After Barack Obama was elected it did not take long for the extremists to come out in full force. They had lost that permanent majority that was going to make it easier for a free-market theocracy to come into being. They have not handled it well at all.
I kept thinking that showing the screamers at the health care forums would embarrass them. Not at all. They seem to take pride in it. I thought that most school districts would refuse to cave in to those who think the President of the United States would warp their children's minds. Not at all...even the media is making these fools sound legitimate. They have no shame and nothing embarrasses them.
I just heard of two families in our area who follow the way of life of the Quiverfull movement. A friend mentioned them and the problems they face. They believe if they keep producing child after child, God will provide. The woman sacrifices herself and her womb to her husband, to the Quiverfull movement and to God.
I think we underestimate the power of religious extremists in this movement and in the overall religious community. My head is still reeling from the way Florida counties so quickly caved to the ones who were fearful of the president. I think this kind of situation may be unprecedented in our country. I though Bush looked pathetic reading My Pet Goat, but I assumed he had a right to be there. I didn't respect him because he lied us to war, but he was the president...he had a right to talk to school children.
My friend, a social worker, pointed out that movements like the Quiverfull one are not just about building a army...they are about into keeping their children isolated from the world as much as they can. Isn't that what we saw this week? Are other religious right movements like that? For some reason so many right wingers are terrified of the president's speech....why? What do they fear?
From Kathryn Joyce at
The Nation in 2006:They borrow their name from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they're building for God.
..."Instead of picketing clinics, Pride writes, Christians should fight abortion by demonstrating that children are an "unqualified blessing" by having as many as God gives them. Only a determination among Christian women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a "military air" and become "maternal missionaries" will lead the Christian army to victory. Thus is Quiverfull part of Mary Pride's whole-cloth solution to women's liberation: embracing an opposing way of life as total and "self-consistent" as feminism, and turning back the tide on a society gone wrong by populating the world with right-thinking Christians.
The gentle manner of Deidre Welch, another Coxsackie mom, with four boys, seems at odds with Quiverfull's militaristic language, which describes children as weapons of spiritual war, as arrows shot out by their parents. But she describes the movement toward larger families in the same way: "God is bringing revelation on the world. He wants to raise up His army. He wants His children to be."...."Population is a preoccupation for many Quiverfull believers, who trade statistics on the falling white birthrate in European countries like Germany and France. Every ethnic conflict becomes evidence for their worldview: Muslim riots in France, Latino immigration in California, Sharia law in Canada. The motivations aren't always racist, but the subtext of "race suicide" is often there.
The goal is to grow the ranks of the righteous who in turn will have more children. And it IS political in nature as well. This paragraph from the article is a little scary.
After arguing Scripture, the Hesses point to a number of more worldly effects that a Christian embrace of Quiverfull could bring. "When at the height of the Reagan Revolution," they write, "the conservative faction in Washington was enforced (sic) with squads of new conservative congressmen, legislators often found themselves handcuffed by lack of like-minded staff. There simply weren't enough conservatives trained to serve in Washington in the lower and middle capacities." But if just 8 million American Christian couples began supplying more "arrows for the war" by having six children or more, they propose, the Christian-right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century ("assuming Christ does not return before then").
Raising children, arrows, to fight for the right wing issues in Congress.
This movement is about power in politics and government.
Religion is a part of it, but it is about power and control over our country.This year Kathryn Joyce interviewed a women who left this movement. The price of this kind of submission is devastating to the body of a woman, but the men just keep quoting scripture to them.
Quiverfull, the patriarchal movement, religion, Christianity.This woman's husband (to whom she was required to submit) became verbally abusive and controlling.
Garrison's marriage ended, and she became pregnant with her oldest daughter, Angel, during a short-lived rebound affair. She moved to Iowa to be near her mother and met Warren at a church picnic. After getting married, Garrison followed a new pastor's counsel to homeschool her growing family, which eventually led her to the Quiverfull movement, where homeschooling, Quiverfull and submission are intertwined convictions. As Garrison says, "If you take one, you pretty much have to take it all eventually."
Accepting every pregnancy as a unilateral blessing meant some radical leaps of faith, however. Put into physical practice, Garrison says the lesson of leaders like Nancy Campbell, editor of the fundamentalist women's magazine Above Rubies and author of movement books like "Be Fruitful and Multiply," "was, if pregnancy can kill you, think of the missionaries who go off to foreign lands and put their lives on the line. It's no different if you're risking your own body or life." Indeed, Mary Pride referred to her mothers as “maternal missionaries.”
Garrison complied. She'd had her first three children by cesarean section, but after coming to the Quiverfull conviction, she was swayed by the movement's emphasis on natural (even unassisted home) birth. During one delivery, she suffered a partial uterine rupture and "felt like I'd been in a major battle with Satan, and he'd just about left me dead." The doctor who treated Garrison lectured her for an hour not to conceive again, but she felt that stopping on her own would be rebellion. When she turned to her leaders for inspiration, she received a bleak message: that if she died doing her maternal duty, God would care for her family. For six months, she couldn't look at the baby without crying.
The person Kathryn Joyce was writing about set up her own blog called Quivering No More. These paragraphs tell a shocking tale of the price paid by wives and children who must be submissve in order to build a political army for God's work.
To those who are disappointed or hurt by my apostasyThere was a price to pay.
In the patriarchal world which I will no longer take part of, the Commanding Officers (the men) are forever waging war against the world and the devil. Wives and children are useful as foot soldiers and arrows in this daily battle for the Kingdom of God. Should a mother die in childbirth, she is hailed as a faithful, dedicated woman ~ hers is a martyr’s death. But if she should struggle ~ if she fails to reverence her husband despite his imperfections and failures to love her as Christ loves the church ~ if she should dare complain that she’s tired and overwhelmed ~ if she has a healthy self-preservation factor ~ or should she be a thinking woman who just can’t manage to adorn herself with that highly prized “meek and quiet spirit” ~ then she is a rebellious Jezebel ~ a reproach on the testimony of Christ. Likewise, the children are valued only in as much as they conform to the lifestyle chosen for them by their parents. If they should express their own opinions (but where would they form dissenting opinions when all influences are controlled by their protector and provider, i.e., Daddy?) they are made to fear for their soul’s salvation. It’s a world in which the only way to win (to be declared a faithful servant approved by the Lord), is to lose yourself ~ lay aside all your dreams, desires, wants, needs ~ your very life ~ and do it without complaint. That’s the way to win if you are a godly woman or a visionary daughter ~ for the man, it’s a whole different story.
Okay ~ I have to stop. Not that I don’t have plenty more to say ~ just that I know this letter sounds bitter and angry and I haven’t figured a way to convey my true feelings ~ that of betrayal and of having been used and of the frustration of having adopted a worldview which systematically denied my children their very selfhood.
The Democrats are working on a strategy via the DLC about groups like this. Trust me the way they are doing it is not very reassuring.
The Carlson he refers to is Alan Carlson a proponent of the Quiverfull movement.
Longman, Carlson, and the Quiverfull movement.Meanwhile, Phillip Longman hardly offers a left-wing counterpoint. Instead, he's searching--at the request of the Democratic Leadership Council, which published his policy proposals in its Blueprint magazine--for a way to appeal to the same voters Carlson is organizing: a typically "radical middle" quest to figure out how Democrats can make nice with Kansas.
"Who are these evangelicals?" asks Longman. "Is there anything about them that makes them inherently prowar and for tax cuts for the rich?" No, he concludes. "What's irreducible about these religious voters is that they're for the family." Asked whether the absolutist position Quiverfull takes on birth control, let alone abortion, might interfere with his strategy, Longman admits that abortion rights would have to take a back seat but that, in politics, "nobody ever gets everything they need."
Aside from the centrist tax policies Longman is crafting to rival Carlson's, he urges a return to patriarchy--properly understood, he is careful to note, as not just male domination but also increased male responsibility as husbands and fathers--on more universal grounds.
.....Longman's answer to this threat is for progressives to beat conservatives by joining them, emulating the large patriarchal families that conservatives promote in order not to be overrun by a reactionary baby boom. Any mention of social good occurring in regions with low birthrates is swept away by the escalating rhetoric of a "birth dearth," a "baby bust," a dying hemisphere undone by its own progressive politics.
Return to a new form of patriarchy, "properly understood"? Abortion is out of the question? Birth control? Longman does not mention that. Doesn't sound like we will fight very hard.
The price of creating Arrows for the War, which in reality is a political war...is a huge one for the women and their children.
The intent of this and other religious right groups is to form a theocracy in this country. The media gives them oodles of air time. But our party can fight back on this kind of thing if they learn to speak up clearly and call them out on what they are doing.
Unfortunately the really brave outspoken voices in our party are too soon hushed so we can work on being bipartisan.
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