Conservatives Are Still Confused About Consent

Last updated on: October 18, 2017 at 9:49 am By Fred Clark

From the video description on YouTube: “In this video, Kelley Schiffman (Yale University) discusses one of the most basic tools in the philosophers’s tool kit: the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions.”

And, yes, this is very basic stuff, which is another way of saying that it’s very important stuff. And thus worth revisiting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LqNm9d2__I&t=11s

For a textbook example of the monstrous stupidity that can come from failing to grasp this textbook distinction, see David French’s latest rendition of the stock conservative rant about “modern sexual morality.” Or let me save you a click: French doesn’t understand what “consent” means and doesn’t understand it’s moral significance. Specifically, he’s deeply confused about the distinction between necessary and sufficient.

French is not unique in this regard. Some variation of this same non-argument gets rehashed and regurgitated in every other issue of “conservative” journals like National Review, First Things, World magazine, etc. They’ve been repeating this nonsense, exposing their ignorance on this point, for decades. Relentlessly.

This is often, as in French’s perfunctory recitation, expressed in the form of straw-man attacks against “modern sexual morality,” which is dishonestly caricatured as “Anything Goes among consenting adults.”

It’s an immensely frustrating, bewildering “conversation.” And it’s been going around and around in the same circle for decades. It’s based on their failure, or their refusal, to recognize that basic distinction between necessity and sufficiency.

“Consent is necessary.”

“Oh, so you’re saying consent is sufficient!”

“No, not sufficient. But necessary.”

“Ooh, la-ti-dah, consent is sufficient so Anything Goes!”

“We’re not saying that. We’re saying it is necessary. Without consent, nothing goes.”

“So it’s fine by you if a man marries a box turtle!”

“What thuff–?”

“Free love! Anything goes among consenting adults! That’s what you’re saying!”

“No. Again. We’re saying consent is necess–”

“[Starts singing ‘Let the Sun Shine’ from Hair in a mocking, sarcastic voice.]”

Lather, rinse, repeat. After endless cycles of this same bizarre “debate,” I honestly cannot tell at this point whether these folks are genuinely this obtuse, or if they’re doing this deliberately in bad faith. I also cannot tell which interpretation would be more charitable.

Insufficient

The best spin I can put on this in their defense would be some kind of fear-driven slippery slope theory. The hobgoblin of all-sufficient consent is, in their view, such an immense potential threat to their “traditional” sexual morality that it must be guarded against at all costs. Whatever the legitimacy of claims about the necessity of consent, such talk serves to underscore its essential moral significance — and that might lead to a slippery slope in which some might then decide that it is of exclusive moral significance. If we allow any moral value for consent, then some might decide it is the only value, or the ultimate value. And, thus, to guard against that, we must deny that consent has any moral significance. We must pretend that consent is not a necessary condition for sexual morality lest that lead — somehow, somewhere, some day — to others claiming that it is the solely sufficient condition for sexual morality.

It’s likelier, I think, that their confusion over our claims is a consequence of the same confusion they have about their own claims. Their “traditional sexual morality” holds that marriage is a necessary condition for moral sex, but they’ve gotten that garbled in their heads into the idea that marriage is a sufficient condition for moral sex. And if marriage is, by itself, sufficient, then nothing else can be recognized as necessary. (This is, by the way, why they’re losing the argument they want to make in defense of marriage. Because they’ve been so busy asserting the sufficiency of marriage for sexual morality, they haven’t even bothered trying to explain why anyone should regard it as necessary.)

Anyway, I’m now repeating myself — which is probably an unavoidable result of responding to people who are repeating themselves. See earlier:

• But if homosexuality isn’t ‘objectively immoral,’ then Anything Goes …

• Here’s that ‘Anything Goes’ rant about evangelical sexual ethics

• Consent is a necessary prerequisite for any sexual ethic

Trump and Erdogan and ‘a certain kind of consent’

Last updated on: May 16, 2017 at 12:36 pm By Fred Clark

“It’s too late now,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in April after ramming through a national referendum that “will greatly expand the powers of his office.”

Many citizens of Turkey have questioned the legitimacy of the results of that referendum vote, which took place during a period in which the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan was busily arresting journalists, professors, and opposition politicians. But the result — a narrow, 51-percent alleged majority — stands, and so the country’s constitution will be amended to give more power, with fewer checks and balances, to its president.

That president is here in the U.S. today, visiting the White House to meet with President Donald Trump, who was among the very few world leaders who called to congratulate Erdogan after his referendum “victory.” Most leaders of most constitutional democracies did not call to offer congratulations because they did not see increasing authoritarianism in Turkey as a Good Thing. But Trump did.

This meeting would be a major controversy and a big story in more normal times. Hosting a wanna-be strongman who is — at this very moment — actively curtailing human rights and liberties in his own country would be the sort of thing that a normal president and normal White House would be hard-pressed to defend. But we do not have a normal president or a normal White House. We have Donald Trump.

And Trump’s enthusiastic welcome for Erdogan today is barely making any news at all because it’s getting drowned out by yesterday’s blockbuster news that President Trump himself leaked highly classified intelligence to high-ranking Russian officials in the Oval Office.

The story was first reported by The Washington Post’s Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe: “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador.” It was subsequently confirmed, independently, by The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Buzzfeed. (Lawfare has a good summary of the gravity and repercussions of what it calls a “bombshell” revelation.)

Trump’s defenders rushed to denounce this story as “fake news,” but administration officials offered only non-denial denials. And then, this morning, Trump himself took to Twitter to announce that yep, he did it. On purpose. (It was the same pattern as with last week’s firing of FBI chief Jim Comey. First Trump sends his aides out to deny that the firing had anything to do with the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russian oligarchs and mobsters, and then — after they’ve all spent a day going on record saying that — he throws those same aides under the bus by coming forward himself to say that was exactly why he did it.)

LooseLips

This is unprecedented. It’s a huge story and a huge mess. If anyone other than the president had leaked this information in this way, they would be facing criminal charges. America’s ability to receive and respond to intelligence about terrorist threats was just dealt a major blow by the president himself. It’s all astonishing.

Coming on top of last week’s revelations about Trump’s deliberate attempt to quash the FBI’s criminal/counter-intelligence investigation into his campaign, it seems like this should be consequential. After a weekend in which people like James Fallows, Carl Bernstein and John Dean were lining up to explain how Trump’s obstruction of Comey’s investigation is worse than Watergate, we get this.

It’s overwhelming. And that’s the dangerous thing. We’re at risk of being overwhelmed. We freeze up, paralyzed, waiting for the next shoe to drop, even as it’s raining shoes. We can be so transfixed by the spectacle of Trump’s implosion that we become spectators. We watch what Republican Sen. Bob Corker yesterday called Trump’s “downward spiral” and assume it must mean that he is therefore swirling down the drain and will soon be out of sight, out of the way, out of office.

But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening, rather, is that Trump is actively consolidating his power. He’s appointing judges — the younger the better — to every corner of the federal judiciary. He’s empowering white-nationalist vote-suppression expert Kris Kobach to take his disenfranchisement scheme nationwide. He’s got Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III busily reigniting the “War on Drugs” as a means of felonizing anyone who might vote against him.

Trump is increasingly Nixonian, but he’s not following the same path to disgrace and resignation that Richard Nixon followed. He’s following the path of disgrace and lawless power-grabbing that Erdogan has been mapping out in Turkey.

We can’t expect to just sit back and watch, assuming after every new astonishing revelation that, surely, now someone is at last going to do something about this trainwreck of a petty tyrant. We have to be that someone.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder recently talked with Chauncey De Vega for Salon. Snyder has seen this before. The things happening in Turkey. The things happening here. It isn’t new.

It can be stopped, but it won’t stop on it’s own.

Here’s Snyder:

We have a century of wisdom and very smart people who confronted situations like our own — but usually more demanding — and that wisdom can be condensed.

… The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

… Be as courageous as you can. Do you actually care enough about freedom that you would take risks? Do individuals actually care about freedom? Think that through. I think if enough of us take the little risks at the beginning, which aren’t really that significant, this will prevent us from having to take bigger risks down the line.

We are still at a stage where protest is not illegal. We’re still at a stage where protest is not lethal. Those are the two big thresholds. We are still on the good side of both of those thresholds and so now is the time you want to pack in as much as you can because you could actually divert things. Once you get into a world where protest is illegal, then the things that I recommend like corporeal politics, getting out on the streets — they have to happen but they are much riskier. It’s a much different kind of decision.

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

… Don’t obey in advance because you have to start by orienting yourself against the general drift of things. If you can manage that, then the other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016. You have to set your own habits now.

Consent is necessary. This is not complicated.

Last updated on: October 17, 2016 at 11:12 am By Fred Clark

I will be repeating myself here because apparently this needs to be repeated: Consent is necessary. This is the first, unavoidable aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. It starts with consent.

But every time we repeat that simple, modest claim, we get denounced by so-called “conservatives” who go off on mighty rants condemning us as though we had said something very different. Those rants all rail against the idea that consent is sufficient — that it is the whole, and only, aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. That ethics ends with consent.

Their bewilderment is bewildering. What is it about the conservative mindset that prevents them from being able to grasp this fundamental distinction? This is pretty elementary stuff, after all — necessary vs. sufficient is literally Chapter 1 textbook stuff in Logic or Ethics 101. More than that, it’s a basic distinction every student has to grasp before even signing up for such courses lest they mistakenly think that signing up for such Pre-req 101 courses means they’ve completed all the requirements for their major.

“One does not live by bread alone,” Jesus said. Bread — food — is necessary, but not sufficient. Without food, we would starve to death, but food alone is not sufficient — we also need clean water, air to breathe, grace, and a sense of purpose. The necessity of food does not cancel out the necessity of those other things, which is to say bread is necessary, but “bread alone” is not sufficient.

Again, not complicated. Whether or not they use the precise terminology, this necessary vs. sufficient distinction is something conservatives understand and are capable of applying when it comes to a thousand other things. But not to sex. Something in their brains recoils and misfires, and every repeated assertion of the necessity of consent provokes a boilerplate rant condemning the foolish “liberal” idea that consent is sufficient.

Here, for example, is blowhard talk-radio guru Rush Limbaugh speaking last week:

The left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. … If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine – whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. … Consent is the magic key to the left.

Limbaugh somehow managed to recite this rant without using the stock phrase used in 99 percent of its incarnations: “Anything goes!” But that’s still his argument — that “the left” believes that as long as there’s consent, then “anything goes.”

But that’s not the claim. The claim is not that consent is sufficient, but that it is necessary. The claim is not that with consent, “anything goes,” but rather that without consent, nothing goes.

This same obtuseness — the same hostile inability to understand the necessity of consent — can be seen in the thousands of social media posts from “conservative” Christians eagerly pointing out “liberal hypocrisy” over the use of the word “pussy.” It’s hypocritical, they insist, for “liberals” to be upset with Donald Trump for saying the word pussy when so many others they don’t criticize are using that word too. Why, Beyoncé herself uses that word in a song!

pussyriot

Their confusion and incomprehension seems genuine. They seriously seem to believe that Trump’s comments were upsetting to others solely because he uttered the word “pussy” — completely overlooking what the rest of the world found deplorable, that he was boasting of sexual assault, of grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent. Such staggering incomprehension is only possible due to these “conservative” folks’ utter inability to grasp the necessity of consent.

We see this same incomprehension manifested in many other ways, such as the constant appalling refrain from religious right types that not criminalizing same-sex couples will inevitably result in legalizing pedophilia and bestiality. Apart from the deliberate cruelty of that claim, it’s simply dumb — appealing only to those unable and unwilling to understand the meaning and primacy of consent.

The stubborn conservative refusal to understand this is as weird as it is frustrating. The idea is so utterly simple and basic, but it just makes them angry. Just look at that astonishing statement from Limbaugh. He’s furious about a basic tent of criminal law, blaming some conspiracy of “the left” for the idea that the absence of consent is what distinguishes rape as a crime. It’s easy to get so distracted by the offensiveness of his remarks there that one can miss noticing how unfathomably stupid that is.

So you “leftists” are saying that sex without consent is rape? Well, yes. That is what we’re saying, and also what criminal statutes in every state say, because that’s what these words mean. Yet even when he’s repeating that back to us, he’s unable to understand it.

What accounts for this angry incomprehension?

I suspect in part this dates back a generation, to conservative backlash against hippies and Woodstock and Aquarian fantasies about free love — the 1960s version of an idea that has always periodically emerged in various would-be utopian communities throughout history. So part of why conservatives can’t hear us when we say “consent is necessary” is because they’re too busy arguing with the vestigial hippies in their heads.

But I think the larger problem is that conservatives just don’t like the idea of sexual ethics or ethical sex. They’ve imagined they don’t need any of that because they have a much simpler, more categorical solution of their own: marriage. That’s the whole of conservative sexual ethics — or what conservatives appeal to instead of sexual ethics. Marriage, they want to believe, is necessary and sufficient for ethical sex.

The logic of this two-part assertion often leads to some ugly conclusions — such as the refusal to accept that raping one’s spouse is possible. But set aside the ghastlier implications of this way of thinking for now and consider the self-defeating nature of this two-part claim. This is a big reason why the defenders of “traditional sexual morality” have been unable to defend traditional sexual morality. Specifically, they’re so focused on defending the claim that marriage is sufficient, that they have failed to make any case that marriage is necessary.

This undermines their purported traditional morality in two important ways. First by distorting it — the claim that marital status alone is sufficient goes beyond, and thereby obliterates, the very ideas they’re trying to defend (just consider any traditional marriage vows — which consist of far more than, “OK, you’re married now so anything goes!”). And second by preventing them from paying any attention to the need to defend the necessity of marriage, which ought to be the essence of their argument.

This indefensible notion of the sufficiency of marriage is, I think, a major driver of their hostility to accepting the necessity of consent. If marriage is, in itself, sufficient, then nothing else can be necessary. Not consent, or dignity, or safety, or fidelity, or love, or a prudent concern for not scaring the horses. So they cannot accept or acknowledge or engage with the necessity of consent because that would force them to concede that their claims for the “sanctity of marriage” mean something other than the all-sufficiency of marriage and that they’re actually going to have to think responsibly about this stuff rather than just relying on the binary categories of married/not-married to do all their thinking for them.

I’m not going to do all of their homework for them, but it seems to me that what these folks ought to be doing is making a positive case for the necessity of marriage. That seems much more like what they want to be arguing for, but they’ll never be able to do so until they accept and acknowledge that marital status cannot be the only necessary consideration.

For the record, I think that marriage can be an excellent framework for supporting and nurturing the many things that ethical sex and sexual ethics require. I am not convinced it is the only such framework. In the parlance of our conservative neighbors, I could thus be said to have “rejected” or “abandoned” traditional morality.

Fair enough, but they should recognize that I have done so, in part, because they have refused to offer an argument not to — focusing instead on their indefensible, and ultimately odious, claim that marriage is not just necessary but sufficient. That has led them to reject the necessity of consent and, thereby, to equate their “traditional morality” with the defense of sexual assault. Their rejection of the necessity of consent, in other words, makes their traditional morality seem immoral.

Consent is a necessary prerequisite for any sexual ethic

Last updated on: May 27, 2015 at 12:56 pm By Fred Clark

Libby Anne of Love, Joy, Feminism has written several of the most insightful responses I’ve seen to the horrifying revelations of the history of sexual abuse by reality TV personality Josh Duggar, and to the disastrously inept response from his famous family. This is a story from her native tribe — the white evangelical/fundamentalist Christian patriarchal homeschooling subculture of Bill Gothard, the Quiverful cult, the Vision Forum, “courtship” and all the rest. While she has since gotten free of that world, she still knows it intimately, and you won’t find a better interpreter or translator of that world and its ways than Libby Anne.

(To back up that praise, consider this post: “My concerns about the Duggars.” And then consider that it was written more than three years ago.)

In that capacity as a translator and interpreter of the Duggars’ white Christian subculture, Libby Anne is particularly helpful when it comes to explaining why the members of that tribe — the Duggars and their defenders — seem mystified at the way the rest of the world is responding to the news of Josh Duggar’s past (perhaps) pattern of sexual abuse. She writes about “Josh Duggar and the Tale of Two Boxes” — a post that builds on her older post, “A Tale of Two Boxes: Contrasting Sexual Ethics.” That original post has become an indispensable piece of my own mental vocabulary because it does such a fine job of articulating the shape and the limits of evangelical sexual ethics — at least as popularly understood and practiced.

The Tale of Two Boxes clarifies a great deal, as I’ve written about before (see “Sex and theology” and, more recently, “Here’s that ‘Anything Goes’ rant about evangelical sexual ethics“). The basic idea is that for white evangelicals and other so-called social conservatives, all forms of extra-marital sex are considered sinful, while marital sex is good. This produces a system with two — and only two — categories to be considered: Married and Not-Married. And thus it creates a system that asks one — and only one — question when evaluating the ethical status of any given sex act: Are the actors married to one another?

The end result is Libby Anne’s Two Boxes:

Here’s how Libby Anne applies this to the case of Josh Duggar and the irreconcilably different understandings of his actions held by his defenders and those who are appalled by his deeds:

Social conservatives tend to divide sexual acts into “marital sex” and “non-marital sex.” For social conservatives, child sexual molestation is in the same category as gay sex or consensual premarital sex. When divided in this way, sexual molestation doesn’t look all that different from consensual premarital sex — though both are considered sin. This is why the Duggars can talk about Josh’s “mistakes” the way they do—as though it were simply him going too far with a girlfriend, or viewing pornography. Because for them, they’re in the same category—sexual contact before marriage.

Progressives do not have ethical or moral problems with premarital sexual intercourse — but they very much have a problem with child molesting. To conservatives this can look like an inconsistency — even hypocrisy — but it’s not. Progressive sexual ethics center around consent. Sexual contact that is consensual is okay. Sexual contact that isn’t consensual is not okay.

Consent is, indeed, the key factor here. But note that the problem is not only that this essential factor is absent from the “conservative” Two Boxes scheme. That Two-Boxes framework also prevents those steeped in it from comprehending the role that consent plays for the rest of us.

That, in turn, leads to the absurd cartoon straw-man that such conservatives love to mock and dismiss whenever the matter of consent comes up. Hence the reaction of my old friend the Kuyperian Marine, who could never seem to hear the word consent without sarcastically responding, “As long as its between two consenting adults, then anything goes!” This was an intelligent guy — a man with a Ph.D. in ethics who is capable of immensely subtle and principled thought on a host of other subjects. But he was unable to grasp the vital ethical importance of consent because he was so steeped in Two-Boxes ideology.

His confusion, and that of countless others, arises from misunderstanding statements like the one Libby Anne makes when she says that “Progressive sexual ethics center around consent.” His sexual ethics center around marital status, so he assumes — incorrectly — that this means consent must play an identical role in progressives’ sexual ethics to the role marital status plays in his own thinking. He assumes, in other words, that those hippy progressives also have Two Boxes.

To put this all another way, for social conservatives, marriage is necessary and sufficient for ethical sexual activity. When they hear folks like Libby Anne (or me) emphasizing the essential importance of consent, they therefore assume that we are, in turn, arguing that consent is necessary and sufficient for ethical sexual activity. But that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying consent is necessary. Period.

Ethical sexual activity must be consensual. Take away mutual consent and you take away the possibility of ethical sexual contact. Mutual consent is the necessary starting point, the prerequisite for the possibility of ethical sex. But the presence of mutual consent alone is not sufficient to guarantee that, therefore, “anything goes.” It’s not as Two-Boxes simple or zipless as that. (Any attempt to posit a scenario in which mutual consent would be both necessary and sufficient would involve carefully constructing a simplified hypothetical in such a way as to acknowledge multiple other factors by way of excluding them from consideration in that particular case.)

The real task facing social conservatives is to make a convincing case that marriage is a necessary condition for ethical sex. Many of them aren’t even trying to make that case because they’re too busy defending the indefensible proposition of Two Boxes ideology — the claim that marriage is a sufficient condition for ethical sex. They seem to think that arguing for the necessity of marriage would be a step back from arguing for its sufficiency — and therefore a kind of retreat or wavering or compromise.

But it’s only a retreat from something absurd and morally reprehensible. I can respect and converse with someone who argues that both marriage and consent are necessary conditions for ethical sexual activity, but if someone is arguing that marriage is sufficient, then they cannot believe that consent matters (apart from a once-and-for-all-time “I do”) and that is a perspective I cannot respect or abide.

Trust, control, permission, consent

Last updated on: January 27, 2013 at 11:40 pm By Fred Clark

“Civility is a great friend of the status quo.”

“As a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?”

“please, let’s stop saying ‘we let women lead’ and ‘i just feel like one of the guys’ and start living out a new story, together.”

“It’s a ‘nice’ form of dehumanization, but it’s still dehumanization nonetheless.”

I’ve passed her on the stairs many times, but never knew her history until I read this post.

“Who owns and control’s one’s body, especially when it comes to women: is it the individual herself or the community, through enforced practices of honor, virginity, veiling, and marriage?” (via)

“It is not their talking points that are the problem, it’s the beliefs that inform the talking points that are the problem.”

“The problem isn’t the wisdom of this advice; the problem is that this advice is necessary.”

“Oh, how I missed the certainly, the simplicity, the assurance that if you just follow the recipe, your life and family will turn out beautifully.”

“Better fathers and husbands means men abandoning male privilege and outdated gender roles.”

“For the authorities at our evangelical camp, a paradigm of sexual ethics that even acknowledges consent is seen as ‘watered down’ or ‘less biblical’ since it’s diverging from the typical Protestant stance on sexual relationships: no sex before marriage. Period. End of conversation.”

“At the moment the numbers are small, and they tend to keep fairly quiet about their change of heart, but the change is beginning.”

“The percentage of Americans who believe homosexuality is a sin has decreased significantly over the past year.”

“It’s time for the baptized to claim the priesthood of that baptism and to stand up, shake the dust off their sandals, and abandon a church where its hierarchy practices apartheid.”

“If I signed this, it would be a betrayal not only of myself but of my fellow priests and lay Catholics who want change.”

“As the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island, I support the bill before the General Assembly that would allow same-sex couples to marry in our state, not in spite of my Christian faith, but because of it.”

“The only excuse I have is that somewhere, in the back of my brain, I know that it is more repulsive in some evangelical circles for a woman to sound Marxist than to say the word penis.”

“They clearly didn’t believe us. They didn’t trust us.”

“Our moral goal should be to struggle against those real barriers — poverty, racism, and anti-female cultural oppression — that prevent authentic choice from being a reality for every woman.”

“Women have been arrested, institutionalized, or subjected to unwanted medical interventions due to their pregnancies.”

“I will never understand why people who hate abortion don’t love Planned Parenthood and tithe to it like it was their church, because they have prevented more abortions than all the fire-and-brimstone preachers on the planet combined.”

“It’s a bit of a relief that Bryant abandoned the pretense of giving a damn about women’s health. And a bit more of that kind of candor will also perhaps inhibit judges from taking such pretenses seriously.”

“Even if Roe survives as before and the wave of anti-choice state legislation flowing from the 2010 Republican landslide retreats, we still have to come to grips with the fact that a significant if decisively outnumbered minority of Americans, for reasons ranging from religious doctrine to fear of women’s sexuality, view or claim to view legalized abortion as a ‘Holocaust,’ and themselves as akin to the anti-Hitler resistance.”

Misogyny isn’t new; consent shouldn’t be confusing

Last updated on: July 8, 2012 at 7:08 pm By Fred Clark

Helen Lewis at the New Statesmen shows us “What online harassment looks like.” It’s an awful, potentially triggering, collection of “Obscene images, hate sites, and a game where people are invited to beat you up.”

This is disturbing and disturbed. It’s hateful, hate-filled stuff posted by boys who simply hate women. These boys hate women viscerally and violently.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course.

Amanda MacInnis of Cheese-Wearing Theology is taking us on a tour of similar harassment during the Protestant Reformation. Here’s the second post in her series: “Invectives: Examples of Reactions to Women in Leadership in the Reformation.”

I’d never heard of John Knox’s treatise, “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” but geez, that man had issues.

I can begin to understand the sort of cautiously conservative church person who sees some of those “keep silent” clobber verses and takes them as supporting limits on women’s participation in the church. I think those folks are utterly wrong, but I can appreciate that they’re at least basing their wrongness on something other than straight-up misogyny and a seething hatred of women.

But the kind of invective MacInnis collects here can’t be explained as a mere attempt to elevate the clobber verses into an eternal rule. You only write like that when you despise women.

For this collection of invective, as with Lewis’ more recent collection of online examples, it doesn’t seem we’re really seeing a “reaction” to women or to anything any given woman has ever said or done. For these men, hatred of women seems to be the starting point, not the conclusion, response or reaction they want to pretend it is.

* * * * * * * * *

American Family Association culture-warrior Bryan Fischer doesn’t understand consent.

Or, perhaps, Bryan Fischer doesn’t think that consent does, or should, have anything to do with sex:

Once you allow sex between two people of the same sex, there is no place to stop. You can’t stop just with homosexuality. You can’t stop with polygamy. You can’t even stop with pedophilia. You wind up going all the way to sex with animals.

In other words, if you ask Bryan Fischer why raping a small child is wrong, he would say it is wrong because it is an instance of sex outside of the context of marriage between one man and one woman. Not because it is coercive. Not because it is rape. But because, for Fischer, straight-married sex is always Good, and any other kind of sex, not being straight-married sex, is always Bad.

This is not “traditional religious ethics.” It isn’t ethics at all. It’s a single check-box formula for determining whether or not any sexual act is Fischer-Approved.

Yes, this makes Fischer a foolish moral imbecile. But it also makes him dangerous. He is arguing, vehemently, that consent is of no moral consequence. Bryan Fischer may not understand what rape is, but he’s working hard to defend it anyway.

Cheer up, you melancholy Dane

Last updated on: April 16, 2025 at 3:52 pm By Fred Clark

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• All three seasons of Slings & Arrows are now free to watch (with ads) on YouTube. It’s as good as I remembered.

If you’re worried that enjoying an entertaining show seems frivolous given, well, everything else that’s going on these days, then just tell yourself that you’re demonstrating solidarity with our Canadian neighbors and allies by celebrating this fine example of their culture.

Plus it’s got an all-timer for an opening song:

• Naomi Klein (the good one) and Astra Taylor write about “The rise of end times fascism.”

Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.

If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism. …

You don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”

I will, as always, point out that Rapture Christianity is absolutely not compatible with any attempt to be a “biblical literalist.” The arbitrary textual gymnastics required to impose the premillennial dispensationalist Rapture narrative onto biblical texts that literally will not accept that narrative are anything but “literalism.”

But Klein and Taylor make a convincing case for the parallels between the techbro future and the delirious fantasies of folks like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. Here, for example, is a song we sang in my Rapture-fundie Sunday school:

Somewhere in outer space
God has prepared a place
For those who trust Him and obey
Jesus will come again
And though we don’t know when
The Countdown’s getting lower every day.

Ten and nine, eight and seven
Six and five and four
Call upon the Savior while you may
Three and two, coming through
The clouds in bright array
The Countdown’s getting lower every day

And here are Klein and Taylor on Elon Musk’s “end times fascism”:

Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.

There is a great deal to chew on in that long essay, but let me highlight the conclusion and add my “Amen”:

To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.

• I told this story in clipped BlueSky form, but let me repeat it here because I think it’s an important parable about, oh, let’s call it the relationship between power and the consent of the governed.

Many years ago, I spent a week fishing on a lake in Maine with a couple of theology professors. One of them, my boss at the time, had a cabin near the shore of that lake, built on land owned by a timber company.

The company only offered short-term, renewable leases on the land, so my boss was worried that he might build his cabin, then have the company decide not to renew the lease and he’d lose the cabin and all the money he’d spent building it. So he visited with some of the other fishermen who had built cabins on leased land there and was surprised to learn that none of them was worried about that.

He couldn’t understand why not, until one old guy with a thick Down East accent explained it to him: “Well, they could decide to do that. But then there’d be a lot of fires.”

The arrangement was sustainable because the powerful corporate landlord knew this and remembered it. It is important that they never be allowed to forget it.

JD Vance and the Flushing Remonstrance

Last updated on: July 29, 2024 at 5:22 pm By Fred Clark

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I’ve been reading about J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, and so I’m thinking again about the Flushing Remonstrance.

Vance is an admirer and follower of several theorists who are described as skeptics of liberal democracy and as “post-democratic” thinkers and intellectuals. So I decided to read some of their intellectual thoughts.

As skeptics and critics of liberal democracy, what is it that they want to see liberal democracy replaced with? What’s their innovative big new idea?

The short answer is they don’t have one. They want to see liberal democracy replaced with what came before it.

That’s a problem because everybody hated what came before it. Everybody.

Vance’s gurus all start with the notion that liberal democracy was invented by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and then they critique those philosophers to argue that the Enlightenment — and, therefore, liberal democracy itself — was a wrong turn and a bad idea and that we should all go back to monarchy and feudalism and church-state synthesis.

The outrageousness of their conclusions is so startling — monarchism! sectarian integralism! ethnic and religious hierarchy! — that we can get distracted from their dim-witted misapprehension and thick-witted misrepresentation of history.

The idea of liberal democracy did not come from a handful of philosophers writing treatises in their ivied towers. It came from almost everybody who had to live through three centuries of war, instability, uncertainty, and religious turmoil. People did not enjoy living through three centuries of war, instability, uncertainty, and religious turmoil. It was bad.

Basically, every time your country got a new king or queen, or lost a war, you’d have to switch religions. That sucked.

And it sucked for everybody. Historians often write about the persecution of religious “non-conformists” during those centuries, but it was no picnic for the conformists either, because what you were required to conform to was constantly changing, reversing, then reversing back. One day you and all of your neighbors are obediently worshipping the way your king and country expects and requires and the next day, or the next month, that same behavior could get you killed or imprisoned or impoverished. Sometimes you’ve barely finished building your new church before you’re told to burn it down and rebuild the old one.

Nobody liked living that way. It was exhausting and confusing and terrifying — all the time. It took a while for those philosophers to come along and map out an alternative, but for generations before that the mass sentiment was We Do Not Want to Live Like This and We Should Not Have to Live Like This. Long before any of those philosophers started writing about the particulars of pluralistic liberal democracy, the heartfelt, widely held opinion was that life would be a lot better for everybody if we didn’t have to change religions every time we change governments.

Even the winners of the various religious wars and succession struggles eventually came to see this. They came to see that “victory” was always tenuous and temporary — Henry to Jane to Cromwell to Charles, etc. But they also came to realize that even “winning” was intrusive and meddlesome and intolerably fraught. Even under a Catholic or Puritan government, you could never just live your life as a Catholic or Puritan, you’d have to prove you were a good one. And often the way that you’d be asked to prove you were a good one was by ratting our your neighbors so that you could witness them being punished as an example and a constant threat to you.

This was no way to live and everybody knew it.

Which brings us to the Flushing Remonstrance. This was in 1657. John Locke was still a student. Montesquieu and Rousseau hadn’t been born yet. The Flushing Remonstrance was not a work of Enlightenment philosophy. It was just a bunch of normal people collectively saying, “No. Not this again. We refuse to go on living like this.”

They didn’t philosophize and thereby invent new structures of pluralistic liberal democracy. They just protested and thereby invented New York City.

This was the work of normal people who had had enough. They had crossed an ocean to escape the endless religious turmoil in England, settling in a Dutch colony because the Netherlands seemed at least to be trying something new, uniting its Catholic and Protestant lands without demanding the mass conversion of either. So these English settlers, mostly Protestant “non-conformists,” got permission to start a new life in New Amsterdam.

Alas for them, the colonial governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, was still wedded to that miserable old idea of government as the sponsor and promoter of the One True Religion. In Stuyvesant’s case, that One True Religion was Dutch Reformed Calvinism.

Peg-leg Pete, like the ayatollahs of Massachusetts, decreed that Quakers and Jews would not be welcome in New Amsterdam. (He also cracked down on Catholics and Lutherans.) The Flushing Remonstrance was a rejection of that decree. This rejection wasn’t really based on any philosophizing about democratic accountability or the consent of the governed. It was mostly just “Hell no. We are not doing this again. This always sucks for everybody and everybody hates this and everybody knows this is no way to live so, just, no.”

They had had it up to here with governments dictating people’s religion and requiring people to change their religion and so, they decided, from now on, religion was off the table.

That, right there, is the thing that J.D. Vance and all of his anti-democracy gurus do not understand about liberal democracy. That is the prerequisite and foundation of the whole thing — taking things off the table.

This is what George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer so disastrously failed to understand when “promoting democracy” in Iraq. Democracy, they seemed to think, was simply a matter of having an election to choose your government.

And so, as quickly as possible, they held an election — an election in which nothing was off the table. Or, in other words, an election in which everything was at stake. Without a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights or even so much as a Flushing Remonstrance, that election was doomed to become a slightly less violent version of the Protestant/Catholic wars and succession struggles that had roiled Europe for centuries. Religion was on the ballot. Religion should never be on the ballot.

The writers and signers of the Flushing Remonstrance could have predicted what such an election would mean: conflict, violence, civil war. Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams could’ve told them the same thing.

When religious freedom — whether or how you must worship — is contingent on the next government, and the next, and the next, then life always sucks for everybody.

Religious freedom should not be contingent on the next government. It should be off the table.

A lot of things should be off the table. Then, and only then, we can vote safely without life having to suck for everybody.

This, in a nutshell, is what J.D. Vance and his anti-democratic, anti-liberal gurus do not understand about the liberal democracy they oppose.