There were girls there, drinking.

6. Finally, the modesty doctrine erases gay and lesbian people entirely. The idea of being gay is just a terrifying specter for straight boys in this culture; actually being gay is frightening to admit, even to themselves.  There is literally no code of behavior for them other than to “repent” of their “sin.” I’m not sure which one is worse: being told that you’re an abomination or being told that you don’t exist. In either case, gay boys are receiving signals that they aren’t men, because “real” men need to wrestle with their attraction to women and suppress it constantly. “Every Man’s Battle” is the revealing name of an evangelical anti-pornography initiative. For gay men, there is an entirely different war going on. Theirs is a lonelier battle.

What do I make of all this?

It’s a lot of needless suffering for both men and women. Sexual attraction is a biological norm. It happens, whether you’re young or old, gay or straight, in a relationship or not. It lasts for a second and you get on with your life. But by pairing those fleeting moments of appreciation for a face on a billboard or a stranger’s lean legs with sinful lust, evangelical Christians have created an impossible bind for men and a culture of hostility for women. Living outside of this culture now, I can tell the difference between attraction (when a man smiles at me across the street or pays me a compliment) and lust (when a man follows me with his eyes fixed somewhere below my shoulders, or says something vulgar). What you do with sexual attraction is what makes you moral or immoral. If you accept the lie that you can’t control yourself and use your sexual attraction to control or intimidate others, then you are indeed enslaved to your own lust and a danger to people. If you recognize, however, that you are always in control of your own actions and that you can choose not to act on sexual attraction, you can protect yourself and others. Self-control and respect for others are the lessons we should teach boys (and girls). We should not teach them to fear their bodies, feel attacked by the mere sight of attractive strangers, or despise the people they find attractive.

These are the things I’ve discovered through growing up with mostly male friends (an odd circumstance that got me punished in various ways in my fundamentalist church). I have also learned a lot from men who weren’t raised this way, who are used to living their lives without worrying about feeling attracted to strangers, or sexy pictures, or movie stars. I can’t pretend to know all the details of either experience, but I do remember the agony in the voices of my friends who were tired of fighting the modesty battle all the time. I remember their frustration and anger when girls flirted with them, and they were powerless. I remember how much they resented being called gay, and how they assumed stances of superiority to fend off the hurt of being falsely identified with a group they were taught to fear and hate. I can hardly imagine the frustration of actually being gay in this environment and being told weekly that you are an abomination in the eyes of God. All this heartache could have been avoided by adopting a normal approach to sexuality. If I could do anything to soften the blows of the modesty doctrine, I would tell young boys, “There is nothing wrong with you. It’s normal to feel attracted to people. You can want to eat nothing but chocolate cake all the time, but you know that wouldn’t be good for you. You also have the power not to have sex until you know it will be good for you. Your body belongs to you, and you decide what it does. This is your freedom and your responsibility, not anyone else’s.”

The modesty doctrine is a game that no one ever wins. It perpetuates fear and contempt in men. It oppresses women. It needs to stop.

Vice President Joe Biden said he is confident the administration will find a way to require almost all health-insurance plans to offer free contraception without forcing Catholic institutions to act against their religious beliefs.

His comments Thursday to a Cincinnati radio station came as the White House tried to defuse a growing controversy over its decision to exempt only a small group of churches and other faith-based institutions from the new health-care rule. Catholic groups and their supporters have complained that hospitals, schools and charities will have to pay for contraception, which the church opposes.

I’ve been hearing a lot about how requiring organizations to offer health insurance that includes birth control is a violation of “freedom of conscience.” That’s the same logic that was used to justify pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control. (I opposed the latter idea because of its hypocrisy: the Religious Right tells women that if they don’t want to be pregnant, they can choose not to have sex. I would counter that if a person doesn’t want to dispense birth control, he or she can choose not to be a pharmacist.) This time, however, the “freedom of conscience” logic does not work at all.

The “controversy” (which is a kind way of saying “the ruckus kicked up by the Religious Right”) is about denying “freedom of conscience” to organizations. Not people. Specifically, not women. Since when did organizations have consciences? The members of their boards of executives might have consciences, and they might agree on something, but they emphatically cannot speak for every member or every employee of their organization.

The loudest voice in the fray currently belongs to the Catholic Church. Cries have gone up that the Church should not be forced to “compromise its principles” by offering women paid birth control as part of their insurance package. But whose principles are these? A majority of Catholic women were using the pill as early as 1970. A recent report from the Guttmacher Institute (which is contested by Catholic bishops) estimates that 98% of “sexually experienced” Catholic women use or have used the pill. If the opposition were really about “freedom of conscience,” you’d expect to find different statistics.

The truth is, this “controversy” is about the exact opposite of “freedom of conscience.” It’s about denying freedom of conscience to religious women. The Church (and the other organizations supporting it) are desperately afraid that if they give women access to birth control, they will break down the doors of CVS to get it. The US Council of Catholic Bishops made the following argument:

“[The Guttmacher stat] is irrelevant, and it is presented in a misleading way,” the group said in a statement. “If a survey found that 98 percent of people had lied, cheated on their taxes, or had sex outside of marriage, would the government claim it can force everyone to do so?”

Except the government isn’t forcing women to take birth control. It’s forcing religious organizations to let women choose whether to take birth control. If the religious organizations in question had faith in their members’ convictions, they would not be worried about paying for something they disagree with because they would trust women not to use it. This so-called controversy is about religious officials taking away women’s freedom of conscience and giving it to the Church. “Freedom of conscience” is code for “the right to enforce conformity amongst religious women.” Actual freedom is about having a choice. The Church and its supporters want to monopolize freedom and choice for themselves while taking those things away from their employees and congregations.

Not to mention where this leaves poor women who aren’t Catholic, but just happen to work at Catholic hospitals or charities because there’s no other work in their area. Forcing people who don’t even profess the same faith as you do to live by your rules is most definitely the opposite of “freedom of conscience.”

If this were really about freedom of conscience, it would be a non-issue. Women whose consciences are not bothered by birth control would be able to practice their faith according to their own relationships with God. Women who accept the Church’s teachings would similarly avoid birth control. This is about religious officials’ fear of losing control, fear that their beliefs don’t match those of their congregations, fear that people will wantonly surge toward sinful abandon if not reined in by financial constraints. It’s authoritarianism cloaked in hypocrisy.

When was the last time you looked at this verse? It’s used all the time, in the Message and in evangelical culture, to justify opposition to no-fault divorce and the rising trend of multiple marriages. “God hates divorce” is the mantra of many Christian conservatives. But have you ever thought about what this verse actually means?

How did a verse that so obviously tells men to be kind to their wives and not to leave them destitute become a verse that tells women they have no right to leave an abusive marriage? (Isn’t promising to love, protect and provide for someone and then throwing them out on the curb the very definition of “dealing treacherously”? Divorced women were in dire straits in that era.) Branham taught that men could divorce women for adultery, but women could never divorce their husbands, under any circumstances. Branham taught that wives could win their husbands to Christ and change them from abusers to saints by living the example of the Holy Spirit before them. That is not what this verse is about. This verse, if anything, looks like it’s about God caring for the afflictions of spurned women and commanding men to treat their wives better.

The “stay until he changes” dogma is a fiction created by cobbling together piles of fractured Scriptures into a Frankenstein that bears no resemblance to the words above. God hates divorce, indeed, but not because it ends a marriage. He hates it because it hurts women.

I recently had a discussion with Libby Anne at Love, Joy Feminism about the logic of anti-abortion beliefs in evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. I was struck by the difference in our past experiences. Although the Message has grown to look more and more like mainstream evangelical Christian culture by embracing courtship, the Republican party, Vision forum materials, and books by Debi and Michael Pearl, there remain serious differences in emphasis on the issues of abortion and birth control.

There is growing tension within the Message as 21st century cultural values clash with the 1930s-60s lifespan of William Branham’s ministry. Because Message believers make a point of listening to his tapes and reading his sermons several times a week and at church, their faith must negotiate what they believe is the literal truth of Branham’s words with the changing climate of the culture wars. Abortion is a much bigger issue than birth control for most evangelicals. Additionally, evangelical culture is preoccupied with homosexuality. Message believers take anti-gay beliefs on readily, but Branham himself was not as concerned about homosexuality because the gay rights movement simply hadn’t happened yet while he lived.

For Libby Anne, growing up in mainstream evangelical culture, the abortion debate was about three things:

• The soul of the child
• God’s plan for women was to bear and raise children
• The harrowing spiritual and emotional consequences post-abortive women suffer

Only the second of these implicates birth control. The others are about the act of having an abortion, not the effect (not having a child). Incidentally, when I look at Branham’s words, only the second resonates with me.

Branham did not treat abortion as categorically different from birth control, or even as more sinful. For Branham, the problem was not killing an ensouled being (although Message believers today accept this as part of the problem and afford it greater significance). No, the real problem Branham had with abortion was women being “selfish” and not accepting their role as submissive wives and mothers.

A Message believer writing on the William Branham Homepage has compiled the following quotes on abortion from Branham’s sermons:

GOD PERFECTING HIS CHURCH – 04-12-54
I‘ve heard people say, a lot of time, “What is the unpardonable sin, Brother Branham?” My mother used to tell me that it was a woman that would take the life of a baby before it was born – abortion case. Well, She said, “She has done something. She didn’t give the little fellow a chance to live.” Well, that’s awful. I’ll admit that.

GOD PERFECTING HIS CHURCH – 04-12-54 
Here not long ago, I met a woman that had committed some of those cases, practicing birth control. That’s the disgrace in America. This may kindly singe you a little bit, but watch it….. These American people will practice birth control, and give a hundred dollars for a little old dog, and pack it around, and give it the love of a baby. It’s a disgrace. But that’s right. Yes, it is. You know that’s the truth. Will lead him (the dog) down the street with a little jacket on him, when he is nothing but a dog. That’s right. But you wouldn’t have the baby. Because you’re afraid you would deprive yourself of something. God commissioned women to bring forth children. That’s exactly right. It used to be it was a wonderful thing. Nowadays, it’s a disgrace. Too much time. That’s right. You have to have time for your social life, you’ve got to go out to gatherings. You’ve got to do this, got to go at the card party.

This is just a sample; you can read some more of the quotes here.

The first quote is deceptively cut off. Branham did not believe that abortion was the unpardonable sin. In another sermon (The Unpardonable Sin, October 24, 1954) he expanded on this story:

Now, I know mother taught you things that was very good, and so forth, but sometimes mother had things wrong.
I’ve got a mother setting right here that I, on the very subject I’m coming to in a few minutes, told me years ago, that she thought the unpardonable sin was for a–a woman to–abortion case, in other words, take the life of a child ‘fore it was born. Said, “How could she ever be forgiven it?” Mama, in her best of her knowledge, to all that she knew, that was true. See? But it isn’t true according to the Word of God, so that makes a difference.

Branham always mentioned abortion as a symptom of the increasing sin and selfishness of the modern generation he lived in. It stood right alongside birth control, non-submission, and women going to work outside the home as evidence of growing perversion in society. It was not a category unto itself. He sometimes mentioned abortion by itself, but always as a lament of a broader dissolution of society:

QUEEN OF SHEBA – 01-19-61E
I read in the paper the other day, I forget… It’s thirty thousand abortion cases per month, done, recorded in the city of Chicago. How many is not recorded? Thirty thousand abortion cases, my, my. What’s going to happen, brother? Think of the world over, what’s going on at this time, sin. Oh, it’s horrible.

What was wrong about abortion, for William Branham? You can certainly see him referring to abortion as “killing children,” but mostly he talked about the perversion of the modern woman. Abortion, for Branham, was a symptom of women’s refusal to submit to the role God had planned for them.

I think these are the most significant lines from the quotes above:

These American people will practice birth control, and give a hundred dollars for a little old dog, and pack it around, and give it the love of a baby. It’s a disgrace. … But you wouldn’t have the baby. … God commissioned women to bring forth children.

The problem with abortion is the same as the problem with birth control, for Branham. They are consequences of women’s rebellion. It’s telling that the first Scriptures the Message believer uses on his page about abortion are from Genesis. Be fruitful, and multiply (Gen 1:28) is the first, followed by “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16).” What is the lesson taken from these verses? The William Branham Homepage continues:

Man would multiply and replenish the earth through a union with the woman. Multiplied sorrow and suffering in pregnancy, bringing forth with pain would be synonymous with birth. A constant reminder of “original sin”. But thus it is ordained that the woman should conceive and bring forth children. She would according to the original command multiply and replenish the earth BUT through sorrow and pain.

In Invisible Union of the Bride of Christ (November 25, 1965), Branham said the following:

And if a woman won’t have a baby for her husband, she’ll take a dog or a cat or something. She’s got to mother something. It’s their nature. But to bear a child for her husband and raise it to the service of God, that’s entirely all out of her line. … She’d be so disgraced, if she did, by her sin-loving society of this 1965 type of women.

Although you can see on the William Branham Homepage that the Scriptures have been interpreted in a way that matches the current evangelical climate (an emphasis on the moment of conception), I see something different operating in the Message itself (Branham’s own sermons). Message believers now tend to emphasize birth control less (though they still perceive it as wrong), and consider abortion to be much more heinous. For Branham, however, the problem was not the act of abortion but the refusal to be a mother. Rejecting motherhood was rebellion against God’s will. Abortion and birth control were two sides of the same coin: “selfishness.” This is where my upbringing overlaps with Libby Anne’s. Current American Christian culture has implicitly accepted beliefs in women’s equality and self-determinacy, even if women are expected to prioritize raising children over working and are expected to defer to their husbands to a “reasonable” extent. Most evangelicals accept the idea of sending daughters to college, practicing abstinence (a form of birth control, after all) and postponing motherhood.

Abortion is the last front on which women can be attacked for refusing or postponing motherhood. By emphasizing the “life at conception” argument, evangelical culture has steered away from telling women outright that the reason they should not have abortions is because God commanded them to be mothers (and mothers of many). Branham, however, knew only the first glimpses of this cultural shift and attacked what he perceived as the heart of the problem: female rebellion against submissive motherhood. Message believers now keep this idea alive even as they negotiate the shift to adopt “life at conception” beliefs. As the pace of social change strains the connection between Branham’s world and ours, Message believers must continually reinvent their faith to remain relevant against contemporary issues. Opposing homosexuality and abortion are the causes célèbres of Christians now; Branham must be recruited to the side of 21st century believers so that the Message itself can retain its image as eternal truth.

I’ve noticed a lot of comments on No Longer Quivering recently claiming that there’s a difference between “voluntary submission,” which is godly, and “involuntary servitude,” which is not. The arguments usually run like this:

• Submitting to my husband fulfills my God-given desires for leadership.
• I don’t mind submitting to my husband; he doesn’t lord it over me like a tyrant.
• I choose to submit to my husband to glorify God.
• I submit to my husband because Jesus likes it and I want to please Jesus.

There’s a problem with all four of these arguments: they are fundamentally contradictory to the more baldfaced justification used by people who aren’t trying to win over the nonbelievers with sweet words like “love,” “peace,” and “fulfillment”:

• The Bible tells wives to submit to their husbands.

The idea that submission is voluntary and that it is also a Biblical commandment is nonsense. If it’s a commandment, it’s not optional. If it’s voluntary, it is.

Regardless of how you personally feel about a command, it is still a command. The law tells me to wear my seatbelt. I don’t mind wearing a seatbelt, so I might feel like I’m doing it voluntarily, but I’ll still be punished if I don’t wear it. The law tells me not to kill anybody. I am very happy not to kill anybody because I don’t want to hurt other people. That doesn’t mean it’s just a guideline – it’s still an actual rule.

Even if you break it down further, and distinguish between laws that punish (“If you do this, you will be punished this way”) and prohibitive commands (“Do not do this,” but punishment is not specified), “voluntary” is not an adequate way of characterizing compliance. When the “choice” involved boils down to “do this or go to hell,” or “do this or receive a lethal injection,” it’s a bounded choice of such magnitude that it might as well not be a choice at all. That’s why the law makes exceptions for things like self-defense. If your options are “kill your attacker” or “be killed,” the law accepts that your actions are not the same as willfully killing someone without provocation. When you don’t really have a choice, it’s involuntary. Women who believe that the Bible commands wives to submit to their husbands do not have a choice but submit.

If you assert that you submit to your husband to please Jesus, you ignore the fact that your own religion dictates that not pleasing Jesus seriously jeopardizes your salvation. Message people say that “grieving the Holy Spirit” does not cause you to lose your salvation, but does cause your spiritual life to stagnate and probably indicates that you won’t go in the Rapture.

The “pleasing Jesus” argument also ignores the social consequences of not submitting in a culture (yes, culture) that demands such conformity. Many a woman has submitted “willingly” because she knows that she will be universally condemned for doing anything different.

Women who assert that they submit to their husbands in a way that does not damage them, because their husbands are keeping up their end of the bargain (loving their wives “as Christ loved the church”), are not really making a valid argument. If I have to submit to my husband because God tells me to, and my husband is a nice guy who lets me make my own decisions, I’m just lucky. My luck and happiness do not make my situation “voluntary,” just pleasant.

As for the claim that submitting fulfills a woman’s innate needs: that’s irrelevant. And wrong. But for the purposes of this discussion, it’s mostly just irrelevant. Either God commands you to submit or you do it naturally. If you think both coincide, that again just makes you lucky. If submission is a command, it doesn’t matter that you like it: it’s still involuntary.

The problem with complementarian arguments that real submission is voluntary (contrasted with the specter of soul-crushed servitude) is that they are just veils to mask the ugly bottom line: complementarians believe that God commands women to submit to men. It’s really just as simple as that. Complementarianism is a soft worldview with an icy, hardened core. Submission is “beautiful,” they say. They talk about harmony and order and peace and fulfillment and the joy of letting somebody else make decisions. They talk about God’s commands to men to love their wives. Some even posit magic formulas that claim that if the wife submits enough, God will honor her by changing an abusive husband into a kind, godly leader. Submission only goes bad, they say, when one partner is “out of the will of God.” By making these excuses, however, they implicitly acknowledge that submission is actually a very ugly thing. Submission without rewards like a loving husband and supernatural blessings is not so different from involuntary servitude at all.

Complementarians are the salesmen of patriarchy. Their pastels and Victorian paintings and talk of smoothly functioning households is a great big, beautiful storefront display for a theology that dispenses poison.

If you believe that wifely submission is not a command from God, great! Then it is voluntary. Then there will be no spiritual repercussions for rejecting it. I reject it happily and fearlessly.
If, on the other hand, you do believe that wifely submission is a command from God, don’t lie to yourself. It is the very definition of involuntary servitude – which, by the way, is just a wordy way of saying slavery.

The moral wrong of slavery ought to be self-evident.

When you’re at the checkout, and the cashier says, “Have a nice holiday,” say thank you.
When you’re at the checkout, and the cashier says, “Merry Christmas,” say thank you.
When you’re at the checkout, and the cashier says, “Have a nice day,” say thank you.

Don’t do any of the following:

When you’re at the checkout, and the cashier says, “Merry Christmas,” correct her and tell her to say “Happy holidays.”
When you’re at the checkout, and the cashier says, “Happy holidays,” tell her “Merry Christmas” and go on a rant about Political Correctness.
When you’re at the checkout, and the cashier says, “Have a nice day,” tell her that she’s forgetting about the Reason for the Season.

Don’t wish people well to make a political statement. Do it to wish them well.
When they wish you well, don’t assume they are making a political statement. Just thank them and move on.

Retail workers are the unwilling pawns conscripted to the front lines of the holiday wars. They don’t want to be fighting it. They don’t want to fight you. They just want to get done and go home with minimal conflict.
If you’re a Christian and the cashier says, “Have a nice holiday,” she’s not trying to undermine your belief in God or the significance of the birth of Jesus. She’s trying to be nice to you during one of the most stressful times of the year to be working retail. If you’re not a Christian and you’re wished a Merry Christmas, consider it a meaningless seasonal greeting. Remember: she’s just trying to be nice to you.

When I worked as a cashier as a teenager, I tried every seasonal greeting there is. I wanted to be in the cheerful spirit of gift-giving and I wanted to make people feel acknowledged. What I got was an endless litany of corrections. Eventually I stopped saying anything at all, fatigued by the politicization.

When someone gives you a gift, you don’t get to choose that gift and tell the person you would have wanted something else. That’s rude. The same goes for holiday greetings. Accept the well-wisher’s good intentions and move on. Return the gift. Ignore the politics. Just for gosh sakes be nice!

Remember:

It’s the thought that counts.

Daughter of the Patriarchy: Admissions

It concerns how I got into college… and what happened when my female friends in the Message tried to go, too.

I am nearing the end of my story after nearly three years on No Longer Quivering. I left the Message as a college sophomore, ten months after the conclusion of this installment. If you have questions about how I left the Message and what college was like after growing up fundamentalist, this would be a great time to ask me. I’m still figuring out where to end the story.