Women’s bodies and sexuality has always been viewed as things that must be regulated because women are too stupid (or given to temptation) to regulate themselves.
Why, if women can have sex without any negative consequences, what will stop your wife from opening her legs for your next-door-neighbor? Next thing you know, you’re raising some other feller’s kids without even knowing it. And if your daughter can have sex without any negative consequences, what will stop her from opening her legs for the ne’er-do-well heathen down the road and bringing shame to the family? No one will ever want to marry such a ruint woman! No, we must regulate female sexuality to keep order in the home!
Conservatives in general has always viewed women’s sexuality as an evil that must be controlled. They may sincerely believe their pro-life position is all about saving babies, but their disregard for women’s rights and autonomy to achieve this aim is rooted in the fears I laid out above…whether they want to admit it or not. And you gotta wonder about the motivations of an Administration that is so vehemently against both abortion and “evil Islam” but shrugs its shoulders over female circumcision. You also gotta wonder about the motivations of a political party that claims to care so much about babies, but doesn’t see anything wrong with female babies being forced to marry.
You misunderstand. The point isn’t for men to have more sexual partners but to ensure wives/daughters don’t fuck around. Which is also why you often see pro-life people objecting to sex ed mentioning anything beyond “abstinence” (although I’ve always been tickled by the “fuck me in the ass 'cause I love Jesus” crowd) as well as contraceptives. The point is to restrict female sexuality to specific boundaries that can be enforced and controlled by patriarchal figures.
The mystery here is WHY does their religion tell them these things? As much as their religion would like us all to believe it is the unvarnished word of God, the exact tenets and teachings of religions are decided upon by the people who run the churches.
Those people have decided that sex is naughty, and people who engage in it must “face consequences”, whether or not those people are practitioners of their religion. The consequences of sex are much deeper for women than men, so they bear the brunt of these religious attacks.
They want to control people – period. Controlling what women can do with their body is an example of that, and a pretty strong one. The real message is, "*We don’t give a fuck if a majority of you Godless bastards support a woman’s right to choice; we’re going to take that choice away from you whether you like it or not, so shut your asses up and burn in hell. We know we’re right.
p.s. God loves you*"
That’s one reason (among many) why I think a lot of the people who voted for Trump, many of them being relatively libertarian or somewhat reasonable on some issues, are going to regret their vote down the line. The mentality fueling Trumpian politics is authoritarianism. They might be taking away someone else’s freedom now, but eventually, they will come for yours too.
You think that they believe that? That their religious tenets are just made up on the fly by their pastors? Of course not. They believe it’s the eternal and unchanging word of god.
Ask them where in the Bible these teachings come from. If abortion is such an evil that women should gladly turn over their bodily autonomy to ensure it never happens, then surely this evil is unambiguously described in the holiest of texts and explicitly forbidden.
If the same God who used to be pretty blithe about destroying entire civilizations is now deeply concerned about the survival of embryos and fetuses, it’s fair to say His views on the sanctity of life have evolved somewhat over time.
The reason is that, throughout history, and almost without exception, men have dominated women. By reasserting control over a woman’s reproductive processes, they essentially regain much of the control that they have lost in this society. Women literally become slaves who can be raped with impunity and chained to giving birth to the demon’s spawn. You can’t have more control than that.
There are many people whose religion tells us that abortion is wrong, contraception can be wrong (there is no religion which considers all forms of contraception wrong, some are more subtle about it than others), and sex should happen within marriage with an openness for conception - yet who also consider that there are degrees of sin, and/or take views such as:
“since shit happens, so should toilet paper”
“since other people have other religions, I don’t have any more right to impose my religious views on them than they on me”, or
“government law and religious law are and should remain separate”.
So one of the questions is what is the difference between the ones you talk about and all these others. It seems to me that different people and cultures have different levels of manicheism, but also that this is the kind of essential trait which manifests in many aspects of that person or society.
Yeah it’s religious. Should we stone them to death those who wear two items of clothes woven from different fibers? That’s religious too (or something like that - I don’t care anymore about the specifics).
If you follow religion in such matters I have a low opinion of your decision-making ability. And I act accordingly.
Exactly. And the women in the movement are being moral by doing what these men say.
Straight, white, Christian men had the power in this country for over two centuries. They are very pissed they have lost it, and will do anything to make any person not in those categories to feel bad, and to regain that power.
This conclusion is usually reached by pointing out that the pro-life movement clearly and evidently does not believe what it claims it believes and consistently acts in such a way to ensure that there will be more unwanted pregnancies, and therefore more abortions. Their stated reasons make no sense, in other words. And it’s not a new observation to point out that fascists and authoritarians lie - constantly, about everything.
So what reason is there? Well, what’s the through-line? And what ideological tentpoles do those through-lines map to? Well, women shouldn’t be allowed to get abortions. Women shouldn’t have access to birth control. Nobody should get decent sexual education. Rapists should be able to sue for custody (even if the victim was 12 at the time of the rape). Also, we definitely shouldn’t do things like support the equal rights amendment, or fair pay for women, or parental leave, or anything like that.
There’s a philosophy underlying this that may sound familiar: “Women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” This is a throughline in dominionist and conservative Christian thought. And, if this is what you believe, all of the above actions make sense. If you want women disempowered, weak, at the mercy of their husbands, and unable to make decisions about their own lives, everything the religious right does makes a whole lot of sense, especially the parts that make absolutely no fucking sense if the premise we’re going from is “the religious right wants to prevent abortion”.
This is why I insist that the movement, much like the YECs, is rotten to the core. There may be true believers, but the people running the show? They know what they’re after, and it’s not the life of the fucking blastocyst that passed through Sally Sixpack’s system without anyone ever knowing that there was “life” there.
Nitpick: Of course, the vast majority of people who have serious power in this country still are straight white Christian men. It’s just that the average non-wealthy straight white Christian man is now much less likely to have significant power over the non-straightwhiteChristianmale folks around him than, say, his straight white Christian grandfather was.
The phenomenon of effective opposition to discrimination on grounds of race/gender/sexual orientation/sexual identity/etc., combined with continued resistance to anything labeled “socialism”, means that for the last few decades our society has been slipping back into the largely wealth-based hierarchical class system of the late 19th century.
Wealthy white men around the turn of the 20th century persuaded non-wealthy white men to side with them politically as a gesture of racial and gender solidarity. The implied bargain was that non-wealthy white men would forsake class solidarity in exchange for being socially superior to, and dominant over, women and non-whites.
The second half of that bargain has been unraveling over the last fifty years or so, but many non-wealthy white men are still clinging to the first half. They blame their loss of social dominance on the members of the groups they used to have dominance over, rather than on the people who conned them into this bargain in the first place.
