My Top Ten Posts of 2012

I’ve put up literally hundreds of posts over the past year, so I thought I’d take a moment to look back at the ten posts that got the most traffic. Unfortunately, something got reset when I moved my blog to Patheos this past March, so this list is actually the top ten posts of the last ten months. I’ll add a moment of commentary after each.

1o. So you say you don’t hate gay people, Part IV

This post was the one where I introduced the sexual ethics graph I later highlighted in my post A Tale of Two Boxes. My attempt to explain contrasting sexual ethics grabbed so much attention at the time that I’m not surprised this post made the top ten list.

9. When It Really Is about Controlling Women

In this post I talked about the way “responsibility” is invoked in discussions of abortion, pointing out that when the focus is on “responsibility” rather than on the argument that zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are people, there’s no way whatsoever to hide the reality that being anti-abortion is about trying to control women. This idea became important enough that I followed with another post offering further explanation and detail.

8. Marital Rape? Doug Wilson on Dominance and Submission in the Marriage Bed

This post was my contribution to the blogosphere discussion of a quote from one of conservative theologian Doug Wilson’s past books that resurfaced this past summer. Namely, Wilson argued that every part of marriage, including sex, ought to be characterized by dominance and submission.

7. Emotional Incest, Part 1: Definitions

This post was the first in my four-part series on emotional incest. In a nutshell, emotional incest occurs when a parent creates an unhealthy and much too spouse-like emotional relationship with one of his or her children. This series is probably one of the most painful things I have written.

6. The Real World Damage of the Purity Culture

Honestly, the amount of attention this post got surprised me. All I did was post excerpts from several emails I have gotten from women whose marriages have been damaged by the teachings of the purity culture, including ideas about emotional and sexual purity.

5. The Hypocrisy Burns: Voice of the Martyrs’ Tom White

I posted this piece immediately after Voice of the Martyrs’ director, Tom White, committed suicide. I think it became popular in part because it became a top hit for those searching “Tom White” or “Voice of the Martyrs” in the wake of the scandal, and also because its comment thread became a veritable goldmine of excuse making for religious child molesters.

4. A Response to Objections on My Pro-Life Movement Post

I don’t really have anything to add here, except that I put up this post in an attempt to address some of the counter arguments and points of confusion I was seeing in the wake of my post on losing faith in the pro-life movement.

3. Carefully scripted lives: My concerns about the Duggars

I actually posted this one last February, which means the page view total doesn’t actually count those who read it immediately after I posted it. In other words, it’s only on this list because it has staying power, and that, I think, is simply because a lot of people find the Duggars interesting enough to search the internet for information about them.

2. “This is the most important election of all time!” (again)

This is the first post I ever had that went viral. The reason this happened is that I brought Focus on the Family’s Letter from 2012, which they wrote in 2008, to the attention of not only readers but also other bloggers, who then blogged about it with links back to my post. And being shared over 6,000 times on facebook didn’t hurt either.

Next comes my number one most viewed post of all time, and anyone who has been following my blog for the past several months shouldn’t have any questions as to its identity. And so, without further ado, I give you:

1. How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement

I knew when I posted this piece that it would be well-read. I anticipated it being shared on facebook and perhaps linked back to by other bloggers. Yet even with these expectations, I was completely overwhelmed by what actually happened. This post was shared on facebook over 148,000 times and received 1,655 comments. As of today, it has received over 350,000 page views. To put that in perspective, that means that this one single post received over twice as many page views as I was used to getting in an entire month. I was expecting this post to be read, but not that read.

So there you have it: my top ten posts of 2012. I’ll finish by simply asking this: Which other of my posts or ideas did you find especially striking or interesting in 2012?