Trump is a would-be dictator, as his attempt to derail the 2020 election results and his whipping up of the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection demonstrates. That is, he wanted to do to the US Constitution what he did to Ms. Carroll.

Trump can be depended on to fund-raise on his conviction, and the scarily irrational MAGA base will ignore it.

Chris Licht’s right-leaning CNN has even thrown caution to the winds and offered to televise a Trump “town hall” in prime time. Licht came to CNN from entertainment television in part — having been a show-runner on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, and in entertainment TV it is thought unwise to alienate half your audience by taking partisan political stands. We saw Taylor Swift warned by her handlers about losing 50% of her concert attendees over opposing Sen. Marsha Blackburn. That’s how they think in show biz. It is why there are no union member characters on American television shows. (Ironically, Colbert himself rejects this warped logic and has had great success nevertheless.)

So Licht applied the same yardstick to CNN, and made the anchors stop calling Jan. 6 an insurrection and stopped them from referring to the phony conspiracy theory Trump put about that the 2020 election was rigged as “the big lie.”

And now he’s bringing Trump into America’s living rooms unfiltered. If the American Republic goes the way of the Roman, it will be enablers like Licht who are to blame.

In contrast, the US media never had anything good to say about other dictators who were serial sex abusers. Take Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. He was renowned for having a female personal guard. But guess what? Five of them alleged that he had raped them. Gaddafi, like Trump, was a monster.

Too bad his own people overthrew and killed him, or Chris Licht could give Gaddafi a live town hall on CNN, too.

Or there was Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose minions killed tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. He is admired in Trumpian circles — Trump consigliere Steve Bannon slavers over Il Duce as a role model. Mussolini, too, was a vicious rapist, according to Yale University Press author RJB Bosworth.

One of Mussolini’s letters is quoted in that book describing his assault on a young virgin: “I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine. She got up weeping and humiliated, and through her tears she insulted me.”

Creep.

Or there is the ex-dictator of Gambia in West Africa, Yahya Jammeh, who “handpicked” women for rape during his 22-year reign of terror. After it was over he tried to bribe them with gifts.

Rapist dictators are a dime a dozen. Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Hissene Habre of Chad.

Trump now formally joins their ranks, having at last been publicly found liable for just one of his many alleged assaults on women (some of them, again allegedly, having been minors). Ugh.

And many Americans would blithely put this ogre back in the highest office of the land.

US politicians are always going on about how things happen abroad that just wouldn’t be tolerated in a “civilized society.”

But it turns out, not so much. We, like the Chadians, Gambians, Libyans and Dominicans, have had a sexual predator-president who sought to be president for life.

Maybe that conceit of being a “civilized society” so different from others is unwarranted. Or maybe the phrase has a genuine content and we just don’t fit that bill.

Interviewed: Luis Josué Salés, Scripps College; Rachel Mikva, Chicago Theological Seminary; Samira Meht University of Colorado Boulder; Steven K. Green, Willamette University; Susan M. Shaw; Oregon State University.

Since the first indications that the U.S. Supreme Court could overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, following a leaked draft opinion on May 2, 2022, religious leaders from many denominations have been working to preserve access to abortion care, even as others prayed for Roe to indeed be overruled. A minister in Texas was among those working on coordinating abortion care, including flying women to New Mexico to get abortions.

Religious communities in the U.S. have long been divided over the issue of abortion. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that 57% of Americans were supportive of legal abortion. A majority of those who identified as evangelical were opposed to abortion.

Before June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, The Conversation asked several scholars to explain the multiple views across faith groups and also the differences within denominations. Here are five articles from our archives:

1. Abortion rights as religious freedom

Steven K. Green, director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University, explained why restricting abortion interferes with religious freedom.

The strong opposition of some Christian churches, such as the Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, is based on their views about the time of “ensoulment,” the moment at which the soul is believed to enter the fetus. Conservative Christians believe this happens at the moment of conception.

Not all Christian denominations agree. As Green wrote, the United Church of Christ, for example, passed a resolution in 1981 that said “every woman must have the freedom of choice to follow her personal and religious convictions concerning the completion or termination of a pregnancy.”

Additionally, other faith groups such as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism have differing beliefs about ensoulment.

2. What Jewish texts say

Judaism allows for abortion and even requires it when a woman’s health is endangered, according to Rachel Mikva, professor of Jewish studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. The majority of foundational Jewish texts assert that a fetus does not attain the status of personhood until birth.

There is some difference of opinion among Orthodox rabbis, but there is room to consider diverse perspectives.

Overall, according to a 2017 Pew survey, 83% of American Jews believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Even ultra-Orthodox leaders, as Mikva found, have resisted anti-abortion measures that do not allow religious exceptions.

3. Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist views

Beliefs from other faith traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam also show that religions place ensoulment at different moments and give it varying degrees of importance, according to Samira Mehta, assistant professor of women and gender studies and Jewish studies at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Muslim scholars and clerics, for example, have a range of positions on abortion. “Some believe abortion is never permitted, and many allow it until ensoulment, which is often placed at 120 days’ gestation, just shy of 18 weeks,” according to Mehta. In general, classical Islamic law sees legal personhood as beginning at birth, and many Muslim religious leaders therefore permit abortion to save the life of the mother.

Views in Hinduism and Buddhism are diverse. “Most Hindus believe in reincarnation, which means that while one may enter bodies with birth and leave with death, life itself does not, precisely, begin or end. Rather, any given moment in a human body is seen as part of an unending cycle of life – making the question of when life begins quite different than in Abrahamic religions,” wrote Mehta. For Buddhists, a decision about abortion is treated with compassion and considered to be a “moral choice,” depending on the circumstances.

4. Shift in views of Southern Baptists

Scholars have also pointed out how in conservative faith groups, beliefs have shifted over time. Scholar Susan M. Shaw, who has long studied the Southern Baptists, explained that they have not always been opposed to abortion.

According to Shaw, the change in Southern Baptist views started in the 1980s, when a more conservative group took charge of the denomination. At that time a “resolution on abortion” was drafted that declared that “abortion ends the life of a developing human being” and called for legal measures “prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.”

Additionally, as Shaw found, another “interesting shift” happened in that resolution – instead of referring to fetal life, as earlier resolutions did, the 1980 resolution called fetuses “unborn” or “pre-born” human life or “persons.” The fetus, as she wrote, “was no longer a developing organism dependent on a woman’s body, but rather it was a full human being with the same status and human rights as the women.”

5. Reproductive options in premodern Christianity

Scholars have pointed out that among premodern Christians, too, views on abortion were more complex. According to religion scholar Luis Josué Salés, pregnancy prevention and termination methods thrived in premodern Christian societies, especially in the medieval Roman Empire.

Indeed, premodern Christians may have actively developed reproductive options for women, Salés found. Sixth-century Christian physician Aetios of Amida and Paulos of Aigina, who came a century later, were said to have provided instructions for performing abortions and making contraceptives.

In the U.S., the first abortion restrictions were enacted only in the 1820s. As Mehta aptly put it, “We tend to think of the religious response to abortion as one of opposition, but the reality is much more complicated.”

Kalpana Jain, Senior Religion + Ethics Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(Tomdispatch.com ) – Given the more than 60 Democratic and Republican votes lined up, the Senate is poised to move forward with a new bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault and other felony crimes by service members. Sponsored by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Joni Ernst (R-IA), the new law would assign decision-making on sexual-assault cases and a host of other felonies, including some hate crimes, to a specially trained team of uniformed prosecutors. While the bill will indeed inch the military away from its antiquated practice of allowing commanders to decide whether to prosecute their own officers and soldiers on sexual-assault allegations, if baffles me that it’s still allowed to handle its own violent crimes rather than having them dealt with through our criminal justice system.

Why should our troops enjoy such protected status, as though they exist in a separate reality from the rest of society? Arguably, in these years, the face of America has indeed been militarized, whether we like it or not. After all, we’ve just lived through two decades of endless war, American-style, in the process wasting significantly more than $6.4 trillion dollars, more than 7,000 uniformed lives, and scores of health- and safety-related opportunity costs.

Meanwhile, it’s taken years for the public and members of Congress to begin to recognize that it matters how the military treats its own — and the civilians with whom they interact. (After all, many felonies committed by such personnel against civilians, at home and abroad, are prosecuted within the military-justice system.) That Congress has taken so long to support even such a timid bill in a bipartisan fashion and that few think to question whether felonies committed by American soldiers should be prosecuted within the military, suggests one thing: that we’re a long, long way from taking responsibility for those who kill, maim, and rape in all our names.

I’m a military spouse. My husband has been a U.S. Navy officer for 18 years. During the decade we’ve been together, he’s served on two different submarines and in three Department of Defense and other federal staff jobs in Washington.

In many ways, our family has been very fortunate. We have dual incomes that offer us privileges the majority of Americans, let alone military families, don’t have, including being able to seek healthcare providers outside the military’s decrepit health system. All this is just my way of saying that when I critique the military and my experiences in it, keep in mind that others have suffered so much more than my family.

The Military Criminal Justice System

Let me also say that I do understand why the military needs its own system for dealing with infractions specific to its mission (when, for instance, troops desert, defy orders, or make gross errors in judgment). The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is federal law enacted by Congress. Analogous to our civilian legal system, it is of no small importance, given the potential cost to our nation’s security should the deadly equipment the military owns not be operated with the utmost sobriety and discretion.

In such cases, the standards listed in the UCMJ are implemented according to procedures outlined in another document, the Manual for Courts-Martial (MCM). Essentially, the MCM provides a framework for trying alleged offenses of various kinds within the military, laying out the maximum penalties that may be imposed for each of them.

Included in this are procedures for nonjudicial punishments in which a commanding officer, rather than a court-martial judge and a panel of other personnel (functionally, a jury), determines what penalties are to be imposed on a service member accused of a crime. Crucially, the results of such nonjudicial punishment do not appear on an officer’s criminal record.

Among other things what this means is that a commanding officer can decide that a soldier accused of sexual assault will be subjected to nonjudicial punishment rather than a military trial. In that case, the public will have no way of knowing that he committed such an act. No less crucially, the MCM leaves it entirely up to the commanding officer of a soldier’s unit whether or not such allegations will be dealt with at all, no matter the format. That’s why the Senate bill under consideration is of importance. At least it will remove the decision-making process on prosecuting reported assault cases from officers who may have a vested interest in covering up such assaults.

Because here’s the grim reality, folks: sexual assault in the military is a pandemic all its own. According to a 2018 Defense Department survey across five branches of the armed services (the most recent such document we have), 20,500 assaults occurred that year against active duty women and men. Yet fewer than half of those alleged crimes were reported within the military’s justice system and just 108 convictions resulted.

Buy the Book

What this tells us is that commanding officers exercise a stunning decision-making power over whether allegations of rape get tried at all — and generally use it to suppress such charges. Consider, for example, that, of the 2,339 formally reported sexual assaults that military investigators recommended for arbitration in 2019, commanders took action in only 1,629 of those cases. In other words, they left about a third of them unexamined.

Of the ones brought to the military justice system, fewer than half were actually tried in front of a judge through the court-martial system. At worst, the remainder of the accused received nonjudicial punishments from commanders — extra duties, reductions in pay or rank — or were simply discharged from the service. And all this happened entirely at the discretion of commanding officers.

Those same commanders, who have the power to try (or not try) allegations of violence, generally have a vested interest in covering up such accusations, lest they reflect badly on them. And while you might think that sexual-assault survivors would have a say in command culture, as it happens their “anonymous” contributions to such reports sometimes turn out not to be anonymous at all. In smaller units, commanders can sometimes figure out who has reported such incidents of violence and misconduct, since such reports regularly include the gender and rank of those who have come forward.

All of this explains why the Gillibrand-Ernst bill is a welcome departure from a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse. At least those with less of a conflict of interest and (hopefully) more than just a token amount of training when it comes to sexual assault, harassment, and other forms of violence will be assigned the job of deciding whether or not to try alleged felonies.

Let’s Take This Further

And yet, while that bill is far better than nothing, it’s distinctly a case of too little, too late. The real problem is that Americans generally view the military just as the military views itself — an island apart from the general populace, deserving of special allowances, even when it comes to sexual crimes.

I recently spoke with a young female Air Force recruit who saw the military as her sole means of paying for a four-year university without carrying crippling debt into middle age. What struck me, however, was how much more she feared attacks by male airmen than the possibility that she might ever be wounded or killed in a combat zone. And in that ordering of fears, she couldn’t be more on target, as the stats on combat deaths and reported sexual assault bear out.

In addition, these days, new recruits like her enter the military in the shadow of the bone-chilling murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old Army soldier. She went missing in April 2020 from Fort Hood, Texas, shortly after reporting that a superior officer had sexually solicited her, repeatedly made an example of her after she refused him, and finally approached her while she was taking care of her personal hygiene. Her dismembered body was later found in a box on the base. Her alleged killers included a soldier who had been accused of sexual harassment in a separate case and his civilian girlfriend. An Army report on Guillen’s murder and the events that led to it concluded that none of her supervisors had taken appropriate action in response to her allegations of sexual harassment.

The murder sparked public outrage, including among women in the armed services who quickly coined the Twitter hashtag #IamVanessaGuillen, and went public with their own accounts of being assaulted while in the military. Her case would, in fact, be a major catalyst driving the Senate bill, which has attracted support from a striking range of sponsors, including Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Though I never thought I’d find myself quoting Ted Cruz, let me echo his reaction to the bill: “It’s about damn time.”

A Small Start

Yet Guillen’s murder and the legislation it sparked begs this question: If it took the death of a young woman who reported sexual harassment to launch such a relatively timid bill, what will it take to move the judging of violent crimes entirely off military bases and into the regular court system? I shudder to think about the answer to that question.

The morning I went into labor with my daughter, my husband was on a military base a few minutes away, carrying out his duties as executive officer on a ballistic missile submarine. As the pains grew stronger with each passing hour, I phoned the base to let him know that I was in labor. I was eager to reach him in time to be taken to the hospital before a pending snow storm made driving through the foothills of the Cascade Mountains treacherous.

His colleagues repeatedly insisted that he was unavailable, even to them. Finally, I said to one of them between gasps, “Oh for Christ’s sake, just tell him I’m in labor and I need him to drive me to the hospital!”

Four hours later, having heard nothing from the base, I watched my husband, looking beleaguered and sad, walk through the door. No one had even bothered to give him my message. As I sat up on the floor where I was trying to cope with the pain, he slumped momentarily on the couch in his blue camo uniform and told me that he’d been called upon to assist in the hearing of a sexual-abuse and possible rape case involving the daughter of one of his sailors. I listened, while he prepared to take me to the hospital, as he described what he had dealt with. I could see the stress on his face, the drawn look that came from hours of listening to human suffering.

At least, that case was heard. However, another point is no less important: that a group of men — my husband and other commanding officers with, assumedly, zero knowledge about sexual assault — had been placed in charge of hearing a case on the possible rape of a child.

In scores of other cases I’ve heard about in my years as a military spouse and as a therapist for veterans and military families, I’ve been similarly struck by the ways in which male commanders without training have treated the survivors of such assaults and women more generally. I’ve seen some of those same men joke about how women’s behavior and moods, even abilities, change depending on their “time of the month” or pregnancy status. I’ve heard some make sexist or homophobic jokes about female and gay service members or heard about them threatening to “rip them another asshole” when fellow shipmates failed to meet expectations. Within the military, violence is the first thing you notice.

That day, trembling with the pangs of late-stage labor as my husband rushed me through the falling snow to the hospital with our daughter about to be born, I thought: Where will she be safe in this world? Who’s responsible for protecting her? For protecting us? I hugged my belly tighter and resolved to try to do my part.

And today, years later, I still wonder whether anyone beyond a group of senators and military advocates will show an interest in holding service members accountable for respecting the dignity of the rest of us.

Copyright 2021 Andrea Mazzarino

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Via Tomdispatch.com

Since the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the start of the Colonial period, the U.S. has been predominantly white.

But the white share of the U.S. population has been dropping, from a little under 90% in 1950 to 60% in 2018. It will likely drop below 50% in another 25 years.

White nationalists want America to be white again. But this will never happen. America is on its way to becoming predominantly nonwhite.

Who is white?

The U.S. federal government uses two questions to measure a person’s race and ethnicity. One asks if the person is of Hispanic origin, and the other asks about the person’s race.

A person is defined as white if he or she identifies as being only white and non-Hispanic. A minority, or nonwhite, person is anyone who is not solely non-Hispanic white.

Whites were not the first people to settle in what is now the U.S. The first immigrants were a people known today as American Indians and Alaskan natives, also commonly referred to as Native Americans. They arrived in North America around 14,000 years ago.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in America in 1492, there were around 10 million American Indians living in the lands north of Mexico. But by the 1800s their numbers had dwindled to about 1 million. They are now the smallest race group in the U.S.

The first sizable stream of immigrants to what is now the U.S. were whites from England. Their arrival at Plymouth in 1620 in search of religious freedom marked the start of large waves of whites coming to this land.

When the U.S. was established as a country in 1776, whites comprised roughly 80% of the population. The white share rose to 90% in 1920, where it stayed until 1950.

Declining numbers

The proportion of whites in the U.S. population started to decline in 1950. It fell to gradually over the years, eventually reaching just over 60% in 2018 – the lowest percentage ever recorded.

Although the majority of the U.S. population today is still white, nonwhites account for more than half of the populations of Hawaii, the District of Columbia, California, New Mexico, Texas and Nevada. And, in the next 10 to 15 years, these half dozen “majority-minority” states will likely be joined by as many as eight other states where whites now make up less than 60% of the population.

Census Bureau projections show that the U.S. population will be “majority-minority” sometime between 2040 and 2050. Our research suggests that this will happen around 2044. Indeed, in 2020, there are projected to be more nonwhite children than white children in the U.S.

The nonwhite population is growing more rapidly than the white population. Minorities accounted for 92% of the U.S. population growth between 2010 and 2018, with Latinos comprising just under half of the nation’s overall growth.

Behind the trends

Why are the numbers of white people declining, and why are nonwhite numbers increasing? The answer is basic demography: births, deaths and immigration.

White women have an average of 1.7 children over their lifetimes, while Latina women average 2.2. The total fertility rates of blacks, Asians and American Indians are in between. So whites have fewer births than all nonwhite groups.

There are also big differences in age structure. Sixty-two percent of Latinas 15 years of age or older are of childbearing age. Only 42% of white women fall into this group. Latinos also have lower mortality rates than whites. Demographers call this the “epidemiological paradox.”

In 2015, for the first time, there were more white deaths in the U.S. than white births. Indeed, as of 2016, in 26 states, whites were dying faster than they were being born. The states with more white deaths than white births include California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

How about immigration to the U.S.? Of the more than 43 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. in 2015, 82% originated in Latin America and Asia. Only 11% were born in Europe. So whites don’t increase their representation in the U.S. via immigration.

The future of whiteness

The aging white population, alongside a more youthful minority population, especially in the case of Latinos, will result in the U.S. becoming a majority-minority country in around 2044.

The demographic shift in the U.S. has resulted in many whites proclaiming that they are losing their country, and that they already are or will soon become a minority group.

In her research on working-class whites in rural Louisiana, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild observes that many whites feel frustrated and betrayed, like they are now strangers in their own land. In Trump, they saw a white man who brought them together to take their country back. Hochschild points out that at a Trump campaign rally, whites held signs with slogans such as “TRUMP: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” and “SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP.”

The decline of the white share of the U.S. population could result in the shifting of racial boundaries to assign whiteness to some people of color so as to bolster the white numbers.

This has happened before. Groups that were initially seen as very different from whites, such as the Irish and Italians, once sought to distance themselves from blacks, and eventually were accepted as white.

In addition, although persons of Mexican origin largely identified racially as white, in the 1930 census “Mexican” was used as a racial category, at a time when there was heightened hostility against Mexicans due to their growing population size and the Great Depression.

But any future changes cannot override demography. The U.S. will never be a white country again.

Dudley Poston, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University and Rogelio Sáenz, Professor of Demography, The University of Texas at San Antonio

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Vox: “The fractured politics of a browning America”

“Media Matters for America has released an interview Tucker Carlson did on the Bubba The Love Sponge show, Tucker probably wishes this didn’t come out. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss Tucker’s disgusting comments on The Young Turks.”

The Young Turks: “The Real Tucker Carlson Exposed In Bubba The Love Sponge Interview”

Recent media reports have revealed decades of abuse by Southern Baptist pastors.

Denominational leaders are offering apologies and calling the sexual abuse “evil,” “unjust” and a “barbarity of unrestrained sinful patterns.” Many Southern Baptist leaders are considering action.

As a scholar who has written a book on Southern Baptist women and the church, I’d argue that this scandal has its origins in how Southern Baptists have long and purposefully pushed back against women’s progress.

The ‘woman question’

Since the Southern Baptist Convention’s founding in 1845, Southern Baptists have had a complicated history with women.

Historian Elizabeth Flowers explains that questions of women’s roles as preachers, teachers and deacons were frequent subjects of disagreement among Baptists.

Women were not allowed to serve as messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention until 1918. A messenger is a member of a local Southern Baptist church who is appointed by the congregation to attend the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and vote on Southern Baptist Convention business. The church doesn’t instruct the messenger how to vote, nor does the messenger represent the church. Messengers attend as individuals who vote based on their own conscience.

When Southern Baptist women formed a national organization to support missionary work in 1888, they had to hold their first meeting in a Methodist church down the street from the Baptist church where the Southern Baptist Convention was meeting. Until the 20th century, only men gave the organization’s report to the Southern Baptist Convention.

Indeed, women in the U.S. did not have the right to vote at this time. The Southern Baptist Convention’s practices certainly reflected larger social norms around gender, but its reasoning was also theological. These beliefs formed a basis for gender hierarchy that ultimately triumphed in the late 20th century.

Southern Baptist controversy

In the 1970s, greater numbers of women entered the six Southern Baptist seminaries, many professing a calling to the pastorate, even though most churches still refused to ordain them.

I grew up Southern Baptist and was a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1980s. By that time, women were about a third of the student body, although very few women were professors.

This was also a time when fundamentalists took charge of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptist Convention owns six seminaries and numerous publishing and missionary agencies worth billions of dollars.

Fundamentalists used biblical inerrancy, the idea that the Bible is without error in history, science or theology, as a test for theological faithfulness.

Beginning with the denomination’s annual conference in 1979, these fundamentalists were able to inspire voters to elect fundamentalist leaders. They claimed that moderate Baptists who did not accept inerrancy were also the ones who did not believe the Bible.

The new leaders purged the moderates from Southern Baptist Convention employment and leadership.

While fundamentalists claimed this takeover was about biblical inerrancy, in reality, it was as much, if not more, about women. As historian Barry Hankins also concludes, the “gender issue” eventually became a central issue for Southern Baptist fundamentalists as their takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention proceeded.

So even as these Baptist leaders claimed their movement was about the Bible, they specifically targeted women and worked to reverse women’s progress in church and home.

First in the Edenic fall

In 1984, as fundamentalists gained greater control, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution against women’s ordination. The resolution reasoned that women are excluded from ordained ministry to “preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.”

In other words, because Eve was the first to eat the fruit that led to the humans’ expulsion from Eden, they argued, God compels all women to submit to men.

Furthermore, the resolution argued for the preservation of “God’s delegated order of authority” – “God the head of Christ, Christ the head of man, man the head of woman.”

In Baptist polity, local churches are autonomous and free to ordain and call as pastor whom they will. The Southern Baptist Convention has no official control over local churches.

As, however, local churches did ordain and call women to the pastorate, local Baptist associations “disfellowshipped” these congregations, excluding them from participating in the local association.

Fundamentalists appointed a president of Southern Seminary in 1993 who forced Molly Marshall, the first woman to teach theology at a Southern Baptist seminary, to resign in 1994, primarily over her support for women in ministry.

‘Gracious submission’

In 2000, reinforcing fundamentalist beliefs about women, the Southern Baptist Convention changed its statement of faith, noting that women and men “are of equal worth before God” while insisting “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

In 2003, an administrator at Southern Seminary explained that in response to women’s desire to rule over men men must exercise their rightful “rulership” over women. What this administrator interpreted as a desire to “rule over” was actually a simple demand for equality in the home and the ability to serve as pastors and leaders in church and society.

For Southern Baptists, the statement of faith is not a creed but rather a set of largely agreed-upon beliefs. The statement is not binding on any individual or local church. Seminaries and denominational agencies, such as the International Mission Board, however, must work within the guidelines of the statement.

The 2000 statement of faith also asserts, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” In response, in 2004, Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board stopped endorsing women as chaplains. Prior to the controversy, more moderate Southern Baptists had supported women in ordained ministry, including chaplaincy.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary then used this statement in 2007 to remove Sheri Klouda from its faculty, where she taught Hebrew, simply because she was a woman. Klouda was not ordained and did not support the ordination of women. In their thinking, however, she was teaching men the Bible, which they forbid women to do.

They were able to remove her on the basis of gender because religious institutions are exempt from gender-based nondiscrimination laws for positions that have an explicit religious function, such as pastor or seminary professor, if their beliefs sanction such discrimination.

Sexual abuse among Southern Baptists

As early as the 1980s, Dee Ann Miller, who had survived sexual assault by a Southern Baptist missionary, tried to call attention to the problem of sexual abuse but found a denomination unwilling to address it.

Similarly, in 2009 another survivor, Christa Brown, critiqued the denomination’s minimizing and enabling of abuse. Southern Baptist churches often allowed abusers to move onto a new and unwitting congregation without reporting abuse, and the Southern Baptist Convention refused to create a registry of abusers for churches to consult.

A scandal at Baylor University brought Baptists’ inaction on sexual assault to the fore. A 2016 report on the university’s handling of sexual assault found a “fundamental failure by Baylor to implement Title IX.” The report noted “that Baylor’s efforts to implement Title IX were slow, ad hoc, and hindered by a lack of institutional support and engagement by senior leadership.” The report was specifically in response to the sexual assault problems in athletics.

Baylor was not alone in institutional mishandling of abuse. In 2018, trustees of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired President Paige Patterson, an architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, over statements he had made encouraging abused wives to return to abusive husbands and discouraging seminary students from reporting rapes to police.

Sexism and rape myths

Research suggests that sexist beliefs affect men’s attitudes toward sexual coercion. In particular, men who hold sexist beliefs are more likely to accept the myths that “women ask for it” or “if a woman is wearing provocative clothes, she wants sex” or “lots of women lie about being raped.”

Most significantly, research also suggests that fundamentalist and sexist clergy also tend to have more negative attitudes toward rape victims.

Apologies will not be enough

In my view, Southern Baptists’ history in relation to women provides important context for the current moment and helps explain the denomination’s inaction on sexual abuse by pastors.

The Southern Baptist Convention has fostered a culture in which sexual abuse and inadequate responses are not at all surprising. Apologies will likely do little to change that culture as long as beliefs about women’s submission stay in place.

Susan M. Shaw, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

PBS NewsHour: “Southern Baptist officials sexually abused hundreds, new reports reveal”

One in every six women in the United States, 17.7 million women in total, have been victims of rape or attempted rape.

7 in every 8 sexual assault victims are women.

Rape thus disproportionately targets women. Another disproportion is rates of conviction and length of sentences with regard to African-Americans charged with this crime.

Samuel R. Gross, Maurice Possley, and Klara Stephens have shown that African-Americans show up in cases of exoneration from crimes they did not actually commit at many times the rates of whites. That is, African-Americans are 13% of the US population but they make up a *majority* of persons exonerated when DNA tests are now administered.

*innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.

*Police officers were found to have engaged in misconduct at a rate 22% higher when dealing with African-American defendants than in the case of other races.

The system on average puts African-American defendants in jail for 3 times longer than white defendants.

*An African-American convicted of sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than whites convicted of the same crime.

* White victims misidentifying suspects seems to account for some of the discrepency

* but just plain old racism accounts for large numbers of falsely accused African-Americans

Whites and Blacks use recreational drugs aat about the same rate.

*But innocent African-Americans are five times more likely to be found guilty of drug crimes than innocent white people.

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Bonus video:

The Young Turks: “America’s Injustice System: PROOF Of Institutional Racism”

The uproar over Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged attack of a 15-year-old has resulted in many irrational reactions, which even included a bizarre conspiracy theory created (and later retracted) by a respected lawyer. When considering the picture of Kavanaugh, I had to wonder if the allegation would have stirred up as many heated denials if he had been ugly; he doesn’t look like a rapist.

After all, one rape myth is that only ugly men are rapists because they cannot get sex any other way. One recent Incel (“involuntary celibate”) post showed the mugshots of four rapists with this comment: “Dear Normies, If you don’t want ugly men to rape females, then stop excluding them from something which literally everyone else experiences. Instead of going on another one night stand with Chad from Tinder, have sex with a lonely virgin instead.” This explanation of rape disregards the solid research proving that rape is not about sexual desire but instead about power and intimidation.

Even some academics have supported the thesis that rape results from the female rejection of males. Thornhill and Palmer’s controversial A Natural History of Rape, for example, posits the evolutionary argument that unattractive men rape women for the primary purpose of insemination. Ignoring the fact that many rape victims are not attractive young women, the writers also fail to acknowledge that many rapists are good looking.

The boyish face of the convicted rapist Brock Turner, for instance, contradicts the evolutionary argument of rape. Why would such a handsome young man commit such a heinous crime when he could so easily find a consenting sex partner? It can be disorienting to picture this man attacking a helpless victim because we have an unconscious tendency to equate good looks with good character. This is related to the “halo effect” that makes us think that attractive persons are smarter, wittier, and nicer than their plainer counterparts. “What is beautiful is good” is the underlying premise of the halo effect.

Appearance discrimination can influence our view of any alleged (and convicted) perpetrators. Although researchers have focused on racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, little is known about how a defendant’s looks could influence a jury or judge. One finding notes that baby-faced defendants are perceived as more innocent than others. Also, prejudice against tattoos as symbols of lawlessness is still common despite the widespread popularity of body art.

Because of appearance discrimination, “facial profiling” can be a factor in how we perceive threats. If I were walking down a sidewalk and passed a man in a business suit who looked like Kavanaugh, I would probably not perceive him as a threat. Unfortunately, socialization has distorted my threat perceptions because men in business suits can be just as likely to be criminals as casually dressed males. This distortion may be one reason why some people are so resistant to the idea of a noble-looking judge being suspected as a rapist; violent predators are supposed to look like they hang out in seedy bars and hustle money. It could be frightening to realize that our previous categorization of males could be so wrong.

Intellectually, we may accept the fact that an attacker can be an attractive man because we know that sexual assault is a crime of violence and not desire. This fact, though, is hard to reconcile with our unconscious wish that such a cruel act be only a freakish incident and not a common occurrence—admitting the ordinary nature of cruelty could disturb our threat perceptions. If a respectable-looking person can be a threat, how can we sort out the good guys from the bad guys? We must recognize that physical appearance does not make it more or less likely that a sexual assault allegation is true. Appearance discrimination can distort our thinking, but not if we understand its impact.

Citations

Incel quote found on: www.reddit.com/r/IncelTears/comments/7ez5p7/if_you_dont_want_ugly_men_to_rape_females_stop/

Thornhill, R. & Palmer, C.T. (2000). A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Johnson, B. D., & King, R. D. (2017). Facial Profiling: Race, Physical Appearance, And Punishment. Criminology, 55(3), 520-547.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now! “Report: Senate Aides Knew of Second Kavanaugh Sexual Assault Claim & Tried to Rush His Confirmation”