13 JUN 2015 AT 09:47 ET
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Stories of patriarchal Christian leaders groping, fondling or otherwise harassing or assaulting women and having clandestine sex with men seem to be a media staple of late. At the same time, conservative Christian leaders are fixated on lording it over women, queers and kids. Consider the following sample from spring 2015:
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- The Vatican’s second-in-command pronounces that Ireland’s 62% endorsement of marriage equality via national referendum was a “defeat for humanity.”
- The Seattle Archdiocese agrees to pay $1.2 million to a woman abused for five years by a priest who was a known pedophile shuffled between parishes by the Church hierarchy.
- Catholic priest and blogger Father Dwight Longenecker godman-splains that transgender former Olympian, Caitlin Jenner, is a “man dressed up as a whore” who is “caught up in a huge publicity machine to sell himself and now to sell his sexual confusion.”
- Devout U.S. presidential wannabes Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee warn the public that gay marriage proponents are a danger to Christianity, which is likely to be criminalized if the Supreme Court backs equality.
- Former U.S. Speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert (also a celebrated alumnus of my alma mater, the Evangelical Wheaton College), is indicted for stealing $1.7 million from his securities firm to pay hush money to a former male high school student he coached in wrestling and sexually molested.
- The producers of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting stop counting dollars and start counting how many sisters Josh Duggar molested before becoming an anti-gay, anti-contraception, anti-kids-rights advocate. (Duggar’s celebrity father had previously advocated the death penalty for incest.)
- Conservative Christian politicians, bloggers, and religious leaders rush to defend Duggar who, as shown in a photo album at Wonkette.com has touched nearly every conservative presidential contender with “the same hands that touched his sister.”
- Paraguay’s Catholic-dominated court denies a 10-year-old rape victim the right to terminate her forced pregnancy.
- Wisconsin governor Scott Walker calls forced vaginal ultrasound before abortion “a cool thing.”
- Conservative Republicans kill funding for America’s most effective teen pregnancy prevention program, which provided IUDs to young mothers in Colorado.
- A sexual abuse investigation at Bob Jones University is back underway after public outcry when university officials suspended the inquiry. A Protestant sex abuse scandal, focused on universities, orphanages, missionary schools and more is heating up globally.
- Under the influence of Bible-quoting conservatives, the U.S. continues to stand with Somalia against the rest of the world, by refusing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
- Idaho implements a bill, signed in April by Gov. Butch Otter, protecting parents from persecution in cases of religiously motivated child abuse and medical neglect.
- A Christian Gender Roles article titled “8 Steps to Confront Your Wife’s Sexual Refusal,” goes viral as the sequel to, “Christian Husbands: You Don’t Pay for the Milk when You Own the Cow,” a biblical manifesto that stops just short of endorsing marital rape—or maybe doesn’t.
Christianity’s Anti-Marketing Team?
.If you’re feeling disgusted, you’re not alone. From the standpoint of wooing converts or even inspiring the faithful to stay faithful, the sex-obsessed behavior of high-profile patriarchal Christians is about as effective as the U.S. Army’s attempt to win hearts and minds with drone strikes. I’m not trying to be poetic here—in the last decade or so, the percent of Americans who self-identify as Christians has dropped from 85 percent to 70 percent, and young people point to the culture wars as a key reason Christianity turns them off.
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Guess who’s leaving the fastest? Women. Moderate Christians find themselves apologizing for their co-religionists, trying desperately to overcome the perception (fostered largely by biblical literalists and conservative Catholics) that Christians are judgmental, control-freakish, sex-obsessed hypocrites.
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So, why don’t the anti-marketers back off? After all, Evangelicals center their faith around a verse known as the “Great Commission” – Go into the world and make disciples of every creature. And the word “catholic” means universal, literally. The Catholic Church has spent centuries sending a salesforce of missionaries into countries and cultures around the world to promote their product. If your prime directive is win converts, it seems obvious you should lead with universal feel-good platitudes, not some archaic version of Machos rule! Females, fags, and five-year-olds drool!
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Some people say the best evidence against the Bible’s God is that his public relations team is so inept. But I don’t think the problem is incompetence on the part of God’s spokesmen. I think they are stuck.
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Caught in an Iron Age Trap
.Many moderate Christians see the Bible not as the literally perfect word of God, but a record of humanity’s struggle to understand what is real and what is good. They find unique value in the Christian tradition and the model of Jesus but may also acknowledge value in other spiritual traditions while recognizing the human handprints on the biblical texts.
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By contrast, biblical literalists declare the Good Book to be the complete and timeless word of God, essentially dictated by God to the authors. Having made an idol out of the Bible, they have little choice but to promote the Iron Age worldview of the Bible writers. And in this worldview—childish taunts aside—machos do rule. God gave Adam a “helpmeet” named Eve-not-Steve, and to punish her for seeking independent knowledge swore that Adam would rule over her and she would bear his children and it would hurt like hell. As later Bible texts encode in law and illustrate in story, those children are Man’s property—assets he can use for labor, send to war, sell into slavery, trade for political alliance, or even sacrifice as a burnt offering. In this view, consent is not a thing. Nowhere does the Bible, Old Testament or new, suggest that a woman’s consent is needed or even desired prior to intercourse. And for a man to have sex with another man violates the whole procreative hierarchy.
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In other words, patriarchal Christian men are obsessed with lording it over women, queers and kids because in the view of the Bible writers (and true Bible believers) that is the right and proper order of things, ordained by Yahweh himself—who, by the way, gets really mean when people don’t do things his way.
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Continue reading... http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/high-profile-patriarchal-right-wing-christians-are-obsessed-with-sex-heres-why/
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