Women

On his radio program today, Glenn Beck spent a bit of time discussing the case of Kermit Gosnell and the media's supposed refusal to adequately cover the story.  Despite that fact that until last week, Beck's The Blaze had barely mentioned the story, Beck blamed the media for failing to cover it and announced that he was going to delve into it in potentially graphic detail on tonight's television program.

In Beck's view, the Gosnell case and "almost everything that is going on in our society, I think, was hastened by the National Organization of Women" [sic] because the organization convinced women that they were no different than men. 

And when that happens, "society goes to hell" because men stop respecting women "and society starts to careen out of control":

As Brian just demonstrated, the Religious Right is not at all pleased about the Pentagon's decision to allow women to serve in combat and that, of course, includes Bryan Fischer, who declared on his radio program today that the change is part of a deliberate effort on the part of President Obama to destroy the military.

As Fischer sees it, Obama "detests the military" because he views it as tool that "white colonial powers" use to oppress nations around the globe.  In fact, Obama is so imbued with hatred of America's fundamental "white supremacy [and] white racism," Fischer believes, that he is "systematically going about destroying the military" by allowing women to serve in combat:

On yesterday’s Generations Radio, Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner took on the recent case in which the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a dentist was justified in firing an assistant whom he found “irresistible.” Swanson and Buehner, who agreed with the court’s decision, used the case as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the woes of modern workplaces that throw men together with women to whom they are not married. Such arrangements, Buehner fretted, are “pseudo-marriages.” Swanson feared that they come dangerously close to “polygamy”:

Swanson: This is not unusual, unfortunately, and it certainly is going to happen when you have a decrease in family economies. It’s one reason why we push the family economic vision, because the family economy is pretty much the way God set things up. The man and the woman come together not just for sexual union but also to be helpmeets and dominion-takers together as a team, as a lean, mean team in the dominion effort. That’s the way it was designed in the garden when the woman came to the man as the helpmeet for the man in the dominion task.

Buehner: And Kevin, I think that’s key. What we have in some of these business workplaces is a woman who’s not the wife being the helper or the helpmeet of the man and she has taken on the role of the helper…

Swanson: …for the man.

Buehner: And the only thing that’s missing in that relationship is the sexual consummation.

Swanson: Or the polygamy.

Buehner: Right. So remember, when God placed Adam in the garden, he gave him a mandate. He said you need a helper. He told Adam to go out and take some dominion, Adam named the animals, He said, ‘Yeah, this is really hard, you’re gonna need yourself a helper.” So He made Eve for him. It does not say that Eve was created because Adam needed to have a sexual outlet, it was created because Adam needed a helper. Now we take a man and we give him a helper out in the marketplace. He’s in a pseudo-marriage.

Swanson: And yeah, it can move in that direction pretty quickly.

The root cause of these inappropriate workplace relationships, Swanson and Buehner conclude, is an economic system built by “universities and colleges and political systems and corporate systems” in which women work outside the family unit. The fired dental assistant, Buehner contends, “would have been better off working for her husband.”

Swanson: Friends, you gotta understand that we have tremendous socio-economic forces that have been set up by systems that want to systematically destroy the integrity of the family life and the marriage in the 20th century and the 21st century. This is what you’re up against. I just want people to understand that as we are trying to reconfigure entire socio-economic systems by way of our familyeconomics.com and by our huge conferences we are sponsoring around the country to this year, we are going up against this socio-economic structure that has been put in place by universities and colleges and political systems and corporate systems, etcetera, etcetera, that makes it extremely difficult for the family to survive in the 21st century.

…

Buehner: In this dentist case situation, the dentist was married, his wife was working in the office with him. That’s great. This woman, this “irresistible” woman, she was also married and had two children. It would have been better if she was working for her husband! I mean, these are utopian ideas here, but these are Biblical ideas.
 

Last week, Bryan Fischer was making his case, yet again, that it is liberals who hate women ... especially stay at home moms. This prompted Fischer to go off on a tangent and declare that women can have more influence staying home and raising the next generation of leader than she can by "going out in the world and making her mark out there":

It's not possible to overestimate that value that stay-at-home moms, what they contribute to society by investing their full energies in the children. Where does the next generation of leaders come from? It comes from moms, and dads, who are invested in the lives of their children. So a woman can have far more influence, far more significant impact on the world by giving herself wholly to growing her children up to be responsible, mature adults than she can by going out in the world and making her mark out there.

The implication here, of course, is that "the next generation of leaders" - and every generation of leaders, for that matter -  will be men since every woman should be at home raising children instead of "going out in the world and making her mark out there."

Yesterday, Phyllis Schlafly traveled to South Carolina to speak to at The Citadel, which now offers a course entitled the "Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America."

Speaking to an all-male audience, Schlafly assured them that women don't care about the issue of contraception and warned them not to date feminists:

The recent political flap about contraception being an important issue for women is completely contrived by Democrats and the media to divert attention from abortion and other important issues, said conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly.

“Contraception is not controversial,” she said. “The issue is not access. It’s who’s going to pay for it.”

...

Most women are concerned about issues such as jobs and religious liberty, Schlafly said, not issues being drummed up by feminists to foster support for President Barack Obama.

And feminists are working through the media and other channels because the American public no longer seems to strongly support their agenda, Schlafly said. “Feminists are having a hard time being elected because they essentially are unlikable,” she said.

Schlafly talked to a group of Citadel students about the culture of conservatism and the history of the religious right. She told the all-male group that “feminist is a bad word and everything they stand for is bad.”

And she warned them about having personal relationships with feminists. “Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” she said. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

Last week, Rick Santorum explained that he was opposed to any plans by the Pentagon to place women in combat positions, asserting that the "types of emotions that are involved" would compromise combat effectiveness.

Santorum quickly "clarified," saying that he didn't mean that women were emotionally unsuited for serving in combat but rather that male soldiers would be protective of female soldiers and inclined to compromise the mission in order to defend them.

Not surprisingly, Bryan Fischer agrees with Santorum ... and is even willing to defend the view that Santorum himself rejected: that women are inherently emotionally unfit for combat:

But not only are women emotionally unfit for combat but also physically unfit because, as Fischer explained in his column today, "the average female soldier does not even have the arm strength to throw a grenade far enough to keep herself from getting blown up."

While a few right-wing groups are using Halloween this year to put on "Hell Houses" which torture attendees with graphic portrayals of gay people dying of AIDS and women suffering from abortions, many Religious Right figures have called on people to stop celebrating Halloween altogether. Back in 2009, Jacksonville city councilwoman and past CBN commentator Kimberly Daniels warned that Halloween candy is under a demonic curse as a result of Satanic orgies, and last week Christian radio commentator Linda Harvey said that celebrating Halloween is cheating on Jesus with ‚"our spiritual enemy." Pat Robertson warned Christians earlier this month that‚ "Halloween is Satan‚Äôs night; it's the night for the devil. It's All Hallow's Eve but it's time when witches and goblins."

But according to Christian researcher Jill Martin Rische, who co-authored The Kingdom of the Occult with her father, the evangelist Walter Ralston Martin, Halloween actually has Christian roots. While Rische laments what the holiday has become in contemporary America, she told Christian broadcaster Janet Parshall earlier this month that the day is not in fact from the occult:

Rische: I started searching for what Halloween was and oh, ran across some very fascinating thing, the most fascinating of all is, recently, over the last ten to fifteen years, secular historians’ views of Halloween have changed. They used to promote the fact that this was a pagan holiday and that the Church took it over to wipe out what the pagans were doing and you’ll find this all over the place, all over the net, all over different sites, a lot of information that says this is a pagan holiday that was taken over by the Church. But in reality, you have these scholars now, some from Harvard and other places that have gained a lot of respect, big names, saying that this is not true. They’re saying that there is no historical evidence whatsoever for the witches’ holiday of Sowan. None.

It was the Church actually, there was more evidence for the Church, and this relates to All Saints Day. Now as far as being celebrated all over the world, there were different feasts that were celebrated and there is evidence that there were feasts celebrating the beginning of winter when animals were killed and there was a lot of partying, but again there is no evidence for what went on during that time. None. So it’s all kind of been lumped together under something bad but really All Hallow’s Eve, which comes before All Saints Day the First of November, was meant to be a great time of celebration, celebrating the lives of those who have really lived for Christ and often have given their life.

On a Believers Voice of Victory episode that aired today, David Barton told televangelist Kenneth Copeland that women are most elevated in a society that has “conformed to the Scriptures.” Citing Religious Right activist Rabbie Daniel Lapin, Barton said that the Bible is actually the basis of women’s rights, while in “Islam” and secular societies like France and “the Norwegian countries,” women have fewer rights and less respect. Perhaps Barton should read The Handmaid’s Tale before arguing that women will prosper in a society run strictly according to biblical law:

Watch:

Bill Bennett appeared on The 700 Club today to promote his new book The Book of Man. He and Pat Robertson used the time to lament the rise of women in American society and the supposed decimation of manhood. Bennett claimed that “feminism” and “gay culture” confused and blurred gender lines, and seemed to mourn the fact that women are now taking positions of authority in society once reserved only for men. Robertson cited the promotion of Virginia Rometty, who is succeeding Sam Palmisano to be CEO of IBM, and warned of a pending “matriarchy.”

Watch:

Bennett: What feminism did I think, Pat, was confuse the debate to some extent by saying those expectations we have of boys, the kinds of responsibilities that they will need to take up as men, we’re not sure we need them anymore because we’re not sure we need men any more, well we do need men.

Robertson: Well you know it’s interesting in the news today was the changing of the guard at IBM where Palmisano is changing off and a woman’s taking his position as head of this great corporation, IBM.

Bennett: That’s right and there’s just a ton of that…fine all power to the women and the girls, as long as we don’t confuse roles and the differences in genders. Boys have to wake up! We got to wake them up!

Robertson: What’s this going to do to society, if men don’t take their places as men and suddenly there’s a gap and women and we have a matriarchy. What will this do ultimately to society?

Bennett: I think it can hurt society, maybe grievously. Interestingly the feminists are not celebrating this Pat, they want men too. They might want to rail against this and they may want to talk about stereotypes of man and male domination and so on, but women want men. They want men for that strong arm, they want men for that protection, they want men for a partner in marriage and so it’s something that has got very blurred and what I try to do in this book is remind people of things that are true. And to the boys, as you very well said, the array of things offered on TV and elsewhere is very confusing, from macho stuff to gay culture to all sorts of things. What I got here is a point of view that is time tested, based in tradition that will get boys to manhood.