It’s hard work keeping up with my four-year-old’s social life…it’s so difficult to identify his friends.“Can you see Rotem?” he asks during morning drop-off at kindergarten. I look at each of the girls, believing I’ve already met her and risking his wrath because I have forgotten what she looks like, but no, this Rotem — though it’s a traditional girls’ name — is a boy. A couple of days later, a woman chats to me at the kindergarten gate. “I’m Natanel’s mom,” she says, positive that I know Natanel (the Hebrew form of Nathaniel). The name rings a bell, so out of politeness I say I know how much my son enjoys playing with him. Cover blown: Natanel is a she.
Misogyny is entrenched in both the Protestant and Catholic forms of conservative Christian faith. Indeed, the Catholic Church remains a fully misogynistic force, committed to the inferiority of women the world over. The conservative branches of the Presbyterian church trust women so little that they’re often not even allowed to teach Sunday School without their husbands present. Part of the reason conservative Christians are so fervently opposed to marriage equality is that, even though women gained equal status in marriage years ago, for the law to unequivocally state that the genders of two people making a marriage contract are irrelevant makes it all the more difficult for them to propagate in their own homes and communities that women are best served when they’re subservient. The current state of this country’s financial affairs is also doing its part in making their lives difficult, but that’s another story.
If you’ve ever been to a conservative church, you might have heard a long-drawn out sermon about how Paul’s words in the Bible about women’s subservience are actually the BEST thing for a woman, because they ALSO specify that the husband is to look after her needs above all else. It might not even sound evil, until you realize that they’re simply putting a new coat of paint on the idea that The Man Is In Control, Period, End of Story.
And what happens when women don’t know their place? Well, they just might end up using their silly emotion-based “reasoning” to weaken their otherwise studly, steadfast, righteous penis-having husbands, that’s what!
I bring this all up because the National Organization for Marriage, the front group for the officially misogynistic Catholic Church, has suddenly come up with a new reason why Ted Olson supports marriage equality: Why, it was that liberal bitch wife of his!
How did Mr. Federalist Society decide it’s okay to use the U.S. Constitution to require gay marriage? The New York Times is reporting that his new young Democrat wife may be a key reason.
“Lady could not have been more supportive of this,” Mr. Olson said in an interview shortly before Vaughn R. Walker, chief judge of the United States District Court hearing the case, ruled on Aug. 4 that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. “And she’s certainly influenced my views — her ideas, her approach, her feelings.”
When Mr. Olson teamed with Mr. Boise in 2009, much of the politerati was shocked to hear that the conservative stalwart was working alongside his former rival in Bush v. Gore, to defend the right of gays to marry. In fact, supporters of Proposition 8 had themselves tentatively approached Mr. Olson about arguing their side of the case.
But his wife said that anyone who knows him well — not to mention anyone who knows her at all — understands that for Mr. Olson and his fierce libertarian streak, gay marriage was an issue “of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and discrimination is something that offends at any time.”
“He would have never been able to take the other side,” she said, before adding with a laugh, “He wouldn’t have had a wife after that!”
She continued: “After eight years of knowing Ted, I thought this is something I can jump into with two feet, really sink my teeth into, and we can do this together.”
Whelan ends by essentially saying, “No comment.”
Whether Ted Olson’s wife has indeed influenced his views is immaterial. The significant thing here is the sneering tone that NOM and Ed Whelan take toward the concept of a woman influencing her husband’s views. Do the Olsons not know that the Haver of Woman Parts is supposed to shut her mouth and let her husband navigate all things involving thinking, morals and principles? Do they not know that if she is allowed to talk enough, she could unleash a disaster of epic proportions on the country? Although these principles might work in special cases in certain families where the female spouse is clearly insane — perhaps if Maggie Gallagher’s husband took a more dominant role in their household, for instance — they are, across the board, asinine principles, implying as they so clearly do that women should be seen and clearly not heard.
Always remember, when you watch anti-gay folks arguing, to look for the signs of their continuing support for the repression of women. They are always there, lurking just slightly under the surface. One of the most common examples, and it happens every election cycle, is when conservative Republican men sneer resentfully about the fact that women, across the board, lean far more Democratic than men do. This reinforces their (hilariously stupid) belief that conservative men are the most mature members of society, and that the rest of us need their holy guidance.
Newer and older readers might sometimes wonder why the writers at Truth Wins Out occasionally veer, seemingly, way off the beaten path of gay rights and the lies of the Religious Right. Why do we write about the Park 51 project, Dr. Laura, racism, anti-immigrant hatred, women’s rights and so on?
I’ve always said, for one thing, that discrimination is discrimination, plain and simple, and that moreover, the people who would discriminate against LGBT people tend to be the exact same people who hate Mexican immigrants the most, who use the most coded language to express their distaste for all but their very favorite (read: Republican) blacks, etc. There’s an overlap because we’re not dealing with rational people with rational opinions to add to the debate. Fevered hatred of Mexican immigrants isn’t a well-thought out position; it’s a gut reaction based on fear. And so it is with anti-gay bias. These days, there is simply too much education, too much information out there, for people to arrive at a distaste for gay people via any intellectual method.
Along those lines, I was impressed with this post from Betty Cracker over at Rumproast (as I usually am with her posts), which goes a long way to explain, politically, what kind of time we’re living in:
The attempt to establish a Muslimfrei zone around Ground Zero isn’t about 9/11. The wingnut solicitude for “Dr.” Laura’s supposedly lost First Amendment rights isn’t about “Dr.” Laura’s right to repeat racial slurs on the radio.
Fox News’ relentless pimping of the New Black Panther Party non-story isn’t about voter intimidation. Arizona’s anti-immigration law isn’t about illegal immigration. Breitbart’s Shirley Sherrod smear wasn’t about “reverse racism.”
The persistent suggestions from multiple quarters on the right that President Obama isn’t a Christian or an American aren’t about his religion or nationality. And the Prop 8 campaign wasn’t about protecting straight marriage.
What this is all really about is the most orchestrated, widespread attempt to divide this country since George Wallace’s presidential run. Scratch that—Wallace was never more than a regional candidate. This may be unprecedented in living memory.
She then links to a piece from Will Bunch which takes that theme even further, and which deserves to be read in its entirety:
American political debate — in a time of crushing 9.5-percent unemployment, record foreclosures and bankruptcies, and climate change linked to catastrophes from Moscow to Pakistan to Iowa — has been hijacked over the arcane question of whether to allow an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan. The controversy is stunning — but it should not be. The national brouhaha over the $100 million Muslim Park51/Cordoba House proposal is not an anomaly but rather the culmimation of an alarming downturn in America’s mood, its discourse, and even our former ambitions as a beacon of religious and political tolerance. In 2010, a large swath of the American public — led by ratings-mad media mavens and immoral politicians like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin — had declared out all-out war on “the Other” in America in all its alleged forms, from immigrants to Muslims to non-white aides working in the West Wing of the White House and of course the president himself.
And it is threatening to rip America apart in a way that we have not seen in 145 years.
[...]
America, we are in for the bumpy political ride of a lifetime. It will take enormous courage for defenders of two centuries of religious freedom and tolerance toward both religious and economic refugees to stand firm in the face of the kind of raw public anger and emotion that have caused backbone-impaired politicians like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or supposed progressive stalwart Howard Dean to wither in mere days. Our determined minority may be barely clinging to our cherished traditions — as best expressed by President George Washington in 1790 when he wrote “the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens” — in the face of this onslaught for the next few years.
Let’s face it: This country has long had its Know-Nothings and its Birchers and its McCarthyites, but it never had gizmos like Fox News or Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed to fuel toxic ideas so far so fast. It’s time we admit these seemingly disconnected battles over “anchor babies, mosques, and a black man in the Oval Office are all part of the same war against “the Other,” and that we are in the fight of a lifetime.
And that, in a few concise paragraphs from two Very Smart People who you all should be reading anyway, is why we at Truth Wins Out are talking about these things. The people who fight against gay people are rebelling against The Other everywhere they see it these days. When Maggie Gallagher and her friends talk about “traditional marriage,” there is a whole lot of baggage besides “one man/one woman” tied up in there. While I’m not saying that every one of them is actively racist or xenophobic (some are), the “I want my country back!” nonsense of their fight for “traditional marriage” is a desire to return to a time when men were the breadwinners and had veto power over everything, the women were legally powerless, raising children was expected rather than voluntary, and all the neighbors were white and spoke American English. They want to return to a time when everyone “knew their place,” and for white Christian men, that means that everyone else knows that they are the Supreme Penis Gods of whatever homesteads/neighborhoods/Wal-Mart Supercenters they happen to inhabit, and that everyone else maintains their appropriate places, behind whichever Penis God they’ve been assigned to.
It sounds funny, but think about it.
This, by the way, is why the Religious Right is having a fully formed cow about the painfully obvious points Judge Walker raised in his Prop 8 opinion on the subject of gender. He said, in so many words, that because gender is no longer an essential component in determining the status of partners in marriage, it’s supremely irrational to deny marriage rights based on gender. To anyone with half a brain and a spine, this should be obvious. Married men and women are, whether or not they like it, and whether or not they live it out, equal partners under the law, and have been for a while now. Christian Rightists do not like that, though! The existence of gay and lesbian couples who are married doesn’t change anything for them, except to force them to acknowledge that their time of lording their beliefs over society legally is over and done with.
We’re better for it, too, just like the fact that our nation will be majority-minority by 2050 will make us a better, stronger, smarter nation, closer to achieving the ideal of the American Dream. But our detractors don’t see it that way, do they?
So, again, that is why we talk about all that stuff. Hope that clears things up.
As she so often does, Amanda Marcotte has noticed something in the Christian conservative worldview that I’ve never seen pointed out before. The tabloids are apparently having a minor freak-out over the gender presentation of one of Angelina Jolie’s children, you see, and in order to present an “expert voice on parenting,” Life & Style Magazine went to Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton, of all people. Britney Spears was apparently otherwise tied up and didn’t have time to comment, I guess? Anyway, reacting to the fact that little Shiloh is going through some sort of tomboy phase, Stanton had this to say:
Says FotF’ Glenn Stanton, “Little girls have never been women before. They need help, they need guidance of what that looks like.”
Oh, how right you are, Mr. Stanton! Let’ make sure this poor misguided tot gets to spend some time with a traditionally feminine woman‚Äîsay, one with long silky hair, pillowy lips, bountiful curves, perhaps even one considered the hottest sex bomb Hollywood’ ever seen! But where oh where are we going to find a woman like that for Shiloh to emulate?
Heh.
So anyway, off ran Amanda Marcotte’s brain, and she noticed that there is a huge, glaring contradiction in the teachings of Focus on the Family and similar groups on gender, gender presentation, and sexuality. I’m going to excerpt a good bit, and then you should read the whole thing:
[W]hat’ really interesting to me is that social conservatives want to have it both ways—they argue both that gender is innate and unchangeable, and that it’ learned. When feminists criticize domestic sexism, conservatives are all about how gender roles are natural and fixed—and in complete opposition to each other. That men are naturally boorish pigs and women are naturally nurturing, so women who resent being told to nurture people who can’t even be expected to show gratitude are bucking nature and need to learn to live with our debased roles. But then they turn around and say things like Stanton did, which is basically to admit that femininity (they also believe this about masculinity) is a learned behavior, and not only that, but it’ a long, hard process learning your gender. You’ll hear from conservatives that boys are naturally drawn to trains and girls to dolls, and then they’ll flip around and tell each other that it’ extremely important to steer your children towards the “right” gender roles.
Their homophobia is clashing with their sexism, and showing how intellectually bankrupt both positions are. Social conservatives portray homosexuality as a “choice”—which makes sense. They want gays to get in the closet, and they’re just portraying that as authentic heterosexuality. But in order to argue that it’ a choice, you have to position homosexuality as a serious temptation and gays as simply very weak people who give in. If you buy into that argument, then you start to see homosexuality as a temptation that preys on all people, and your job as a parent becomes about shoring your child up to resist that temptation. Focus on the Family has long taught its followers that homosexuality can be warded off with strict teaching of gender roles. In other words, they’ve been forced to make explicit what they’ve always pretended wasn’t true, which is that gender roles are learned and performed. The irony is that the one avenue where they’ll admit gender roles are learned is the one avenue where they’re not actually going to have as much influence as they think. Forcing a little girl who wants to be a tomboy into dresses is not going to make her not be a lesbian, and also that many lesbians prefer to present a feminine manner to the world. And a lot of little girls allowed to be tomboys grow up straight.
What groups like Focus are unable/unwilling to grasp is that concepts of gender and sexuality are actually unique for each of our lives, and they can’t handle that reality. Even if one were to grant that their “god” created us (I do not, obviously), they can’t stand the fact that the humanity they think he created simply doesn’t fit into artificially proscribed gender roles. I was talking to someone the other day, whose high-school aged son recently came out, and the father was apparently doing some of that all-too-typical “If I had only introduced him to more guy stuff, this wouldn’t have happened” thing, and I said, “Actually, even if he had, and the kid turned out to be the most talented football player in the state, he would simply be a gay teen who happens to be the most talented football player in the state!”
It’s ludicrous. The teachings of James Dobson and pals are so stupid, so completely unaccredited by any real parenting experts, that it’s obnoxious to have to spend time refuting them, but the sad fact is that lots of normal garden-variety Evangelicals read his titles for advice. In his book Bringing Up Boys, Dobson actually spends a significant amount of time talking about “preventing homosexuality” by enforcing strict gender roles. It’s laughable to us, because we know that homosexuality isn’t a disease to be prevented. It’s a simple fact that homosexuality exists, and it bears no relation to a person’s gender presentation, or how well they fit into societally proscribed gender roles. The only thing Dobson can really teach parents to do is to make their gay kids hate themselves so much that they’re driven to depression, general unhappiness, inauthentic living, and in some cases, suicide. (I’m never quite sure whether that’s not Dobson’s actual goal in the first place, the insipid dog-abusing monster.)
So yeah, Focus, etc., are wrong on all counts. In the world of actual human beings, most of us, if we’re honest, are sort of a composite of the characteristics ascribed traditionally to “male” and “female.” Likewise, there are many, many kids who go through experimental phases where they like to dress up like the opposite gender, and most of these kids just sort of outgrow it. Others, as they mature, find themselves to be transgender. Still others find themselves somewhere in between the two! And others, and others, and others… It’s the same with sexuality. All you have to do to realize this is to spend five minutes in a large gay or lesbian bar and do some people-watching. Sure, there are those who conform to stereotype. Others don’t. Still others find themselves somewhere in between. The point is that the reality of gender and sexuality is complex, and those like Glenn Stanton will always be wrong as long as they insist on interpreting the world though a disproven, black-white, good-evil, male-female dichotomy that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Anyway, three cheers to Amanda for picking up on yet another example of extreme cognitive dissonance in the Christian conservative worldview. There are so many, it’s hard to keep track sometimes.
In Omaha, Nebraska, a child’s parents and therapist have determined — after years of struggle, extensive counseling, and careful consideration of their unique circumstances — that it is best, at least for the time being, to allow their child to live as the opposite gender.
WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Fla., has an in-depth story and video about the child’s background and struggle.
[Therapist] Ellie Hites says the brain is sometimes wired differently than the body is.
She says many of her transgender clients have suffered from nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts and deep depression because they’ve been forced to hide their true identity.
Hites tells KETV-TV in Omaha, “I wish that society was open and loving enough to let that child be who that child perceives himself to be.”
But the activists of Focus on the Family and the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha will hear nothing of it. It is still considered politically correct for members of conservative political institutions to ridicule sissies and tomboys and to dismiss any child development issue as something that can be cured with a good spanking and strict conformity. Focus’ Jeff Johnston — who has no professional mental-health credentials — ignorantly diagnoses that the child must have “gender identity disorder” and further declares, “Many boys who are troubled with gender-identity disorder grow out of it,” he said. “Good parental, pastoral and therapeutic support can help.”
In other words, Focus on the Family declares that its political activists — not a child’s parents or therapist — know what’s best for all children. And it deems itself qualified to blame parents and therapists for the failure of some children to conform to the dictates of Colorado Springs evangelicals. Meanwhile, the Catholic archdiocese in Omaha has been just as smug, ignorant, conformist, and superficial: It has thrown the child out of Catholic school.
According to WJXT,
The mother, a life-long Catholic, thought making the transition in their parish would be the best place for their child to continue friendships, with a support system that included other parents and children.
“The child is welcomed to come, but it would not be acceptable to change the child’ gender and present as a girl,” said Omaha Archdiocese’s Chancellor, the Rev. Joseph Taphorn.
Instead of utilizing this moment to teach its school children about gender, tolerance, and respect, the conservative archdiocese politely told the family to get out. This is the sort of sweetly worded ostracism that conservative Catholics and Focus on the Family try to market as “love” these days.
Focus on the Family and its religious-right therapeutic mentor, NARTH, have a long history of advocating ridicule and harassment of children as a means of imposing traditional gender roles and identities by force. This latest situation suggests that Focus has not yet learned how to approach issues of youth and gender with sensitivity, grace, patience, and respect for parents’ authority and first-hand knowledge.
It’s much easier for a conservative organization to humiliate a family and to dictate comforting, self-satisfied, and politically partisan stereotypes, than to support Christian families with intelligence and compassion in unique and difficult circumstances.
A British evangelical group called “Church Society for Bible, Church and Nation” — an oxymoron, to be sure — warns that former ex-gay Peterson Toscano is “promoting immorality” by teaching what the Bible says about gender.
The Society, which opposes an allowance of privacy for Christians, says of Toscano and his “Transfigurations” play about transgender issues in the Bible:
Toscano is someone who has apparently trawled the Bible and attempted to find in it references to people who “do not fit the gender binary’. This sort of argument is not uncommon and anyone who had encountered it will know just how the desire to find such leads to a twisted and selective reading into the text of Scripture, yet sadly many who dismiss the plain teaching of Scripture seem enthralled by such perverse handling of the text.
To “trawl” means to dig deeply; apparently the Society prefers a superficial approach to the Bible, instead. Hence its rejection of the Bible when its stories deviate from strict gender roles policed by self-righteous evangelicals.
But Toscano doesn’t need us to defend him; he ably discusses Transfigurations right here:
Who better to lead a Southern Baptist Convention panel promoting gender stereotypes than a cabal of gender-confused ex-gay political activists?
Photos of the panel show it to be dominated by Exodus International president Alan Chambers and other Exodus leaders including South Carolina ex-gay activist Tim Wilkins, Florida ex-gay activist Christine Sneeringer, and Texas ex-gay activist and SBC gender-issues czar Bob Stith.
The panel appears to be all-white — and all-male except for Sneeringer. Some members are not Southern Baptist.
None of these “ex-gays” has demonstrated academic expertise in gender issues nor a commitment to equal opportunity for women.
Instead of educating the public about gender diversity and individuality, the SBC gender panel plans to recruit Southern Baptist financial support for ex-gay activists and to confuse Christian teen-agers, their pastors, and their parents into believing they aren’t truly manly or womanly unless they mimic a 1950s-era heterosexual “lifestyle.”
