Race and Gender Voting Moore
I was chatting with a friend of mine early today and asked why women so readily vote for sexual predators. He responded, “Most of them are hard-shell Baptist.”
According to a series of exit polls by the Washington Post, the majority of women in Alabama still voted for (alleged) pedophile Roy Moore.
Why?
I was chatting with a friend of mine early today and asked why women so readily vote for sexual predators. He responded, “Most of them are hard-shell Baptist.”
Of course! This highly-churched state is also highly Baptist and, therefore, is highly “Alpha men are good and women are to stay silent and submissive.”
Women are to be used, abused and silenced
In other words, the women are used to being abused and sexually used. They’ve also taught their sons and daughters the normalcy of this pattern.
They honestly don’t care that they are voting for sexual predators because they have grown up with them, collude with them in the practices, and defend them because those predators provide their livelihoods.
That’s what conservative Christianity does: it uses, abuses, and routinely silences women. Women exist for two purposes: as places for men to express their sexuality (witness Mark Driscoll’s famous “women are penis homes” comment) and to breed fresh crops of innocent females for men to also use to express their sexuality.
Conservative Christianity created the Trump/Moore movement
In this seriously disingenuous piece in Christianity Today, Senior Editor Mark Galli laments the loss of Christian witness by the evangelical world because of the Trump/Moore sexual scandals. Nowhere does he take ownership of the fact that the very theology he has spent a lifetime espousing supports the mistreatment and silencing of women. Effectively, Galli’s world made straight the highway, not for Jesus, but for Trump/Moore.
Oh, they’ll give all the right words about how they so value women and how important they are. Yes, indeedy.
But God forbid that a woman’s voice will be heard and heeded. Femaleness is routinely silenced. Women are to serve in their own “spheres of influence,” i.e., in the nursery and in the home. Otherwise, keep your collective mouths shut and let the men lead, for goodness sake.
If a woman should venture out of her particular “sphere,” and, in so doing finds herself sexually harassed, she only gets what she deserves. She wrongfully invaded male territory. Naturally, she is [pick one] raped, fondled, shoved against a wall with a man’s tongue down her throat, grabbed by the *****, shamed, etc. It is her fault.
I know this too well
I know this all too well. I studied theology in one of those “male territory” institutions, which I shall not name. When I was the subject of sexual harassment, I knew darn well that if I complained, I’d be 100% blamed.
I had already heard enough “Why aren’t you home taking care of your husband/children?” comments. The women in my church, totally steeped in the male dominance/female silence world, heard that one of my children became seriously ill. They said, “It’s all her fault: God is punishing her for studying theology. If she stayed home, God would not have had to make her child ill to get her attention.”
Of course, Christian women voted for Roy Moore. They voted for Donald Trump. They did it with the assurance that God would reward them for their continued submissiveness to the male prerogative of sexual aggression.
If the conservative Christian world genuinely doesn’t want to see itself discarded on the trash pile of sad history, then I suggest they get their act together and address the dangers of a theology that supports male sexual aggression, pedophilia, and assault. And they’d better start taking some tough looks at their own practices and institutions.
Christy Thumb
The Rev. Christy Thomas
Author and columnist, the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the North Texas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from her blog, The Thoughtful Pastor, on Patheos.com.