So *This* Is The Sanctity of Marriage They Keep Babbling On About - Rape

After reading this, and seeing all their garbage about how allowing gays and lesbians to marry each other will lead to rampant pedophilia, and how conservatives continually prove unable to tell the difference, I've come to the conclusion that "consent" is not a word in the conservative vocabulary.

This is a heads up - what follows is pretty explicit in it's misogyny. It's also an incredibly twisted worldview - but then, I've come to expect nothing but from these people. I'm afraid that if, by this point, one of these sick bastards started making some sense, it'd mean the fabric of reality had come undone.

Also - cluster F bomb ahoy:
There's no real reason why "sacrament" and "excrement" are so closely similar in sound. They don't have the same etymology. It's just a weird quark of the English language that they sound so close. Of course, sometimes, those weird quarks can take on new meanings in light of some new-found fact. Take, for instance, the excrement called marriage that this "Bible believer" thoroughly thumps. The story comes to me through PZ's blog, who got it from No Longer Quivering, who in turn got it from Ophelia Benson (Ophelia is one of my favorite names; one of the major characters in the novel I'm currently working on is named Ofelia; it ranks up there with Amy and Renee) and her blog, "Butterflies and Wheels." However, I'm quoting from the "No Longer Quivering" version.

 As Bible-believing Baptists who hold to reformed theology, X and I believe that God is sovereign in choosing who will or will not believe in him, having chosen his people before the foundation of the world (see Ephesians 1), and that his selection is unbreakable and irresistible. If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father. Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation. Instead, I asked X’s father for his blessing in taking her hand in marriage. When he gave his blessing, X and I considered ourselves to be unbreakably betrothed in the sight of God. While we had initially intended to consummate our marriage after today’s symbolic ceremony, we instead did so secretly after private scripture reading, prayer, and mutual foot-washing.

Apparently censored for good measure. That or this sick asshole decided that she didn't need to be referred by her name, either.

I feel ill.

Your God doesn't deserve to be the sovereign of a pile of shit. I'd tell him myself if he existed. Shit is worth more than your whole way of "life", and you know what? I think he realizes that, too. I think he's aware of how small and pitiful he is. That's why he's taken this world view - like the classic bully, he's got to put someone else down to make himself feel better. In that case, it would be the entire female sex.

This man makes my skin crawl. Fuck off and die, asshole. I can only think of a handful of other times when I've been this upset, and none of them were pleasant. This makes me what to lash out and hit something.

I'd like to call attention to this little part:

If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father.

The woman has no right to select her husband - everything has to be done for her by the men in her life. The same fucking men who will wheel around in bitch in the very next breath about how they're persecuted. Furthermore:

Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. [...] Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation.

Follow this logic through. She has no right to select her husband, her consent doesn't mean a damn thing. This is the attitude to leads to the justification of marital rape. If she isn't a person of her own, and she's just an extension of her husband as such, then she isn't, and doesn't, have any say in anything. Even sex. Which means that rape is fully justified by this Bible-based outlook.

Goddamn I feel ill.

This sort of thing is extremely upsetting for me. My sense of social justice makes me want to rush right out there and fix this, and make it go away, and I can't. The end result of that is a stewing pit of hatred and anger that makes me want to see this man thrown into the pool of a nuclear reactor unprotected, but I have difficulty coming up with a justifiable reason for harming isotopes who did nothing to deserve it through exposure to this ... thing.

I'm trying really hard to remind myself this creature is a fellow human being.

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be surprised to realize that it's extremely difficult.

This is part of a broader problem in the sick, twisted world of X-Treme Christianity. In general, these people are so fucking loopy that they've shot right past Christ worship and looped back around into "life-destroying quagmire of stupid and hate." I'm exactly how it connects back to the Quiverful Movement, but I know it does.

For those new to the Quiverful Movement, it's basically the idea that the vagina is a clown car and your children are arrows for the "Good Lawd" to expend as he fucking pleases. The more kids you have, the more resources you suck, the more you damage the environment, the less capable you are of taking care of those children, the more "weapons for Jaysus" you have, the happier God is with you. Or some stupid shit like that. I don't normally go after lifestyle choices. I'll make an exception here. Here's how I feel we can work to stamp out sick and twisted little subcultures and lifestyles like this:

• Give women opportunities to advance themselves. My god I can't stress this enough. I really can't. Partially because it seems like no matter how hard I stress it, nobody fucking listens. Shatter that glass ceiling, give equal pay for equal work, stop treating women like they're something other than "the norm." Stop putting them on a pedestal. Stop treating them like they're something other than human. Women occupy an unusual place in twisted conservative thinking - at once, they're something to be worshiped and something to be reviled. It's not really a Madonna/Whore complex, although I'm pretty sure it's related. Society as a whole does this too, and honestly, it's frustrating to me as someone who looks at a woman as my equal, rather than someone who deserves different treatment. This shit's gotta stop.
• Homeschooling is how these sick and twisted little sub-cultures isolate themselves. I have my own reasons for disliking homeschooling, but I don't want to ban it. What I'd rather see happen is make it mandatory, nation-wide, for parents who want to homeschool to be at least half as qualified as I have to be. The government talks this fancy shit about how public school teachers have to be highly qualified, but they don't even bother with homeschool teachers. They don't have to be qualified at all. They don't need a former education. The shit is talked. The line is not walked. If we cared about our children's education, then we need to make it mandatory for parents who are homeschooling their kids to have to at least get an Associates degree. A two-year degree from a local community college, done in night classes. Once you've got the Associates degree, you register yourself as a home-school teacher. You don't do that? You get reported for truancy. If that happens enough, you get judged an unfit parent and your children are taken away. Children should also take even more stringent tests than the kids in a public school system - after all, I'm looking after 30 kids (ha! That's being optimistic). If I can get even half of them to pass, then I'm really successful. You're looking after just one. What's your excuse? These tests would include questions on evolution, questions on basic freedoms, on biology, and everything else that conservatives hate. If they fail the tests enough, the parent gets their license revoked. The whole point here is to remove the fact that homeschooling is used as a tool to isolate these children and force them into a mold. If you can removing that isolating factor, then you'll be taking a huge tool away from them, and it'll be for the best of society.
• The common "colleges" of choice for these parents is Liberty, Bob Jones, and a few others. Once again, isolation is the key here. There's not much you can do here; these are private institutions and there's not much we can against them. They're not accredited, they're routinely mocked, and perhaps other colleges should start advertising campaigns against them. I mean, hell, Gomez Addams, if he weren't so positive and healthy, would be a prized student from Liberty University. His track record as a lawyer proves it.
• Routine exposure to the media. Routine mocking; bitter, vicious mocking. Routinely being told they're wrong, that their lifestyle is wrong, and that they're harming themselves. They talk all this shit about not being dependent on the government but at the end of the day they're more dependent than I am. Perhaps we should force them to walk the walk. Of course, that'd be needlessly cruel and petty on their children, who made no mistake beyond being born into the wrong home.

Anyway, I've calmed myself down. The thought of pushing sub-cultures like this one out of existence makes me happy; the thought of doing it without harming a soul and within legal means makes my inner pacifist glow with a radiance that I didn't have at the beginning of this. There's a way to get rid of these people. It won't take but a generation - it only took two generations for them to end up like this, we can undo it in one if we tried hard enough as a society, and pushed back.

Hell, their kids are already leaning our way. We just need to hold out our hands - extend those hands, clasp onto them, and bring them up out of the bottomless quagmire and show them to real meaning of hope.