If you want to get a chilling idea for what students at fundified colleges and universities are being taught, a real lulu comes from Patrick Henry College, a school with very close ties to the Christian homeschooling movement. Its founder, Michael Farris, started the school with the stated goal of educating a generation of young Christianists who will retake various arenas for Christianity. In other words, this school is basically a Christianist madrassa.
Last week, government professor Stephen Baskerville delivered the school's annual "Faith and Reason" lecture, a mandatory event for all students. His treatise, titled "Politicizing Potiphar's Wife," can be read in its entirety here. However, arguably the most offensive part is a maudlin apology for rape, domestic violence and child abuse. In Baskerville's view, laws against these are a nefarious attempt to throw upstanding white men in prison.
Since the inception of their Revolution – and well beneath the media radar screen – militants have been creating a panoply of new crimes and expanded redefinitions of existing crimes – all involving sexual relations. While it is very likely that the Sexual Revolution has also increased incidents of real sex crimes, the new gender crimes are different: They play on the fear of sex crimes, but they redefine these politically to include not simply acts but heterodox political beliefs. The reality of the witch hunts thus bears no necessary relation to what is suggested by the inflammatory language and jargon:
- “rape” that includes consensual relations and in most instances is no more than that;
- domestic “violence” that involves no violence or any physical contact or threat of it;
- sexual “harassment” that can mean anything from simple flirtation to unauthorized opinions about morality or politics;
- “child abuse” that is routine parental discipline, or homeschooling, or concocted altogether to win advantage in divorce court;
- “bullying” that involves criticism of the homosexual agenda or other differences of belief and opinion;
- “stalking” that is forcibly divorced fathers trying to see their own children;
and much more.
In Baskerville's view, laws against rape, domestic violence and child abuse have turned government into a "matriarchal leviathan" manipulated by "the temptress, the seductress who lures men into a “honeytrap” by offers of pleasure before springing a trap that today can mean decades in prison."
I don't think I need to tell you how primitive and degrading this kind of thinking is. Two things in particular scare me. The first is what it must take to be a woman attending this school and having to sit through such mindless, chauvinist garbage. I know that fundie women are trained almost from the time they can crawl that they are to more or less bow and scrape before their men, but you would think that even they would have limits. The second is that dozens of kids in Christian schools and Christianist homeschooling curricula are having their minds poisoned with claims that laws that protect women from being degraded are a Bad Thing.
(h/t to People for the American Way)