Noodling

Are You A Political Porno Addict?

I was wondering how one might accurately describe the person and work of Rush Limbaugh. Muckraker? Yellow journalism? Yes, I think so. Character assassin? Yes. Rabblerouser? for sure. Political hatchet man? Yes, that's obvious.

Then, thinking about what he does in aggregate, the bigger picture, I thought, It's like pornography, kind of. Yes, it meets the definition I think of as pornography, actually meets it better than sexual pornography.

It denigrates the people it holds up to view. It distorts and dirties the purposes of real, honest discourse and discussion and news. It's tawdry, and it creates victims, all in the name of "entertainment."

So, what does that make the people who indulge in their daily fix of Rush, people who think pornography indulgence is a major bad thing to do. Is it hypocritical of them to rail against sexual pornography viewers while they indulge in the political form of something very like it?

Do they watch or listen to Rush for the rush it gives them? Or are they just listening/viewing for the information, like people who read Playboy magazine for the articles?

Why The Attacks On Women?

Notice something strange about the Republican super conservatives' focus during their campaign? Notice that the issues are phony?

Instead of real issues there is targeting of a particular group of people, namely women. This targeting of a group of people tag teams with targeting their opponents with hugely expensive dirty attack ads.

Why?

One of my sons pointed out to me that the Republicans are lacking a real issue to use against President Obama in the Fall election. Hoping to use the recession, blaming him for it, they blocked his every effort to gain co-operation from a Republican dominated Congress.

But, the economy is relentlessly improving. So the Republican candidates have to come up with something else. That something else is to use distraction techniques: dirty politics, accusing scapegoats, inflaming old animosities, and targeting a minority group.

They use what I call The Falkland Islands Distraction Ploy. President Reagan used the Grenada micro mini war to accomplish the same thing.

Historically, looking for a good scapegoat has always been an effective distraction and relieving the tension technique. During the plague years that held Europe hostage during the Middle Ages nobody knew that the Black Death plague was caused by bacteria carried by fleas that made their homes on rats.

Scapegoats, Jews in this case, were accused of poisoning wells, and thus causing the plague. The witchcraft craze in Europe brought about the deaths of thousands of innocent women and men, particularly women. At that time there was an excess of females in the population and unmarried women were a financial burden on their families. Rich women's property could be taken from them if they were tried and convicted of witchcraft (really easy convictions).

Why choose women for the diversionary scapegoating attacks? Because it is obvious that the conservative Republican base, hyper right wing conservative religious groups, are male dominant and female repressive.

If you doubt that is so, read their writings, listen to their speeches, sermons, and TV and radio programs, read their books. I know these groups from having been inside. I went to a fundamentalist Christian college, sat in their pews, married into a fundamentalist Christian family, was a pastor's wife in a fundamentalist church.

From this vantage point I want to warn my fellow female voters: Believe them when they seem to be saying they don't really like women that much. They don't. If they did, they wouldn't repress and misuse them the way they do. They look at women as substandard human beings, and many of them want us to be silent, strictly obedient to the dominant males in the group, pregnant, and powerless.

Religion and politics don't mix well. Each religious group believes God is guiding them as they attempt to impose their own beliefs and practices on everyone else.

Without political power religious groups must persuade in order to affect people's behavior. With political power, they can force it.

Religion is as full of egotistic, domination obsessed individuals as politics is. Government needs to be free of interference and control by any religious group. Our country's founders knew what they were doing when they established this country with strict separation of church and state.

If we do not take action to retain the rights and protections our foremothers won for us we will lose them. Don't think it cannot happen here. It can. If you value your rights to your own body, your own privacy, and equal protection and opportunity under the law, you must take action.

Demonstrate, write letters to the editors, blog, make phone calls, put pressure on your government representatives. Object to attacks on individual women, to disparagement of them and of women as a group, and to threats against women's present rights.

Contribute to and vote for candidates who support women. And work, work, work to defeat candidates and groups who hold us in derision and aim to push us back into the days of coat hanger abortions, poor medical care, and endless pregnancies.

New Blog: Shining A Light On Patriarchy and "Complementarianism"

I've created another blog. Yes, I know, there are a lot of them. And I wasn't going to do it, but I feel compelled to, so I did. It's about patriarchy, heirarchicalism, and "complementarianism," those female destroying and female crippling beliefs that provide a fertile ground for the trash crop of abuse.

I have no desire to try to change the minds of patriarchicalists, nor any of the others who believe and teach that females aren't to be allowed equal access to opportunity. I don't mind if they believe something like that.

What I do mind is for both males and females to be victimized by those beliefs through ignorance. I also mind people outside those groups being victimized by the practices of patirarchicalists and other hierarchalists.

It has always bothered me to see good people denied what should be rightfully theirs, whether it's fairness in paying taxes, insurance costs, educational opportunity, or the right to protect their own bodies and souls from invasion and abuse.

It bothered me when, as a student in a Fundamentalist college, I watched my bright female fellow students marry boys who were not as bright as they were and then hand over their own decision making and freedom of choice to those boys because they'd been taught God required it.  It bothers me to know how doing that abbreviated and reduced their opportunities to use the abilities God gave them.

And, it bothered me when someone on an email discussion list posted a link to a blog like the Bayly Blog, and I went there and read posts and comments that support a man's supposed right to restrict the women in his life in ways that will deny them an education, freedom of choice, and could deny them their health and life.

So, I thought, someone needs to create a place online to gather information and comment about groups and individuals who use religion to batter women and restrict their lives. Someone should do this, but who? Looks like it's me.

It's at http://www.tellville.com

Why We Don't Need A Constitutional Marriage Amendment

I've written a post on the FemSpeak blog on  why I think the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage is not a good idea. To read it click here.

Christianity Today's "A Peace Plan For The Gender War"

I'm a feminist, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm proud of the honorable and noble history of feminism. So, I don't mind being called a feminist. It feels good to hear the term. No matter that some would like to demonize the term "feminist," it's an ancient ploy, making something that is clear and honorable into an epithet.

And, I am what is called, or has been called, a Christian feminist, or biblical feminist. That's just a descriptive term. More recently, the term "egalitarian" has been attached to people who believe, as I do, that the Bible supports equal opportunities and full humanity for women. "Egalitarian" is good, I'm happy with that too. But, it's only a matter of time before opponents to egalitarianist views find egalitarians who can be disparagement fodder and use their actions or words to try to discredit that term too.

Christianity Today, the Evangelical Christian news magazine, has a relevant online article I'd like to respond to.

The article, "A Peace Plan For The Gender War", presupposes, by its title and contents, that there is a war. I'm not so sure there is a war. I guess it depends on one's definition of war. Personally, I think of war as having two sides attacking each other, aiming at conquest. I've been involved in the issue of equality for women in the church in one way or another for many years, have written several books pertinent to the subject, and it doesn't look like a war to me.

What it looks like from my perspective is an effort on the part of egalitarians to share information, to educate their fellow Christians about some historical oversights in the area of Bible Interpretation.

We've been doing our homework, finding that previous hermeneutical errors were not limited to insisting the Bible teaches that the world is flat, witches can be discovered by several invasive and dangerous methods (and should be killed if they prove to be witches by such tests), slavery is OK, and kings have a divine right to rule.

We've, for the most part, been pretty decent in the manner in which we've shared our hermeneutical discoveries about biblical support for the full humanity of womankind. There's no war there.

Now, we have been attacked. Not by a large contingency, but by a loud one. Does that make a war? I don't think so. It seems to over dignify attempts at character assassination, victimization of individuals, and organizational takeovers to call it a war.

So, to me, the premise of the Christianity Today article is faulty. It is probably encouraging to those who would like everyone to believe there is some great battle going on to see that title, but it presupposes much too much. The sky isn't falling, it's just rain.

I don't think there is a war, but a fundy fuss fest, with a few players who have political clout because they can swing votes.

The writer starts out "A Peace Plan For The Gender War" with several disclaimers.  He's only trying to bring some togetherness between what he sees as opposite, warring camps.

He then sets up hypothetical bad boys and bad girls polarities. On the bad boys' side he lists the historical outrages and misogynistic woman haters, and John R. Rice type "woman in her place" (very small place) tracts. On the bad girls' side, he puts, of all things, radical feminism. He says,

"The gender issue is also framed by abusive sexism's polar opposite, the ugly face of radical feminism."

What? That's quite a juxtaposition: centuries of death, destruction, and woman hating actions opposite a few radical feminist books, speeches, and marches. No war there, and a bit of a pitiful effort to find a substantial opponent too.

You would be very hard pressed to find a biblical egalitarian or biblical feminist who shares the views of radical feminists. So, why put them in the piece at all? Doesn't make sense. They don't represent anyone except a very small minority of feminists, secular or otherwise.

Next, the writer of the article says,

The rise of contemporary feminist hermeneutics can be traced back to The Woman's Bible, a revisionist rendering of the Scriptures edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and published in the 1890s. The purpose of this project was to turn the Bible into a weapon in the struggle for women's liberation.

Not really. The hermeneutics biblical egalitarians use are the same ones contemporary lawyers use to interpret the law, and the same ones taught in all Bible colleges and seminaries. We aren't using "feminist" hermeneutics. We're using just plain vanilla hermeneutics, the kind our opponents will find if they take a short walk over to their library.

Then comes the central point of the article:

Many complementarians believe the inevitable logic of the egalitarian view leads to radical feminism. Likewise, many egalitarians see the complementarian position as a slightly updated version of the old chauvinism, an effort to suppress the full exercise of women's God-given gifts. Both fears are motivated by legitimate concerns, and we will not move forward until these concerns are fully heard.

How well studied biblical scholars using universally acceptable hermeneutical principles to examine Bible texts could lead to radical feminism is a mystery I'm not man or woman enough to fathom. That is what is called a "paper tiger." And, it's not that those who hold such views need to be heard, we've all heard them, repeatedly. It's that those who hold such views need to stop demonizing those who don't hold such views.

As for egalitarians seeing the female restrictive proponents as a slightly updated version of the old chauvinism--well, that's precisely what it is. It's easy to trace it historically.

And, as for the term "complementarian," a spade is still a spade. By their works ye shall know them. Egalitarians are complementarians. In fact, we're probably more complementarian in our actions and beliefs than the hierarchical traditionalists who've changed their name to "Complementarian." We believe women and men are complementary to each other. We also believe in allowing them full use of their abilities and full access to opportunities.

The article ends, after some "play nice now" exhortation, with the platitudinous:

The two sides may never come to full agreement, but passages like these suggest that there is no reason we cannot work and pray together on issues we do, in fact, agree upon. This is not a call to give up our distinctives or to cease trying to convince one another. It is, rather, a call to disagree in genuine love and in the context of the greater mission of the church—to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

What this article looks like to me is a bit of setting up a false premise of a war, attempts to legitimize a valid opposition between polarities without accurately identifying what the differences are, and ending with a soothing, play nice now exhortation.

And, I suspect the whole thing is actually addressed to the fundys, attempting to get in under their radar, smooth their feathers, and say, OK, now guys, you're getting embarrassing, stop the attacks and get down on your knees, where if you'd spent more time, you wouldn't be attacking in the first place.

No More Underwoman

I don’t debate with religious traditionalists, aka complementarians on the rightful position of women, because it’s generally a waste of time, energy, and good will. I think the best way to deal with most of them is to ignore them. Not ignore in a rude and dismissive way, but to simply do something else instead of debating whether hierarchicalism is superior to more egalitarian alternatives.

It’s not that I don’t respect their right to differ. It’s just that it seems pointless to argue something so
obvious. Sort of like arguing the advantages of using a computer instead of a crank telephone. I’d rather invest in sharing useful information with people who need and want it.

A central claim of traditionalist/complementarians is that hierarchy is necessary, that it’s hard wired into human relationships, that God made us that way, that it’s “natural.”

What they don’t realize is that natural hierarchies are different from the kind of hierarchies they propose. Natural hierarchies are more like heterarchies. That is, they aren’t rigid, they are fluid. They are based on need/provision rather than assigned position.

Steve Andreas, in his excellent book Transforming Your Self  says it well, on page 18,

“A heterarchy functions something like a committee, but one in which everyone can talk and listen to each other simultaneously. The various elements of this system all communicate with each other, contributing to a consensus about which perceptions and activities are most relevant at a particular moment. In a heterarchical system all the different elements mutually interact, and one of them temporarily gains control in cooperation with the others. This system is very ancient, and it determines attention not only in human beings, but in all vertebrates, and it has been doing this for several hundred million years, an indication of how useful it is.”

I participate on an  email discussion list  for people who have experienced or are experiencing abuse. Many subscribers are women who have been imprisoned in rigid hierarchical marriages. Their experiences were often made worse by churches that taught a hierarchical relationship in marriage.

Where did we get the notion that relationships should be hierarchical? I think it came from the ownership of people, viewing people as property. Basically it’s a slavery based idea. Hierarchicalists have a sense of ownership of those under them. They’d not want to call it ownership, they would be more comfortable calling it “authority over,” but their actions betray what it really is to them.

I’ve known a lot of authoritarian hierarchicalists, and I can’t remember any who were successful at being fair and honorable with their “authority.” Hierarchicalists know that’s true, but they excuse it by saying they aren’t perfect, they make mistakes, and therefore it’s not the system, it’s them. Well, it is the system. The system places too much power in the hands of those who can’t or won’t handle it well. They are doomed to fail in their task a high percentage of the time because skill doesn’t have anything to do with them getting the job, or keeping it.

In a hierarchical system women have no real power, and are free to use their abilities only if it suits the whims of those over them. They are, permanently, Underwoman.

It’s time to change costumes.