Author: Ophelia Benson

We’ve seen all this before. It’s the stay-at-home-daughters movement.

The stay-at-home-daughters movement, which is promoted by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single women to forgo college and outside employment in favor of training as “keepers at home” until they marry. Young women pursuing their own ambitions and goals are viewed as selfish and antifamily; marriage is not a choice or one piece of a larger life plan, but the ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend their days learning “advanced homemaking” skills, such as cooking and sewing, and other skills that at one time were a necessity — knitting, crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered his daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the CPM shares much of its philosophy with the Quiverfull movement, which holds that good Christians must eschew birth control — even natural family planning — in order to implement biblical principles and, in the process, outbreed unbelievers. Although the CPM has been around for the past several decades, with its roots in the founding of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the teachings of religious leaders like Bill Gothard and Rousas J. Rushdoony, the stay-at-home-daughters movement seems to have gained traction in the last decade…

Vision Forum, for its part, is fully dedicated to turning back the clock on gender equality. Its website offers a cornucopia of sex-segregated books and products designed to conform children to rigid gender stereotypes starting from an early age. The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog shills an extensive selection of toy weapons (bow-and-arrow sets, guns, swords, and tomahawks), survival gear, and books and DVDs on war, the outdoors, and science. The Beautiful Girlhood Collection features dolls, cooking and sewing play sets, and costumes.

It certainly does.

The Beautiful Girlhood Collection aspires, by the grace of God, to encourage the rebuilding of a culture of virtuous womanhood. In a world that frowns on femininity, that minimizes motherhood, and that belittles the beauty of being a true woman of God, we dare to believe that the biblical vision for girlhood is a glorious vision.

You bet. The biblical vision is and always has been one of little white girls with long hair in ribbons and long pastel dresses with lace and ribbons and poofy sleeves, crowding around a pretty suburban mommy in a blue shirt and a long navy skirt (or could those possibly be trousers? no of course not, stupid question). Biblical; totes biblical; nothing to do with Victorian illustrations or Little House on the Prairie or nostalgia or anything like that; it’s all right smack straight out of the biblical bible.

Some of them seem to have permission to blog though. Is that biblical?

More fact-checking to do.

Harris’s “The End of Faith” launched the so-called “New Atheist” movement, a make-no-apologies ideology that maintains that religion is not just flawed, but evil, and must be rejected.

No, that’s wrong. “New Atheism” doesn’t necessarily claim that religion is flawed; it claims that theism is wrong – not true, mistaken, false; and that it’s permissible to say so in public discussions.

Within two years, Harris was joined on the best-seller list by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, who all took religion to task for most — if not all — of the world’s ills.

No, that’s wrong. As usual with these things, it’s off the mark about Dennett’s book. Lazy journalists who simply parrot what 40 thousand other journalists have already said should be sent back to journalism school. Kimberly Winston obviously never read a word of Dennett’s book.

“9/11 ushered in a big change, in that it put Islam squarely in the center of the discussion,” said Tom Flynn, director of The Center for Inquiry, and a supporter of the New Atheists. “Previous freethinkers would have said religion is horrible, look at the Crusades, look at the Inquisition. This opened up the possibility of directing strong arguments against religions other than Christianity.”

Flynn points out that atheists have long called for an end to religion. What’s “new” about the New Atheists is their stridency and refusal to compromise.

Since Tom Flynn is a supporter of the “New Atheists” he won’t have said it that way, but the reporter apparently summarized what he did say that way. Nice.

Ryan Cragun, a sociologist of religion at the University of Tampa, is more qualified in his assessment. In their extremism and intolerance, he likens the New Atheists to Fox News Channel — “so far to the right,” he said, that they opened up the middle.

“Now it is OK to be a moderate atheist because you can point to the stridency of the New Atheists and say, ‘At least I am not one of them,”‘ he said. “It opens up a bigger space for freethinkers to actually communicate.”

Overton window. You’re welcome.

There was a large and interesting conflict between Doug Phillips of Vision Forum and Boerne Christian Assembly (a small San Antonio church where he was pastor) and a parishioner named Jennifer Epstein, a conflict that was all about submission and asymmetrical rules. The condensed version is that Jennifer Epstein’s husband Mark had problems with anger and Phillips simply kept telling her to be more and more and more submissive; she tried to argue her case, and Phillips ended up throwing both of them and their children out of the church.

Epstein met her husband when both were in the military.

She’d thrived under military discipline, memorizing long lists of rules and regulations, willing to submit to such authority, she says, as long as she understood the reasons for the rules. That this need to understand the rationale behind regulation indicates a desire for discussion and debate more than a readiness to submit seems evident in the wake of Jennifer’s experiences at BCA, where she attempted to grapple intellectually with the logic behind the rules as she had in the Army. [Quiverfull p 110]

That’s a key point, you see, because there isn’t any. That keeps cropping up throughout the book – it’s not about logic or reasons or fairness. People frame it that way at times but only as long as it works; the bottom line is always just “God said so”; Titus 2; Proverbs 31; it’s for Jesus. You can use reasons around the edges, while the sun is shining, but god-said-so always trumps them. Always. Joyce quotes Phillips saying exactly that early on, in that Vision Forum talk.

You are a helpmeet. The Bible says that man is not made for the woman but the woman is made for the man. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the Creator, not Phillips. I’m just quoting. [p 8]

Nothing he can do, you see? It’s out of his hands. So logic is ultimately beside the point, as is thinking, as is discussion.

And that’s why it’s so foul. Humans are a discussing, reasoning, thinking species. It’s a terrible contortion and stifling of our nature to block that by claiming it’s all been decided by an absent god and the boys are “just quoting.”

Epstein never does seem to grasp that, even though she got her face rubbed in it.

She argues that patriarchy, when it’s done right, in a heart-driven, grace-inspired way, makes women want to submit to their husbands because their husbands lead the way, by loving them as Christ does, not because it’s a system imposing a set of rules from without.

But then that’s not submission! If you’re doing it because you want to, it’s not submission. It’s sprinkling flower petals on a bucket of rotting garbage, to pretend that the really nice kind of patriarchy can make women want to submit.

It’s helpful that they come right out and say it.

Narrated by Amy Gunn [wife of Colin, one of the brothers Gunn], Monstrous Regiment argues that “Christians can’t be egalitarians. We believe in hierarchy and inherent authority.”

Oh. Right. Thanks for spelling it out. That’s why we hate and fear you. We think that belief is evil.

Meet the Gunn brothers. They make exciting Christian documentary movies that win awards from organizations that give awards to Christian movies.

They made Shaky Town, which is about the persecution of Christians by the evil gayz in San Francisco.

You’ll hear testimonies from Christian Heroes involved in a front-line battle against immorality in the so-called“tolerant” city. You’ll also see real video footage of Christian churches in San Francisco being attacked by violent groups of homosexuals. So be warned, this movie is not for the faint-hearted!

And they made The Monstrous Regiment of Women, which you can guess what it’s about (hello John Knox!). The page is super super super scary though, so be warned – it includes a picture with three terrifying women with power in it omigod.

The Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Gunn Brother’s second documentary, goes all out to demolish the feminist worldview. From a consistently Christian perspective, they show how feminism has had a devastating impact on the church, state, and family.

Starting with the infamous 16th century essay written by the reformer John Knox against the reigning female monarch, the Gunn Brothers find plenty of application to America’s political landscape; where feminists vie for every possible office including the presidency.

Featuring an all star, all female cast, the Gunn Brothers prove that feminism has in fact restricted choices for all women, brought heartache to the lives of many, and perpetuated the largest holocaust since the beginning of time.

The largest holocaust! Well surely in that case all feminists should be rounded up and interned.