What the hell is a superbishop?

While the Canadian Anglican church careens towards what looks increasingly like an inevitable schism, the global Anglican church is headed in much the same direction. Not just over gay marriage, it turns out, but over something equally scandalous, the ordination of women. I was really disappointed to read this article. I thought that after I'd left the Evangelical Baptists, who at the time had just fought over the issue (my side lost), this wouldn't be too much of a problem anymore. Reason No. 22 why I won't actually call myself an Anglican despite my current preference for that denomination.

(Speaking of which, at the moment I've started going to a Catholic church. I'll write about that another time, perhaps.)

The article is both vague and flat-out wrong on the history so I'll provide my own. Activism during the 1960s led to a concession at the 1968 Lambeth Conference that there were no conclusive, Scripturally-justified arguments on either side of the debate. This is an interesting concession since a conservative could definitely argue that there is just such a Scriptural argument against the ordination of women, and also because it bears an intriguing parallel to Canada's current inconclusive approach to homosexual marriage.

During the 1970s, renegade provinces - Canada, the U.S. and Hong Kong - began ordaining women without formal international permission. At the 1978 Conference, there was an air of crisis over the issue, but it was resolved with a traditional Anglican compromise, one which unfortunately that church seems unwilling to apply to the present issue of gay marriage: live and let live. Provinces were allowed to decide for themselves on the issue of female ordination. The compromise was repeated at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, though shortly thereafter, New Zealand and the U.S. upped the ante by appointing the first female bishops.

By the 1998 conference, formal egalitarians commanded an international majority. The conference was attended by a dozen female bishops, all from Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand. This provoked outrage from some of the more extremist conservative bishops, who apparently believed that the uterus ruins one's ability to discern God's will. Most of the protestors were American; some decided to hold a parallel conference of their own, and others decided simply not to show up for sessions where women were present.

The conference won broad approval for formal gender equality, though with a disturbing compromise option available for those groups within the church who wished to preserve traditional morality, i.e. traditional sexism: the Church would supply acting bishops to parishes who didn't want to accept the authority of a woman over them. These bishops became known by the hilarious informal term of "flying bishops."

The new proposal would provide a formal framework for the informal "flying bishops," under which they'll now be known as "superbishops" and be made available anywhere there's a female bishop. The Daily Mail seems to think this is a new proposal, but actually it's just a formalization of the old policy. There are also rumors, incidentally, that some conservative bishops are considering moving back to Rome over the issue.

This is of course a ludicrous sham compromise and sooner or later will have to be resolved. Ironically, if they were shorter on ethics, some of the egalitarians might be able to win some friends by siding with the conservatives on the other issue that's now threatening schism, homosexuality. (This promises to start other fights at the 2008 Lambeth conference). The oppressor of my victim is my friend.
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Today's Asinine Headline of the Day

The CBC wants us to know that Life exists after teen motherhood: StatsCan.

Actually, StatsCan, I don't think that particular point was ever in doubt.
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The Influence of the Orange Sky Spreads

An American columnist has actually started to defend the Church of the Orange Sky's previously declared position on the elimination of state supervision and authorization of marriage (here and here). Fuck the gay marriage debate, says Froma Harrop: we need a proper "marriage-neutral" government. Harrop also points out that the "traditional marriage" is already a minority of households in America, which I didn't know.

Unfortunately, most writers still don't seem to have grasped the concept. This writer, for example, is apparently upset that the California Supreme Court blew up the "reasonable middle ground compromise" position of non-marriage "civil unions" for gay people. The Boston Globe similarly adds that we should let the debate over civil rights be fought out in the democratic sphere rather than the judicial one.

Of course, if and when these white married writers see their own constitutional rights violated, I suspect you'll see them racing to the courthouse as fast as they can bring their well-paid lawyers to bear, but never mind that! We can "compromise" when it comes to civil rights for gays and lesbians - instead of "real" marriage, they can have second-class civil unions. I think we should make similar compromises on other rights - for example, many people think men should have the right to vote, but I think men shouldn't. I'm sure we can agree on the reasonable middle ground compromise that men can vote during an election, provided it's on a separate "civil plebiscite" ballot, which gets tallied separately and doesn't count towards the real election.

Doubtless if I were able to persuade a state government to pass such a law, legions of good moral anti-gay-marriage men would say, "No, we won't pursue our civil rights through the courts - civil rights are something to be settled democratically." They'd say that... wouldn't they?

As usual, commentators continue to insist that allowing gay marriage is inevitably going to pave the way for allowing polygamy, despite the fact that there is no logical basis for this position whatsoever.

Still, I think the most lunatic argument so far was recently advanced in the Los Angeles Times by a moron named Glen Lavy, who self-righteously seizes the opportunity to gratuitously beat up on bisexuals - a group, I should point out, whose failure to fit properly into either the "mainstream" or "peripheral" boxes tends to make them doubly marginalized. Lavy, who has obviously never befriended a bisexual (or at least realized he was doing so), claims that bisexual people are going to argue that they require polygamy in order to "fully satisfy" themselves - i.e. one same-sex spouse, and one opposite-sex spouse. Right.

It's interesting to see how desperate and pathetic the anti-gay-marriage front has become in the last few years. Their best arguments now can apparently be summed up as "Look! Evil polygamists!" If the California Supreme Court had accepted that argument when it was raised in 1948, inter-racial marriage would also still be illegal.
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Canada's Ridiculous New Abortion Debate, Part 2

A while ago I wrote about the covert attempt to re-introduce the abortion debate in Canada via a private member's bill, noting that the present Criminal Code gives more protection to pregnant women than the new amendment would (read: very little protection at all) but that the C-484 bill on its own probably doesn't matter very much one way or the other.

I said the justice committee, being stonewalled, would pretty much mean the end of the bill, but Liberal MP Brent St. Denis has other ideas, having introduced a bill of his own into the House with the attention of heading off C-484 at the pass, so to speak. (The news article at the link is a Christian evangelical one, so naturally it repeats a deceptive Environics poll from last year in which Canadians say they'd support legislation on this issue). This is potentially even more pointless than the original bill from Ken Epp, since it would formalize something that's already done - consideration of pregnancy or spousal abuse as aggravating factors in sentencing. (The new bill is short and to the point.)

Ken Epp strikes back in the Ottawa Citizen, where he wrote an asinine screed late last week on women's "so-called right to end a pregnancy." If you wanted a clue to Epp's hidden intentions here, there it is. "So-called right"? I realize Epp is only a lawmaker, and therefore has little knowledge about well, the law - but perhaps he should beef up on his Supreme Court precedents, because it is a right, and has been for some while now.

Later, he says the resort to the abortion debate is a "scare tactic" by various groups supposedly conspiring against him. Is Epp really that dense? He used to be a college instructor. He ought to be smarter than he's making himself out to be.

As usual, Epp arrogantly claims that he's standing up for freedom of choice - "Let us not abandon those pregnant women who choose life for their babies." Right.
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I say it here, it comes out there

The Orange Sky led me to prophecy that there would be rapid and forceful reactions to California's decision to let people marry each other, and the Orange Sky was right!

Despite my recent cautionary comments (I use "despite" to maintain the pretence that my blog actually has some international sway on these issues), the religious right has not hesitated to demand that the California court ruling on marriage be nullified as quickly as possible. The Campaign for California Families (which ironically has very little to do with defending families), represented by Liberty Counsel (which equally ironically has very little to do with liberty), wants the court to stay its opinion and wait for the outcome of a referendum on the subject which could be held alongside the fall elections in November. (Under California law, such referenda are common.)

Well, that makes sense. Rather than (a) follow the current law, the Campaign and its lawyers want to (b) follow their speculation about what the law might be in several months' time. I think this is a fabulous idea. There's nothing like judging today's actions by tomorrow's laws. Incidentally, the chief counsel from Liberty is also a dean at Liberty University, which is the university run by the late Jerry Falwell. You know, the guy who blamed the September 11 attacks on "pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle." What the hell is with these people? I doubt most of them know any gay couples who want to marry anyways. Given that they gave up the battle for civil union rights and benefits long ago, this struggle has just become an increasingly petty effort to prevent people who love each other from referring to their relationship with the same word. I wonder if they realize how moronic they look.

Also as I predicted, the mortal terror of polygamy is rearing its head again, despite the fact that polygamy is a consistent Biblical position to take (as if that mattered to the religious right!) - see, for example, the National Review. I wish people would stop talking about this, because it's totally illogical. Even if the fact that recognizing the loving relationships among gay and lesbian people were to somehow strengthen the case for polygamy, which it doesn't on any logical grounds, it wouldn't matter. You can't deny human rights to Group A simply on the basis that it might harm our ability to deal with Group B. Group A's rights have to be recognized - or not recognized - on the basis of that group alone.

As I say every time gay marriage returns to the front page headlines, it's time to have the government stop "marrying" people. There is no compelling reason that the state should give anyone more than some of the benefits, obligations, etc. which would have been imposed by civil unions anyways, and also are granted through common-law marriage. Actually there is no compelling reason in my opinion that the state should be going around determining and legitimating any intimate relationships, but if it is, it certainly should go no farther than what I am suggesting here. I'm fine with the fact that people want to perform a social ritual declaring their desire to have a permanent relationship, but I don't think that we should be relying on the state to lend power to that ritual.

So, we should have only common-law marriages, at least from the perspective of the law. Other groups can perform marriage ceremonies, but without the present legal standing. If the lack of legal standing upsets people, this reveals their underlying dependence on the law to legitimate their activities - something which ought to be unnecessary, especially for Christians (after all, you don't really need the power of the state to prove the "absolute truth" of your morality, right?). People can read into marriage what they wish, and the conservative churches can continue to marry only those people they think "deserve" marriage (read: straight couples), while the rest of us live lives of our own choosing.

Speaking as a resident of territory controlled by the state of Canada, I can confirm to the residents of California what you'll probably also be told by residents of the territories controlled by the states of Massachusetts, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and South Africa: the sky hasn't fallen as a result of our having gay marriage. In fact, there appears to be pretty much just as many - or as few - gay and lesbian people here as there were before, and they still live pretty much just like you, or at least just like they were before.

To their credit, there are three denominations who have come out in open support of the Court's decision to strike down the ban on gay marriage - the United Church, the Episcopalians, and, of course, the Quakers. No surprise with that last one - they haven't really gotten along with the use of state power since, well, ever.
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More from Schlafly

Well, it wasn't quite as dramatic as the mass rejection of Brendan Nelson's half-assed racist attempt at "apologizing" to the Australian aboriginal peoples a couple of months ago, but I guess it's enough for the moment.

A couple days ago the Orange Sky awarded Phyllis Schlafly an honorary penis for her role in suppressing women's rights in America, to complement the honorary degree she's been given by Washington University for the same work. To their credit, about three-quarters of the graduating students and their families showed their irritation at this travesty by turning their backs while Schlafly was given her award. Even Fox News took notice of this. So did the vast majority of the faculty, according to these pictures. Good for them. I think at this point Washington University's reputation needs to be smeared as heavily as is ethically possible.

Okay, first of all, there's no way Schlafly deserves the award. Not least because she's devoted her life to fighting the movement that ensured her right to get the degree in the first place. If she accepts the Orange Sky's honorary penis, at least she'll continue to qualify to speak in the public sphere, something which by her own admission she as a woman should not be doing.

However, in this case most of the fault has to lie with the cluelessly pro-establishment leadership of Washington U. The conflagration over the Schlafly degree served to completely obscure the fact that they also gave an award to the equally unqualified Chris Mathews. As someone in the Feministing forums pointed out, "it's like the University decided to honor both Hitler and Bin Laden, and we only have the energy and resources to be pissed off about one." In an open letter, chancellor Mark Wrighton informed the Orange Sky that

Following the public announcement of the honorary degrees, many in the University community have called for the University to rescind that offer, stating that Mrs. Schlafly is associated with some views, opinions and statements that are inconsistent with the tolerant and inclusive values of the Washington University community. Personally, I do not endorse her views or opinions, and in many instances, I strongly disagree with them.

However, after further consultation with members of the University's Board of Trustees, the University has concluded that it will fulfill its commitment to award the degree to Mrs. Schlafly. I apologize for the anguish this decision has caused to many members of our community.

In bestowing this degree, the University is not endorsing Mrs. Schlafly's views or opinions; rather, it is recognizing an alumna of the University whose life and work have had a broad impact on American life and have sparked widespread debate and controversies that in many cases have helped people better formulate and articulate their own views about the values they hold.

Wow, what a stream of bullshit. We don't have to agree with Schlafly in order to honour her contribution? By that logic, we should be giving honorary degrees to bin Laden after all - and Hitler too, if he were still alive. I'll settle for "Zimbabwe Bob" Mugabe. After all, they too have had "a broad impact" on life here and especially in their own countries. Bravo, Mr. Wrighton. Even if this was a valid reason to give out honorary degrees, Schlafly certainly wouldn't deserve one. After all, by its very nature, the aim of reactionary conservative activism is to maintain the status quo. Schlafly's "impact" on American life is that she has left it pretty much as it was already.

On the one hand, I can see that Wrighton was placed in an awkward position - I'm prepared to accept that he himself really does dislike Schlafly's politics. It's hard to get that far as an academic otherwise. If so, however, the honorable thing to do would have been to resign. Unfortunately, most university administrators are too cowardly to stand on principle. I know mine certainly haven't.

I'm going to close this post with an inspirational message from Schlafly, who, strangely, thinks that her views are Christian ones. (Reason #1276923 why I will no longer qualify my own beliefs as Christian. As a pacifist and an anarchist, I will reluctantly yield that particular field to those who are neither.)

Says Schlafly:

"They are a bunch of bitter women," she said of her detractors. "It was 25 years ago that we buried the Equal Rights Amendment and they are still whining about it."

Her suggestion to them?

"Get a life. Move on. Try to do something with your life."

...

"They probably have taken women's studies courses which say that women have been oppressed and discriminated against in this society, which is ridiculous," she said. "American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the Earth."


...

Schlafly responds by simply saying that college students these days have too much time on their hands.

"If they make a scene, they just make themselves look ridiculous," Schlafly said. "It doesn't bother me. I'm not going to let a bunch of tacky women ruin my day."

You're absolutely right. There's no such thing as discrimination in America, and spouses certainly are never forced to have sex against their will, and women certainly should not have equal rights. It's God's will, after all!
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Little by little by little...

Today the Supreme Court of California de facto legalized gay marriage by overturning the "pro family" ban on such marriages. The decision by the court is an interesting read, if you have the time. The court accepted a similar argument to one that the Church of the Orange Sky has been making for some time now - that sexual orientation, like race, is not a relevant factor in determining an individual's right to marry a person of their choice. In the court's eyes, this is derived indirectly from the fact that orientation, like race or gender, cannot be used as a basis to deny a legal right.

(And in California, thanks to pro-family people in the past, the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right. I'll bet they wish they had a chance for a do-over on that...)

Naturally, supporters of civil rights greeted the news quite happily and apparently there was already long lines forming for marriage certificates, partially in excitement and partially in the fear that the legislature may find a way to overturn this decision over the next few weeks. Because the decision just came down today, many of the "pro-family" organizations haven't prepared detailed responses. I searched in vain for an angry denunciation on the website of Focus on the Family and didn't see one.

(Another tangent: drop the "pro-family" bullshit. Gay people have "families" too. Being "pro-family" in this case usually means being "anti-family," i.e. anti-recognizing-that-gay-people-have-families-too.)

The Associated Press does have an incomplete list of immediate responses which shows that people are pretty much falling along predictable party lines. The White House denounces it as judicial activism (that old chestnut again), James Dobson says it's an "outrage," Randy Thomasson says it's a "disaster," and plaintiff Robin Tyler says it's "about love," which I have to believe it is, in her case. The people in question, particularly those on the opposition side who think it's "judicial activism" but also those on the winning side, are obviously gifted by a divine power of discernment I don't have, despite my close connection to the Orange Sky - they've been able to form their own judgements on the issue so rapidly that it's obvious they haven't even had time to read the decision from the court. That's very impressive.

Firstly, well done to all the human rights organizations in California who were part of this fight. I hope you enjoy your victory.

Secondly, I sure as hell hope the religious conservative backlash to this isn't going to be too strong, though I fear it will be. Opponents really ought to consider that "social tradition," which was the chief argument addressed by government lawyers as well as by "pro-family" organizations, really shouldn't have much in the way of legal standing. And rightly so!

Look at the sad state of legal arguments that so often fall back on such an argument. Intriguingly, much the same position was advanced way back in 1948, when the same court ruled on an inter-racial marriage ban in Perez v. Sharp, and came to a decision on the same narrow division (4 to 3) as it did in today's verdict. With that judgement the California Supreme Court became the first 20th century court to overturn an anti-miscegenation law, as they were then known; it took until 1967 for the Supreme Court of the United States to agree, when it freed a Virginia couple convicted of living together as part of its judgement in Loving v. Virginia.

Tradition was also invoked, with much the same result, in R. v. Knowles ex parte Somerset in 1772, when the British courts effectively paved the way for the abolition of slavery; and in Wedderburn v. Knight in 1777, when the Scottish courts concurred. (Those with a literary bent may be interested to know that Knight's successful case was prepared by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.) That's not to say it never works - for example, it was basically accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford for example, when that court agreed to uphold the institution of slavery in 1857. In part this galvanized the growth of the Republican Party, which, despite its present racist politics, was actually originally formed as a progressive anti-slavery party.

Over the next few days look for angry responses from conservative religious groups claiming we must return to the traditional family and, inevitably, intimating that this will one day pave the way for polygamy politics.

Let's try and disentangle that one for a moment too. Religious conservatives want us to ban gay marriage, which is clearly not Biblical (whatever you think about the issue, we have to agree that those who wrote the Hebrew Bible, in particular, would have been shocked by the prospect of two men marrying one another); in part because they also want to keep banning polygamous marriage or at least concubinage, which clearly is Biblical (again, whatever you think of the issue, the Hebrew laws in their original form obviously included provisions for multiple marriages).

The inconsistencies continue. They no longer favour the ban on inter-racial marriages, which was once Biblical (though arguably this ban was lifted by the prophets or at least by the New Testament), nor are they in favour of banning divorces, which would also be Biblical (the Old Testament didn't ban divorce, but Jesus did, or at least severely restricted it, depending on which gospel you assign the most primacy to). They also don't support inheriting wives of dead brothers (Biblical), stealing and then raping and marrying prisoners of war (also Biblical), required marriage to victims of rape (you guessed it... still Biblical!), or forced marriages of two employees imposed as part of the regular employer-employee relationship (also Biblical, though with a bit of modern re-interpretation). They oppose prostitution, which is Biblical (at least until 1 Corinthians 6). They are in favour of banning sex outside of marriage, which is not a Biblical position to take; and opposed to lesbianism, which isn't mentioned in the Bible at all, except in Paul's sarcastic rant in Romans 1-2, which, given the extent of the hyperbole, I seriously doubt he meant us to take literally.

So sometimes they side with the Old Testament, sometimes they side with the New Testament, and sometimes they don't side with any Testament at all. This leads me to believe that the Bible is actually completely irrelevant to the "pro-family" organizations, despite the fact that they invariably claim to be conservative and Christian.
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Speaking of Gender and Marriage...

Test question

Please select the answer which best describes the following passage:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.


(A.) Fucking right

(B.) Wait... why isn't that a law already?

(C.) Wow, that's a really "dumb idea."


If you answered (C.) to the above, the University of Washington is interested in granting you an honorary degree for your services to the cause of patriarchy.

Link goes to an interview with arch-anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, a woman so androcentrist that what she really deserves from Washington U is an honorary penis. The text is from the Equal Rights Amendment, the American constitutional amendment which would grant full legal equality to men and women in the U.S., if it hadn't been rejected every year it was proposed since 1920. Schlafly has spent a good chunk of her long political career opposing the amendment, which, in her words, "was a dumb idea in the first place."

The interview also contains a few other nuggets from Schlafly, who apparently believes that once women have married, they're not allowed to refuse sex to their husbands - and if they do, their husbands are allowed to "rape" them. I use quotation marks because Schlafly says it isn't rape at all, and that getting married is equivalent to giving consent in perpetuity.

In a way I suppose it's not surprising that women of the religious right like Schlafly oppose the Equal Rights Amendment - it was, after all, first proposed by a Quaker activist, and the political views of Quakers and conservative Christians usually go together like water and oil.

The Church of the Orange Sky calls upon all universities to forestall this ludicrous and demeaning practice of granting "honourary degrees." It is a holdover from medieval simony and should be treated as such.
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A Spanking Good Time

Holy fucking Christ, I don't even know where to begin on this one. I'm only sorry I'm late to the party - other bloggers found out about this a year or so ago. Let's start with a quiz: who do you think is speaking in the following passage:

I'm not kidding, I felt my stomach drop when I saw my ****** bring out a heavy belt. It is one of those old ones that came with a silver buckle and had a name stamped on it. He doesn't wear it much anymore because it is to heavy for style today. I only got seven, which I have to admit I thought was lenient although I was howling the whole time. I don't get a discipline often and it is amazing how quickly I forget how much it hurts--just a blinding pain. You would think this is the end of the story wouldn't you? Well, you're wrong, when I mess up, I make sure I do it right.

If you guessed "rebellious teenaged son," you'd be wrong. This is a woman speaking about her husband.

A few years ago, back when I was writing at Notes from the Abattoir, I told the strange story of an online Christian sex toys store. Today it's time to move on to the story of Christian S&M (or is it theologically rationalized domestic violence? Or just complete and utter fucking stupidity? I can't tell).

Arguably the Christian domestic discipline movement may be summarized by this $14 thong, the front of which reads "this side for loving" and the back, "this side for spanking." I think I want to cry.



What really disturbs me here is not that couples are engaging in certain practices of ritual dominance and submission. This is present in plenty of non-religious contexts as well, and while I don't find it particularly appealing myself, as a general rule I really don't care all that much about what two consenting persons decide to do with their time. A couple things are really troublesome about the Christian domestic discipline movement to me, however, despite the above - one of which is that it comes at least within striking distance (ha ha) of legitimizing male domestic violence, and the other of which is that God is called on to defend this. (Naturally this is so, because evangelicals call on God to legitimize damn near everything.)

My fairly usual sprinkling of profanity above has probably done more than enough to communicate my own particular biases and prejudices on this subject, but nevertheless, I'm going to try in this entry to let the men and women in this lifestyle speak for themselves as much as possible before saying something myself. I admit I doubt anyone who practices this lifestyle is ever actually going to read this blog, but from time to time people have a strange way of showing up here after I cite their blogs (there's probably some sort of automated tracking software for this purpose, but if so I'm ignorant of it).


Forms of Discipline

First, and in all fairness, it would be inappropriate to summarize this as "wife-beating," or even "wife-spanking," since in the words of participants, it is a general pattern of wifely submission, of which physical discipline is only one part:

Domestic discipline is not spanking. A domestic discpline relationship begins when a couple decides that one partner will maintain a leadership role. For us, this means a married couple with the husband in that role. We also believe that DD means that the "head" will utlize discipline when necessary. What form that discipline will take is determined by each couple. Most couples who use domestic discipline will include spanking, but some do not. (here)

Most commonly, the husband is expected to "discipline" his wife for some perceived failure to follow the rules.

Occasionally, of course, the woman "fails" to understand what she has done wrong, but is expected to submit to discipline anyways, in order to reinforce the authority of the husband. This female blogger explains:

We even had one time where we really were not on the same page. He insisted on spanking and I didnt agree the spanking was deserved, but I didn't argue in order to show him that I really wanted him to be HOH. And on his side, he didnt' back down from what he believed to be the right thing. In the past if I would've even given a hint to disagreeing with him he would've backed off in order to not "force it" on me, but this time he stood firm. We never did figure out who was "right" that night, but we felt really good with the outcome.

In addition to the above, some practitioners advocate "maintenance discipline," sort of the physical equivalent to doing a general prayer of repentance once in a while for any sins you forgot to confess specifically. In the words of this blogger, for instance:

Maintenance Discipline involves regular spanking to maintain the woman's good behavior and attitude. A Maintenance Discipline spanking takes place outside of and separate from any disciplinary spanking that she may receive for specific misbehavior. Importantly, a Maintenance Discipline is also a regular event that takes place at the same interval of time, unlike a disciplinary spanking, which will only occur when the woman needs guidance and physical encouragement to behave properly. So a Maintenance Discipline might occur every day, or every week, or every month, depending on what the couple agree is necessary or depending on what the male HOH decides is necessary for the woman.

The blogger in question goes in in great detail, discussing various flows and interconnections of "masculine" and "feminine energy."


The Importance of Masculine Leadership and Feminine Submission

Men are the heads of household - the "HOH," in the lingo of the discipline movement - and thus a man is "not answerable to anyone except himself, the laws of the land and God."

The woman, by contrast, must submit, because she is not capable of sound judgement:

Women respond to emotional content, not rational content. Women filter out everything that is said or done to them through an emotional filter. This is an emotional filter, not a rational one. Every single thing that is said or done to a woman passes through her emotional filter. Every single experience she has is directed through her emotional filter so that she can extract what she considers to be significant meaning for herself.

Therefore, according to the same author, discipline is necessary to force important concepts through women's emotional blindness:

Spanking is an emotional experience for a woman. If you doubt that, you simply need to remember that spanking is intended to result in crying. The woman should be brought to tears whenever she is spanked by her HOH. Her crying indicates emotion. Intense emotion. This is why it is so important to spank a woman to tears whenever she is disciplined or punished. Because spanking her to tears gets her attention. It is necessary to spank a woman to tears so that rational content can be slipped past her emotional filters and inserted into her brain.

A second, similar perspective, states that

Spanking is effective because it is the backdoor to a woman's mind. A woman 's buttocks are the *ears* that she cannot stop up and refuse to listen. When coupled with a firm, but concerned voice, it can say things that will not be heard any other way.

Another blogger explains that women need to learn proper submission to their man, much, I suppose, as Christians must learn proper submission to God:

The secret to getting past a woman's resistance is much the same as for getting a motor vehicle through a stretch of mud on a back road. Keep going and do not get bogged down...

By nature, women test a man's resolve. It is only after he has proven himself capable of handling her that this attribute fades...

This is where *time* is paramount, because many women are aware that they can *outlast* a man's hand. As a result, one way of assuring a woman that the man is up to the task at hand is to have a suitable implement - commonly a paddle or hairbrush in the United States - already in hand. Not only does the visual effect convey the message that the utensil in hand will *win* over a woman's brain when applied to her bare buttocks, it also keeps the man from the awkward realization that his hand is inadequate to task at hand.

The emotional collapse of the woman should be tacitly palpable. There should be no doubt in her mind, or his, that *he* is in control. Despite politically correct rhetoric, there is security in the knowledge that the man is *in charge*. That singular fact of life explains why *domestic discipline* survived - even thrived under - the feminist onslaught.

The Role of God

According to the Christian Domestic Discipline blog,

First, God put men in charge. It is sexist; but it is also true. Despite reams of politically correct propaganda, God did make men a little brighter and a little stronger so that they could be in charge.

Second, He gave men a mechanism for maintaining order. Call it *domestic discipline*, *moderate restraint*, or *wife spanking*. Properly used, it will sufficiently stabilize the relationship between a man and woman so that they are able to raise viable children even in a turbulent age.

Third, both physically and psychologically, He designed women to accept the authority of men. As Leah pointed out, most of the time it is the WOMAN, rather than the man, who wants discipline in the home. When men are unable to provide that which the woman requires or unwilling to restrain their own behavior, women want out of the relationship in about the same percentage as request *domestic discipline*.

Some writers tend to legitimize discipline, and submission more generally, with the argument that the model of Christ shows us that he who submits is the one who benefits most from the relationship of dominant and submissive. Of course, if that were true, they would follow the writings of Jesus and Paul, which say that we should "submit to one another." Instaed, what's really involved here is a one-directional relationship, with wives submitting to husbands. This reduces the teachings of Jesus and at least some of Paul - that in serving one another we abolish repressive relations of power and thus are united in the kingdom of God - and restore repression in the form of the husband-woman relationship.

I think it's only fair to point out that there are differences in perspective here - another website, for example, claims that on their website, "You won't find the concept that God mandates or requires this lifestyle."

It would also be wrong to suggest that this phenomenon is simply a group of men plotting to write websites legitimating domestic abuse - actually, it's striking that many of the women writers - like Debbie and April, for example - say it was their idea to enter into this lifestyle. A few months ago, April complained on her blog that discipline had become inconsistent:

Where do my feelings and needs fall within his leadership though. Am I supposed to just stand back and be okay with the fact that something is spankable one day, but not the next time and it is the next time or three after that, but not the one after that. Am I supposed to be okay with me following our agreement to journal my behavior each day and having it ignored. Am I supposed to be a robot that is able to just flip a switch to the proper mindset whenever he decides the he finally has the time or energy to address a behavior even if it happened days ago? How am I supposed to respond when he thinks that a spanking will fix everything and reset things between us and there's no discussion involved?

What you are supposed to be is a free human being subject only to God. Christ told us to "decide for yourselves what is right" (Luke 12:57).

It's telling, in my opinion, that it's fairly difficult to find support for this sort of "domestic discipline" lifestyle even within the New Testament, whose ideas on gender are rather less progressive than those that are common today. In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul envisioned human beings, both men and women, as free moral agents who should enter into marriage only in mutual submission, and only if they had no other choice. Granted Paul himself seems to have been unmarried and not all that concerned about the subject of intra-marital affairs, but this is quite the opposite of a ringing endorsement of this rigid "discipline" and the resulting infantilization of women. You have to get into the more conservative books, like 1 Timothy, to get anywhere even close.

It grieves me that people value their integrity, freedom and humanity so little.
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Canada's Ridiculous New Abortion Debate

This post is an official social policy paper of the Church of the Orange Sky and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Mad Reverends.

I need to preface this post by stating that I am male. Normally this would be irrelevant, but on the subject of women's reproductive rights, there's a long history of men telling women what can and can't be done with and inside their bodies. As I will note closer to the end, there's a real problem in doing this with regard to problems that apply only to women's bodies. I'm trying to be as empathetic as possible, but under the circumstances there are obvious limits.

So then:

Continuing our ongoing series on the social consequences of unwanted orgasms, we come to the problem of the mildly ridiculous debate which has sprung up in Canada over the last few months around private Bill C-484, introduced by federal Conservative MP Ken Epp back in December and recently passed through Second Reading by a cowed and useless minority Parliament. I was invited to a protest of the bill last weekend here in Ottawa and chose not to attend.

On the bright side for those who oppose the Bill, it's now been passed to the Justice committee for a detailed review, which means the bill is effectively dead. That's because the Conservatives recently shut down all Parliamentary committee work on the grounds that committees with opposition MPs on them are excessively democratic and can't be trusted not to ask inappropriate questions about the Conservative Party's recently exposed elections-related money-laundering scheme, which was intended not only to defraud the Canadian public but to subvert the fundamental laws of our political order, which guarantee free and fair elections.

But let's put that to one side and move back to C-484. As I was saying, the Justice committee isn't doing any work at all, which means it may not get around to working on the Epp bill before the end of the current session.

The bill looks innocuous enough on first glance that you'd think it wouldn't warrant the explosion of support and criticism in the blogsphere which has occurred since it was first introduced a few months ago. The "Unborn Victims of Crime Act" would make it a crime to "cause the death of a child... while committing... an offence against the mother of the child" - i.e., in the strongest case, if you kill a pregnant woman and her fetus dies as well, you are guilty of killing two people. The bill makes specific exemptions for "lawful termination of the pregnancy," i.e. abortion, and "any act or omission by the mother" herself. It also includes what I've taken to calling the "wife-beating exception," which lets an accused person demand that charges against him be reduced if he committed the act "in the heat of passion."

The religious right has never wielded the same influence in Canada, but abortion has always been a problem for them, particularly because - unlike the U.S. - Canada presently has no laws regulating abortion at all. This is a fortunate consequence of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which unfortunately has become somewhat unpopular in recent years as the Liberals and Conservatives push through new and blatantly unconstitutional laws - like indefinite imprisonment without charge, for example, which apparently is helping us fight terrorism. So naturally any new conservative law relating to fetuses is going to be greeted with great suspicion by pro-choice groups. What's particularly interesting or indeed ironic in this case, however, is that virtually all the religious right groups claim to have come down on the side of preventing what they say is "violence against women" in this case, and virtually all the feminist and pro-choice groups haven't. (Of course, this isn't really about "violence against women" at all, but I'll get to that later.)

In this rather lengthy post, I'm going to look at the history of abortion in Canada, the rather dubious positions both of Epp and his detractors, and then the radical new proposals of the Church of the Orange Sky for building a better, more God-fearing Canada.


1. A Brief History of Abortion in Canada

It occurs to me that perhaps not everyone is all that well-informed about the history of abortion in Canada, which is in many ways much more interesting than the silly Roe v. Wade debates in the U.S., since it involves such sexy and exciting violations of basic democratic rights as wrongful imprisonment and court and legislative reversals of "not guilty" verdicts. For this reason, you may be interested to know, the basic Canadian right not to have an Appeals Court swap your acquittal by jury for a conviction and a prison sentence - which used to be something they could do routinely - is another unintended consequence of the abortion debate.

Until the 1960s, abortion was theoretically a crime punishable by up to life in prison. The law was passed in 1869, probably (though I don't know this) in the beginning stages of new social movements of that time period which campaigned against contraception and other reproductive rights as well (these too were outlawed in 1892).

In practice this law was difficult to enforce, since doctors convinced that an abortion was necessary would simply make decisions in vague informal "committees" in order to dilute legal liability and make a conviction difficult. One of Canada's first female doctors, Emily Stowe, was actually charged with performing an abortion on a pregnant teenager in the 1870s, who later committed suicide (Stowe was eventually acquitted). Effectively it became increasingly difficult to charge people with performing abortions, but occasionally charges were laid for other reasons - for example, Leon Azoulay was charged with murder after one of his patients died, as a result of an abortion procedure, during the 1950s. Azoulay was convicted, but the Supreme Court chose to free him on the somewhat dubious technicality that the evidence in the case was excessively complex and the trial judge had allowed the jury to become "confused."

To strengthen the law, Pierre Trudeau, that grand father of multiculturalism and other fictions, "liberalized" the abortion law in 1969 by permitting abortions in any case where a woman could persuade the members of a hospital's "therapeutic abortion committee" to authorize the procedure. In practice, of course, this was basically meaningless - it wasn't hard for hospitals under the influence of anti-abortion groups to either stack the committees or bury the committees under so much paperwork and obscure regulations that decisions would never be made. Still, Canadians will probably remember this new abortion law, if for other reasons: it's the same one in which Trudeau legalized homosexuality and contraception, and famously declared that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation."

Enter Henry Morgentaler, a survivor of Auschwitz who moved to Canada after World War II. In 1969, angered by the new law, Morgentaler quit his family practice in Quebec and began openly and exclusively performing abortions. In 1970, before the Roe v. Wade crisis in the U.S., he was arrested in Quebec on charges of performing abortions. Over the next several years, Morgentaler was tried several times on similar charges, and in each case, in a testament (in my opinion) to the honour and integrity of the people of Québec, juries refused to convict him even in the face of clear and persuasive evidence. (Morgentaler himself openly testified that he was breaking the law, and even collected evidence against himself.) By the 1980s, Morgentaler had moved to Ontario and was charged there too; once again, he was acquitted in 1983, but the Court of Appeals ordered him sent to jail anyways. (This prompted the legal protection of jury verdicts I mentioned earlier.) Finally, in Canada's own Roe v. Wade decision in 1988, Morgentaler took the abortion laws to the Supreme Court and had them overturned on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court justices were so busy finding novel ways to beat up on the abortion part of the Criminal Code that, even though the abortion law was thrown out on a 5-2 vote, the judges failed to agree on a single justification for doing so, which means that technically it set no binding precedent preventing the Conservatives from introducing a new abortion law tomorrow.

In 1988, the Conservatives predictably reacted with righteous indignation, of course, and promptly attempted to pass a new law in 1989 which would re-criminalize abortion. (Even in the 1980s, you see, the first natural response of a so-called "law and order" government, upon learning that its laws are in fact illegal, is to pass them again anyways. I have a new idea: people who pass unconstitutional laws should be jailed for the maximum term their brand new "law" would have sentenced convicts to.) We came pretty close to not having legal abortion in this country: this law actually passed the House of Commons (the same month, as it happens, that a Waterloo student bled to death during an attempted self-abortion), but the Senate vote was tied, and that was the end of it. Thank God for our lazy, good-for-nothing senators. No attempt to pass abortion laws has been made since.

It's a nice story of civil resistance, but it's worth muddying the waters a little by noting that Morgentaler has profited handsomely from his work. It's also worth noting that it's almost certainly lunacy to frame the abortion resistance movement as a personal crusade by Morgentaler, once again turning even women's reproductive rights into a "great man" theory of history. I'm afraid I don't know enough to overturn this somewhat ridiculous historical bias, but I do know that in 1970, three dozen women closed Parliament for the first time in Canada's history by chaining themselves into the gallery as part of a protest against anti-abortion laws.

Which brings us to the present.


2. Epp's New Movement

Laws like Epp's were deliberately passed by religious right groups in several American states, including the Carolinas, on the grounds that it would give them a legal beachhead from which they could easily proceed to outlaw abortions. These laws have also led to charges against pregnant drug addicts and a variety of other dubious outcomes. Epp claims that this isn't the purpose of the new law and that he has built in protections to make sure this won't become part of a renewed campaign against abortion, which I suppose is half-true (he has built in protections, but it's also part of a renewed campaign).

Guilt by association is not solid either legally or logically, but it's interesting to note the company Epp is keeping nonetheless. Pretty much all the major public backers of this bill are people who have already publicized their desire to see abortion re-criminalized, which has to make one wonder about their intentions here. There's the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF), and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, naturally. There's also Don Hutchinson, lawyer for one of my old denominations, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Even Focus on the Family is getting in on the action.

(Some of the other supporters of the bill, I should add, are somewhat more dubious; one, for example, appears to believe that opposition to Epp's bill is the result of a Red conspiracy against the Harper government. It's too bad this blogger seems so paranoid, because I think he and I may actually agree on the matter of abortion as such.)

The argument seems to be that the new law is necessary to protect pregnant women. Focus on the Family proudly proclaims that "Canada’s Parliament has never been closer to passing legislation that would make it a crime to kill or injure an unborn child during an assault upon the baby’s mother" - making it sound as though this dubious extension of "law and order" is in fact a long-fought-for right rather than an extremely recent innovation. Hutchinson, mildly idiotically, goes so far as to claim that the new law is pro-choice because it will protect "the choice a woman makes when she decides to give birth to the child within her" from the mad psychotics lurking on street corners looking for opportunities to kill unborn fetuses.

Well and good, but completely pointless. Assault and murder are already crimes in Canada, and in each case, harm to the fetus is already an aggravating factor in determining sentences for people convicted of those crimes. Ironically, the existing law actually does more to punish people who attack pregnant women than the new one will, because under Canadian law, the sentence for a second death (in this case, the fetus) is served concurrently with, or at the same time as, the sentence for the first (in this case, the mother). If you're planning on killing a pregnant woman (which I sincerely hope you aren't, for obvious reasons), you're already looking at a life sentence for murder, the sentence to be determined in part by the fact that she is pregnant. The new rules aren't going to make the slightest bit of difference in that respect.

Intriguingly, the supporters of this bill seem to be aware of these problems. For that reason, the COLF is arguing that the new law is needed because it recognizes "the human dignity of the unborn child and the value of human life." Presumably talking points are being shared around by the various pro-life groups that are part of the new campaign, because this is basically duplicating the same arguments made by Epp, who apparently told pro-choice and anti-war (nice combination) activist Carolyn Egan, in a televised debate, that we need to recognize "the humanity of the unborn child."

Why is it so important that we charge someone with two crimes instead of one? Well, because we need to recognize the crime against the fetus as well as the crime against the mother, obviously. So then, the issue really isn't about "protecting women who are pregnant," and it's only vaguely about "protecting" the fetus - it's about "recognizing" the fetus. Recognizing that it is "human," that it has "dignity," that it has "value," and so forth. It's not surprising that pro-life people would be attracted to this position. But can they really be surprised when pro-choice advocates then worry that this is a stealth move to give human rights to the fetus?

As a last angry note, I have to say that there's some misleading talk going on, bordering on blatant lies, when people like Hutchinson imply that this law has nothing to do with the broader pro-life and anti-abortion movement. Do you really expect us to believe that, if and when Bill C-484 is passed into law, at some point you're not going to tell us "we've already recognized the dignity of the fetus, now we need more laws to protect its life!" Let's be honest with each other.


3. The New Anti-Epp Opposition

My expectation for honesty and integrity applies equally to the opposition to C-484, and unfortunately, so does my disappointment. The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), for example, has released a set of talking points, 14 in total, arguing that this Bill makes it harder to reduce domestic violence against pregnant women (at worst, it simply does nothing to change the present situation, except for wasting many man-hours of activism on the part of various conservative action groups), that it compromises women's rights (it doesn't, though the next step on this road certainly might), and so on.

The fact that the opposition has taken the form of suggesting we must not give human rights to the fetus is also somewhat problematic in that it seems to have ignored the rather more important question of whether the fetus counts as human in the first place. If it does, then there would seem to be no problem in adding this new law, even if it is a rather pointless exercise in frivolity in terms of what it will actually do to reduce violence against woman. The correct course of action would therefore be to ignore this altogether and concentrate on more important issues.

What this debate risks moving into is a very dangerous territory in which we're going to let the Criminal Code - and, therefore, whichever political front holds the keys to the Code at any given time - determine through the law what counts as "human" and what doesn't. This is a subjective and philosophical question, not an objective or legal one, and unfortunately both the pro-life and pro-choice camps can point to some fairly easy if rather flawed milestones: conception, and birth.

Unfortunately, mammalian evolution didn't take into account the current ethical dilemma while it was designing the reproductive process, and English political philosophy - based as it is on the perspective (for the most part) of elite male Brits - didn't really take into account the mammalian reproductive process in determining what counted as human life. (Indeed, for a sizeable chunk of the time since the Magna Carta, most fully born human lives didn't really qualify for a high standard of ethical protection either.) The gradual extension of civil rights is something many people feel was a great accomplishment in our culture - on the other hand, the very fact that I've used the term "extend" there suggests the crucial point that "human" rights, despite what the name might imply, are awarded through political recognition, not actually possessed by virtue of being human.

In this case, the opposition to C-484 appears to argue that even some limited set of human rights must not be extended to the fetus because this would lead to the end of abortion and to further oppression of women, particularly women who are pregnant in this case. They may or may not be right, but they're playing a dangerous game by letting themselves get lured onto a rigged playing field. Historically, the people who argue against the extension of rights usually lose, in the long run, ironically because they end up sounding conservative and self-serving. In this case, for example, no one appears to be arguing why humanity shouldn't be legally recognized in the case of an unborn fetus, except that it would cause great difficulty to a pregnant woman. This is a terrible argument, because once the religious pro-Epp side hears it, they're almost certainly going to gleefully point out that human rights cannot be denied simply because doing otherwise would inconvenience others. (This was precisely the same argument that Anglican radical abolitionists made in R. v. Knowles in 1772, and in doing so they rightly won the right of emancipation for slaves living in England proper.)


4. The Orange Sky Speaketh

Aside from some somewhat dubious arguments about legal and political "slippery slopes," I really don't think there's much point in getting excited about C-484 one way or the other, since, as feminist groups correctly point out, this isn't going to do much about violence against women - pretty much as one would expect from a law produced by the same government which recently kneecapped Status of Women Canada and, according to my contacts at any rate, also dropped strategic gender policy at the Canadian International Development Agency. It's not worth having a debate about rights of the fetus.

First, while pro-choice groups waste valuable effort opposing a bill even they admit is basically pointless one way or the other in terms of preventing violence, we're ignoring the real problems relating to reproductive rights in this country. There is, for example, effectively no right to abortion as a medical procedure on Prince Edward Island, where, in open violation of the ruling from R. v. Morgentaler, the provincial government will fund an abortion only if a woman gets referrals from two doctors (effectively recreating in practice the "committee" approval process the Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional), and only if she leaves the province for the procedure, since no publicly funded facilities on the island handle abortions. Other provinces, similarly, have adopted various policies under which abortions are only partially or negligibly funded by the medicare system. Despite the fact that this is an open violation of the Canada Health Act, the religious right in provinces such as B.C. continues to lobby to extend such policies to yet more provinces. What this creates is a precursor to what would follow any attempt to ban abortion nationally - a system in which private procedures are always available to those with enough money. (You'd think this would trouble the religious right, since their continuing paranoia about high immigrant birthrates reveals nascent eugenic tendencies, and historically eugenicists aren't terribly excited about poor people having more babies than rich people.)

Usually these campaigns - or at least the propaganda that I have seen in churches - try to argue that we shouldn't be using taxpayer money to kill fetuses and then note that women could still choose to perform abortions but would have to use their own money to do so) -- which makes a little bit of sense until you remember that our government currently uses $20 billion a year in taxpayer money to buy guns and tanks to kill foreigners and intimidate the First Nations, and no one suggests that we should privatize that program on the basis that people should get to make and pay for decisions over life and death all by themselves.

Forget this notion of "human rights" in the Criminal Code. The real threat to freedom of choice in Canada lies in these insidious efforts to prohibit abortion via creeping regulation.

Secondly, even if as a society we were to recognize the fetus as an independent human being, I'm not sure why this would affect abortion at all - at least in terms of criminalization. At the point when any person is not biologically capable of surviving without vital assistance from the body of another person, to refuse that assistance might be immoral, but it is certainly not criminal. For example, if I refuse to donate a kidney to someone who needs one, they may die. Personally, I would probably feel I had an ethical obligation in that situation. But it would plainly be ridiculous to make it a criminal offence for me to refuse - and indeed, if the Conservatives wrote into the Criminal Code that everyone must consent to medical procedures intended to save others' lives or risk criminal penalties, the religious right would probably hit the roof, even though agreed with me that as individuals we have a moral obligation to render assistance wherever it is needed.

There are a couple of common responses to this argument. One is that by having sex you consented to the responsibility of pregnancy, something clearly weak on philosophical grounds and equally clearly baseless on legal grounds, unless of course you signed some sort of contract beforehand, which would probably kill the mood. This response also falters in part because one of my other concerns, which is that in the present legal and social context, and given some prevailing trends in biology, it is not possible to ban abortion without imposing unfair and sexist constraints on women. No one really seems to be in favour, for example, of criminalizing a man's decision to walk away during a pregnancy; indeed, the absolute minimum legal liabilities of men are limited to nominal financial commitments after birth, in the form of child support payments. If men have the right to abandon a pregnancy, it follows that women must as well.

Of course, even more laws could be written restricting what men could do in such cases, though I suspect that many of the men involved in conservative politics on abortion would start to have second thoughts at that point. Plus, that would probably lead us in a logical sequence through a series of legal amendments back to something akin to Levitican marriage law, in which sex equals possession equals ownership and women are "protected" by overt subjugation to men.

If worst comes to worst, at some point a Conservative majority parliament will try to re-criminalize abortion. I say let them. Such a bill could conceivably pass Parliament, presumably under some sort of emergency accelerated debate and voting procedure since the NDP, the Bloc, and even most of the Liberals can be trusted to fight tooth and nail on this issue. The Senate is more pro-choice than it was in 1989, so it would almost certainly get kill the bill, just like it did the last time. And even if this didn't happen, the first legal challenge would probably be on its way to the Supreme Court in a matter of hours. The Supreme Court would then uphold the prevailing position that abortion laws are unconstitutional, and hopefully this time at least three of the majority would agree on the same justification for their verdict. At that point the issue would be pretty much finished permanently - since it would then become effectively impossible for any further legislative debate - and the anti-abortion movement would find itself about ten steps back of where it is now. God willing, they'd then turn to a much more effective way of reducing abortions, like better sex education, more access to contraceptives, and more access to social welfare measures for new families and single mothers.

All of this could happen with or without the coercive power of the Criminal Code, which is probably why the lowest abortion rates in the world happen to be in those countries with liberalized abortion laws.
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Manly Men and their Manly God

I've been reading ahead in my ongoing commentary project and made it into Judges, which is chiefly concerned with the dangers of unchecked militarism on the one hand, and pagan anarchy on the other. I'll get it to it in due time, but I want to note in the meantime the asinine bullshit and general lunacy that may be found in my Man's Bible and, for that matter, in a great deal of Christian literature. (The first major rise of modern Christian masculinity was a Victorian movement, but it's resumed again since the 1980s.)

My Men's Bible takes the story of Gideon, a demonstrably manipulative brigand who slaughters both foreign Midianites and his fellow Israelites, brazenly demands one unnecessary miracle after another from God, and, through the glorious hand of Bill Hybels, turns it into a declaration of the "authentically male," something that is presumably missing from today's "effeminate" church.

An entire generation of men, Hybels declares idiotically, are "lost in a cloud of confusion." What this confusion may be is unclear, though in part it supposedly stems from failed fathers. We as men have been collectively "emasculated" by contemporary society, Hybels goes on. (Emasculated? Really? Because the continually high sexual assault rates would seem to suggest otherwise...)

Then we get to the good part (no, that wasn't it). Hybels, veering from the merely idiotic into the truly preposterous, says thad God wants to save men - not just from sin, but also from social emasculation - and turn them into "macho men" who will "take risks and make commitments," reclaim the "freedom of authentic masculinity" and gain a "divine elasticity." As official spokesmen of God, Hybels's New Man ill "lead with firmness, the submit with humility"; "challenging with a cutting edge, then encourage with enthusiasm"; and, best of all, "fight aggressively for just causes." Such a man is a "masterpiece": these "authentically male" people were what God had in mind when he made the world.

Mr. Hybels, I have never met you, and I will never meet you (nor, likely, anyone else who has), so I can't speak about you personally, but with the greatest respect possible under the circumstances, your writing here makes you sound like a complete fucking imbecile. I'm trying to see things from your point of view, but I can't seem to get my head... well, you know the rest.

In fairness, Hybels should not be condemned in isolation simply for raving like a crazed chauvinist loon. Even if we could find a sufficiently lofty and righteous perch from which to hurl the stones, we'd have to include the other Promise Keepers, etc., as well. They too have seven manly "promises" - sworn despite the Bible's regular skepticism about oaths, and Jesus's prohibition against swearing them at all - which, ironically but significantly, claim to "reach beyond" race and creed, but not beyond sex. Hybels himself is one of those Willow Creek idiots who regularly bombard and bamboozle the church with nonsense like Contagious Christians.

"Authentic manhood"? If Hybels really wants "authentic manhood," he should read his Bible and find a better role model than an obvious scoundrel like Gideon, who shamelessly demands miraculous proofs from God, murders his "brothers" in Israel, and builds idols out of captured war treasure. He also takes dozens of wives, and keeps extra mistresses on the side, which presumably must also fall into Mr. Hybels's concept of "authentic manhood." Which is strange, because I know of no instance in which Hybels actually embraces elitist polygamy - basically harem-keeping - on a grand scale.

I'm not sure which is worse from a Christian perspective: the offence against God, or the offence against humanity. Hybels's notion of masculinity obviously has much more to do with prevailing militarism-tinged ideals in Western culture than it does with the Jesus Christ he says he serves. There's a basic contradiction between "authentic masculine" power and authority on the one hand, and submission to Christ on the other. Submission is seen as a feminine act, and if we were truly to embrace the concept of total servanthood and humility, then we could not have authority over women. So instead we combine leadership and servanthood in a farcical notion of proud, manly "servant-leadership," and its corollary, which reverts Jesus Christ's suggestion that to serve is to lead and instead proclaims that to lead is to serve, which is a convenient declaration for those who already lead, because it means they can keep leading without calling into question the fact that supposedly they are humble and have rejected worldly power in order to serve God.

There's also the offence against humanity - which, according to the Mosaic law as well as Christ, becomes an offence against God - which is that Hybels's grand manly man requires a suitable number of women, children, and effeminate failed men - preferably non-Christians - in order to truly exercise their power. An authentic Christian woman, may assume, does not "lead with firmness," but only "submit with humility"; she weeps but does not "fight aggressively." Actually, she probably cries rather than weeps, the latter being a much more manly term. She also does not have Hybels's "freedom." Probably, if she's a good Christian woman, she doesn't want freedom - merely humble service to a properly masculine husband.

Then there's the fact that, despite the hereditary status of the priesthood, the God described in the early Old Testament (including in the section of Judges on which Hybels is writing) clearly doesn't give a flying fuck about Hybels's good fatherhood worries. Certainly we may attribute the sinners to the influence of "bad fathers" - but then, what about all of God's heroes so far? Literally not one major Biblical hero in my readings so far comes from a properly righteous family kept in proper, disciplined order by a good father: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, etc. What's more, these righteous men of God are generally horrific fathers: Noah can't control his sons, Abraham loathes and regrets one of his (and almost kills another), Jacob's sons squabble almost to the point of death, Moses completely neglects his family (to the point of provoking an intervention by his father-in-law), and so on. A generation of failed fathers? The Old Testament says God does his best work with the sons of failed fathers (not to mention some of the failed fathers themselves)! Now, I'm not suggesting that this means we should completely ignore any of the responsibilities or obligations involved in raising children, but it does suggest that the Bible really isn't concerned about the "new masculinity"/"family values" agenda of the religious right.

The fact that Hybels thinks men have somehow lost control of society's fate (and thus their own) is plainly ludicrous - most men never had such control and those elite few who do continue, by and large, to be men. If Hybels really wants humility and submission to God, he ought to consider that one cannot take that humility and simultaneously claim righteous command here on earth. The continuing nonsense about "servant-leadership," which in this case is manifested in masculine servant-leadership, always places a lot more emphasis on the "leader" part than on the "servant" part, thus revealing that it is a transparent fiction intended to legitimize an oppressive hierarchy on the grounds that even those on the top of the hierarchy must someday submit to an abstract and impersonal divine figure somewhere out in the ether, who curiously makes very little effort to make his will known directly even while his chosen "servant-leaders" here on Earth habitually attribute his will to their every action.

"He," of course, meaning God the Father. Because this metaphorical description of God clearly means that God has a penis, therefore those who also have penises can feel secure in their positions as leaders here on Earth, exercising judicious command over those who lack the divinely instituted Phallus of Authority®.

Actually, the fact that someone like Gideon becomes the model for certain sexist components of the religious right is starting to make a strange kind of sense. See, the thing about Gideon is that he doesn't actually serve God: like the most successful of the priests and generals before him (e.g. Moses, Aaron, etc.), God serves Gideon. Gideon shamelessly demands one miracle after another from God, most of them only for his personal benefit. Gideon isn't God's servant: rather, the two of them have a symbiotic relationship. Gideon's military prowess glorifies God as commander-in-chief of Israel, and God's mysterious and invisible influence over human affairs glorifies Gideon as general in the field. God gets some headlines in Judges, and Gideon gets some gold and some chicks - not to mention some headlines of his own. Everyone wins! Except Gideon's wives, of course. And all the people he's murdered, too, I suppose.

Rant over.
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Beware! Evil!

This post is sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Years ago, Focus on the Family head James Dobson published Bringing Up Boys. Then he published a truly bizarre guide to preventing your male children from growing up gay. Among other elements, possible solutions included fathers taking the time to shower with their sons, and fathers teaching their sons to pound pegs into holes. Fun!

Ever since then, I've been eagerly awaiting Dobson's follow-up masterpiece, Bringing Up Girls. And at long last, he's finally delivering! This month, in his classic monthly newsletter, Dobson provided an excerpt from the manuscript of the new book. I eagerly linked to the letter in hopes of finding out how to prevent girls from becoming lesbians, but unfortunately the provided excerpt seems to have nothing to do with girls specifically, and more to do with the necessity of protecting all your children from the pedophiles lurking just outside your front door.

To summarize Dobson's argument in fifty words or less:

Be afraid! Fear! Fear! There are predators everywhere! The world is worse than it used to be! If you're not careful, your daughters might go out and have sex!

Dobson, of course, uses more colourful metapors. He explains that our kids are "little bunny rabbits running through the meadow." Parents are "their only defenders" in a world of evil "predators" and "ultimate killers." If you're not careful to "fill the void" in your children's lives, they might seek "the warm company of other bunnies." That is one kick-ass euphemism.
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Christ: A Discussion on Gender and Sex

I was in a women's studies course, and the discussion came up 'would Christianity been adopted if Christ had been a woman?'

To be honest, at first, I was slightly baffled that we were even having the discussion. Then I had to think about it. I don't know.

The relevence of gender and sex should not be of any importance when considering the importance of hearing God's word. Still..

I do have to admit I like the face of Christ as I have imagined him most of my life. I think it would be slightly unsettling to find out otherwise. I don't know why, other than the fact I don't give it much thought about Christ's appearance, and to do so is to take me out of a comfort zone I have not left in a while.

Anyways, nothing terribly enlightening today.. just some thoughts that I had to muse out loud about..

Shawn
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Sure, this isn't religion, but...

Women do not like to read.

This according to the Wall Street Journal, which is implementing changes next year in order to make itself more attractive to women. The executive vice-president of Dow Jones (which publishes WSJ), L. Gordon Crovitz, says that the paper will be using more summary boxes, more colorful graphics, and an easier to read font. It will also have "more headlines with words like 'will and 'why' in the headlines," according to Crovitz (yes, he needed to repeat "headlines" for emphasis). Crovitz further explained that "women... seem especially enthusiastic about the format." CBS is covering this exciting development (here) and naturally couldn't resisit peppering their online article with inane and unnecessary metaphors about the WSJ geting a "facelift," etc, etc. CBS seems to think the changes are a good idea, since they found women readers of the WSJ to say the changes were good, and male readers of the WSJ willing to say that the changes were unwanted.

So there you have it. Women need more point-form summaries and graphics if we expect them to understand the complex topics that the male readers of the leading business press have been pondering for generations. Incidentally, there's also a Woman's Wall Street here, which has no relation to the WSJ but exists "to help women... manage their" investments, and whose CEO, fittingly, is a man. Because even if their husband isn't around, women do need a man's guidance to keep their affairs in order.

The WSJ's real concern is the amount of paper they're using - Dow Jones says they're going to save $18 million a year, which is a tidy sum in an industry that's taking heavy bombardment for the ubiquitous free news available over the Internet. So the appeal to women as the new financial investor seems a little crass. (CBS noted that the LA Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today are also cutting in similar fashion, but didn't say whether their corporate executives also blamed the need to downsize the paper on the idiosyncrasies of female readers.) However, this attempt at reaching out to women seems like a parody of equity to me. And it's not just the WSJ who's guilty.

Let's run through the list. The WSJ needs to be thinned down so that the fairer sex can read it comfortably. Women need special advice so that they will be able to manage their investments as well as men (incidentally, the last three press releases on the site are, in reverse chronological order, "Valentine's Day: What Women Really Want"; "Survey reveals Top Five New Year's Resolutions"; and "Women reveal their holiday spending 'cents'"). My home province, British Columbia, has a Minister Responsible for Women's Issues, because apparently health, employment, education, finance, and the environment are not, in fact, issues for women. What the intangible "women's issues" are remains as mysterious as why women can't read a real newspaper article.

The WSJ should call its cost-cutting measure exactly what it is, and people should stop paying lip service to equity by creating inane, patronizing figureheads.

Thus spake Reverend Dave.
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