Evangelicals Lost in Wonderland
Bible-based Christians turn to Victorian
stereotypes for their cultural clues, images
which have nothing to do with biblical values.
Girls are being told play tea-parties,
do their makeup every day and wait for
Prince Charming to turn up
Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages
It seems as if a new sexual controversy pops up
each week in backward-looking America. Religious
fundamentalism takes sex back to the dark ages.
Much of the stigma surrounding sex, sexuality,
and nudity has to do with “traditional Christian
values” as defined by fundamentalist Christianity.
America has a lot of those old Puritan and
Victorian influences as well as the biblical
view from Genesis 3 that people should be
ashamed of their own bodies.
It’s no surprise that the more fundamentally
religious people are the more they are sexually
repressed especially to nudity and sexuality.
Are we going through a sexual counter-revolution?
Or is this debate nothing but the mouthing-off of
a few old white guys?
There is a regressive anti-sex movement.
It’s spearheaded by an alliance between
social conservatives, religious nutcases
and radical feminists.
From different places they reach the same
broad conclusion: that sexual liberation is
false-consciousness, that male sexuality is
predatory and female sexuality vulnerable.
They believe that women and men can’t
be trusted to follow their desires and
know what’s good for themselves.
I don’t know why abortion and contraception
have been resurrected as political agendas,
if they ever went away.
Religious fundamentalists want to constrain
sexuality (especially women’s sexuality)
and for historical reasons these issues channel
that broader desire in a particular way.
I think the anti-sex and anti-choice brigade in
the Republican party is shrieking about sex
because the party has no other platform.
The mass media are bored so they take
their prompts from the religious fanatics
in the Republican Party who have decided
to turn back the clock.
It’s reminiscent of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
It sprang out of nothing but became virulent
and destroyed many lives here for a generation.
These white reactionary males will do anything
to keep women ‘in their place’. They fear female
power to the point of paranoia.
Right-wing blowhards and all the other middle-aged
men seem to think they know what is best for women.
They seem to be living in the past, a Mad Men-like
era when men had all the power in society and women
were secretaries and housewives. Religious
fundamentalism takes sex back to the Dark Ages.