• On Sunday night, Fathom Events will be staging a special screening at thousands of theaters to mark the 50th anniversary of the iconically cool Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt. Next week, the promotional company will have a two-night special event screening the season premiere of Jodie Whittaker’s run as Doctor Who.
Both of those sound like great fun. They should provide a chance for Fathom Events to make back some of the money it seems to be losing this week by hosting the two-night special screening premiere of Liberty University’s conspiracy theory biopic The Trump Prophecy.
The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood attended one of the 1,200 nationwide showings of the film last night and, despite being right there in Lynchburg, Virginia, found rows of empty seats as well as a smattering of true believers.
Sherwood reminds us that Mark Taylor’s “true story” and his “prophecy” of Donald Trump includes the claim that “Barack Obama will be charged with treason and Trump will authorize the arrest of ‘thousands of corrupt officials, many of whom are part of a massive satanic pedophile ring.'”
That hasn’t happened yet. But Sherwood also notes that Taylor/Liberty have prophesied that God has also ordained Donald Trump to “force the release of cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s that are currently being withheld by the pharmaceutical industry.” So, you know, we’ve got that going for us.
• “He said that because everyone was deaf at the school except those who worked there, no one could hear the screams and cries of the young boys when the abuse took place.”
That’s from this Daily Beast report on “The Sex Abuse of Deaf Orphans in Pope Francis’ Backyard.” This was from a school in Rome. It’s horrible. Just as horrible as the deluge of similar stories from all over the world, including the extensively documented accounts of generations of this kind of abuse here in Pennsylvania.
Everywhere this has happened we have seen religious authorities — “moral” authorities — mustering all of their power and privilege to shelter and safeguard the abusers in order to shelter and safeguard their own reputation as moral authorities. In doing so, they have made themselves magnets for abusers and incubators for programs of institutional abuse.
And everywhere this has happened, those same moral authorities have simultaneously supported equally “moral” political movements to control and subjugate women, to defend the status quo, and to protect money from accountability. The term for this behavior in American religion is “pro-life,” and anyone who refuses to accept this program as a matter of course is condemned as immoral. This Florida bishop explains that we are obliged to bow before our moral “superiors.”
• Speaking of self-proclaimed religious authorities who devote their lives to defending abuse: “Paige Patterson plans to co-teach a mid-October weeklong class on ‘Christian Ethics: The Bible and Moral Issues’ with Richard Land.”
A full week seems a bit too long for these two men to share everything they know about ethics.
Patterson lost his job as a seminary president due to his role in covering up a rape, blaming the crime on the victim, and just generally having a long, bottomless history of belittling and demeaning women. He has also been named in some of the pending sexual abuse cases against his long-time ally, Paul Pressler. Land, for his part, lost his job with the Southern Baptist Convention after he plagiarized a newspaper columnist, attempting to pass the columnist’s extremely vile racist words off as his own.
Any fee or tuition charged for an “ethics” class taught by these two horrible men constitutes theft.
Paige Patterson and Richard Land are simply two more ugly Confederate monuments defouling the landscape. They should have been torn down generations ago.
• Lili Loofbourow writes a clearer version of some of what I was trying to say in yesterday’s post, “Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding.”
For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh accusations share certain features: There is no penetrative sex, there are always male onlookers, and, most importantly, there’s laughter. In each case the other men — not the woman — seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience. In each story, the cruel and bizarre act the woman describes—restraining Christine Blasey Ford and attempting to remove her clothes in her allegation, and in Deborah Ramirez’s, putting his penis in front of her face — seems to have been done in the clumsy and even manic pursuit of male approval. Even Kavanaugh’s now-notorious yearbook page, with its references to the “100 kegs or bust” and the like, seems less like an honest reflection of a fun guy than a representation of a try-hard willing to say or do anything as long as his bros think he’s cool. In other words: The awful things Kavanaugh allegedly did only imperfectly correlate to the familiar frame of sexual desire run amok; they appear to more easily fit into a different category — a toxic homosociality — that involves males wooing other males over the comedy of being cruel to women.
Loofbourow goes on to explain how this band-of-bros camaraderie shields these dudes from remembering anything significant about any of the many, many women to whom they were cruel. The objects of their cruelty do not register. Those women were not ever the most important people in the room when these boys performed their cruelties for their intended audience of one another.
Whether or not Kavanaugh was a virgin throughout his teen years, his own boofing words in his yearbook, his calendars, and his hand-written letters shows him to have been a boy obsessed with pushing the bounds of so-called technical virginity. It did not matter to him who the girl involved might be, or whether she was sober, or whether she gave her consent. The important thing — the all-important thing — was that his bros were there to watch and to take part, and to laugh with him.
The lawyerly loophole of technical virginity is a product of Catholic and evangelical purity culture, which is itself an expression of rape culture. The ferocious anger of Kavanaugh’s self-defense and of many of his Catholic and evangelical defenders only makes sense in the context of this warped notion of “purity,” which sees sex itself — and any woman who willingly engages in it — as dirty. In this view, any couple enthusiastically engaging in non-marital sex is guilty of a grave sin, but Kavanaugh can’t be accused of having done anything wrong because there was no P in V. How dare we accuse him of wrongdoing?
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