nakedpastor
I appreciate people sending me ideas for cartoons. So yesterday I had several people inform me that Pat Robertson was up to it again. Sometimes things are served to you on a silver platter. And sometimes I get tired of the same old stuff. But I couldn’t let this one go. This man has a lot of influence so I felt like taking this one on.
You can check out the video where Robertson responds to a woman asking how to forgive her husband who cheated on her. His advice? Men have a tendency to wander, so she needs to make the home more enticing so he doesn’t want to stray. Men cheat. He also advises her to quit complaining if he provides her with a home to live in, food to eat, and clothes to wear. It’s a plus if he’s nice to the kids and handsome. Her job is to make the home so wonderful that he or his eyes won’t want to wander or look at porn. It reminds me of when he said that “awful-looking women” can cause marriages to fail. Women shouldn’t just lie there all “slatternly looking”. They’ve got to fix themselves up and look pretty. She should quit complaining about her husband’s infidelity or flirtatiousness with other women or hassling him about it and just make herself as attractive as possible. I bet that made her feel better!
I suggest that Robertson is just the most obvious presentation of a prevalent, deep-rooted attitude towards women. We see it every day in the news where women are blamed for rape, sexual harassment and abuse.
Women are the scapegoats for male and rape culture. The idea of the scapegoat is that the sins of the people are put upon the goat, and then the goat is exiled into the wilderness or sacrificed, taking the sin with it. So, as Robertson suggests, a husband can sin against his wife, place the burden of blame for his sin upon her, then punish her for it, leaving him exonerated and innocent.
The woman in the cartoon is the scapegoat for the company she works for. She’s been sexually harassed by a man at the company. Maybe he holds an important position there. She reports the incident. The sin is placed upon her and she is sacrificed for the sake of the company. She is exiled from the community, leaving the community exonerated and innocent and able to go on with its business as usual with a clean slate.
The concept of the scapegoat is entirely biblical so it must be okay (Leviticus 16:10).
Tell me this ain’t so.
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