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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

It had been a year since my spouse had come out to me. It felt like it had been much longer. So much had changed and yet nothing had changed. We still hadn’t decided how Christianity tied in with our changing reality: I was leaning further and further away from the idea of God but my spouse still believed. We felt like there were no real answers anymore. Life was not as black and white as people wanted it to be. My spouse was talking more and more about transitioning and I felt like there was no one-size-fits-all in gender identity. Maybe my spouse would become comfortable living as a man and wouldn’t need to transition, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would transition to living as a female someday, but again, maybe he wouldn’t. The idea just wasn’t that scary to me anymore. My spouse was already living as such a feminine person as he had grown more comfortable with who he was, transition would just be a natural next step if it happened.

In fact the only fear that still clung to me was how this would affect our children, and that made me wonder if my spouse should try to put off transition until the kids were grown up. The faith and culture that I had been brought up in told me that children had to have parents of both genders to be happy, healthy, and well-adjusted. Wouldn’t our children resent us for having grown up with two female parents? How would society treat them? Would they always be the kids with the weird dad? Was it even possible to raise kids without a “manly influence?”

Despite my fears and doubts, I couldn’t deny that my spouse was happier than I had ever seen him. He was relaxed and involved. He was dressing more and more femininely at home, and the kids didn’t mind at all. They were starting to figure out that their daddy was a bit different than other daddies, but they were happy to have a peaceful parent who loved them and cared for them, talked with them and snuggled them and listened to them. It was as if a huge burden had been lifted off his shoulders, like he no longer had to spend the majority of his time struggling to constantly tread water and keep his head above the surface and stay alive. Instead, all of the energy that had been consumed in that struggle could be spent on parenting and living. The conversation about transition “someday” started to change into transition being a real option in the near future, and I couldn’t come up with a reason our kids should have to go back to having a depressed repressed parent who lived as a male and struggled to survive with the help of anti-depressants instead of a happy relaxed involved parent who lived as female. A guy as feminine as he was turning out to be was going to out of the ordinary anyway. Why was I questioning this at all? To please a god? Who had played this gender joke on us in the first place? A god I wasn’t even sure existed?

So, to combat my fear of my children growing up with gay parents, I once again turned to education. I started reading about non-traditional families and one of the stats that startled me was that over 50% of families today did not fit the traditional standard that I had been led to believe was the only healthy family. There were many children being raised by single moms or single dads. Often parents divorced and children spent time living with either parent at different times. Children today are being raised by grandparents, foster parents, and widowed parents. My kids certainly wouldn’t be the only ones with a “different” family. Studies showed that the child’s emotional well-being and healthiness had more to do with how they were respected and loved and cared for as individuals than the exact set-up of their families.

I began reading more and more about LGBTQ parents. I read the stats on how their kids did in school, and how they matured emotionally. I read books written by people who had grown up with gay or lesbian or transgendered parents, and listened to their perspectives. The stats were encouraging, and most of the hardships involved with growing up with LGBTQ parents seemed to come from the pressure from society to conform and the prejudice that created, not the parents themselves. In fact, the divorce that commonly took place after the revelation of sexuality or gender identity questions seemed to have more impact on the children than the sexuality or gender identity questions themselves. The parents and the kids seemed to have the normal range of personality traits and issues that any family would have. Why would our kids be any different? We didn’t hit them, we would accept them and love them whoever they were or whatever they wanted to be. Their emotional health and well being was a top priority for us, and would continue to be so. Did it really matter that their dad would have a unique story? Normally, if a parent had a medical condition that hampered their ability to be happy and productive, society would bless and encourage their seeking treatment. Why should my spouse’s condition be any different?

One of the things I had to consider was that if my spouse did end up completely transitioning to living as female, the medical treatments for gender dysphoria would mean an end to fertility and further genetic children. I had already come to the conclusion that I did not want as large a family as I had grown up in, but the idea of limiting children or being done was still relatively new to me. We now had four beautiful children, whom I loved dearly and who had kept me from getting a full night’s sleep for five years straight. I knew I needed a break and I did not want to become pregnant again in the near future. I also knew I wanted to have the time and energy to be there for each one of my children. But because I had spent most of my life believing that my main purpose in life was to produce children it was hard for me to imagine any other reality.

I kept thinking about it, determined to get to the bottom of my feelings and make sure that I really was OK with a future with fertility limitations. Slowly I started to see that I had value outside of my fertility. I asked myself if my spouse had any other medical condition, would I demand that he refuse treatment because it could affect his fertility? I also learned more about the range of options available for people who are undergoing treatment that may compromise fertility, including sperm banking. And I wondered if perhaps there could be a space in our family for adoption or fostering children someday, a dream which seemed so impossible back in our Quiverfull days of having a baby every 18 months.

As the idea of transition in the near future became more real, we talked at length about our children and our marriage. We asked ourselves if was divorce something that needed to happen? My spouse wanted to make sure I was really OK with him going ahead with gender transition. He insisted that he would understand completely even if we needed to part ways, and that he would continue to provide us financial support regardless. We talked about our children, and asked ourselves if they would they be better off if we separated? But divorce still didn’t make sense to me. I was happy with our relationship and thrilled with my spouse’s new involvement in our children’s lives. Even if for some reason we decided that our relationship wasn’t going to work out, I knew I would still want him involved with parenting our children. I was attracted to him now, and I couldn’t see that changing. He had been the first person to love me unconditionally, and had been there for me all along my journey of questioning and healing from my past. He was a caring, empathic, patient and passionate person, and I wanted to continue my life-story with him. And as I’d begun to unwrap my own sexuality for the first time, I was starting to feel that if we were to separate for some reason, or if my spouse were to die, I would be romantically interested in women anyway, so I had nothing to lose by staying together.

It was better for our kids for our family to stay intact,
and it was better for us,
even if that meant going through transition together.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

It was the end of 2010. I was starting to question the existence of God while my spouse was as Christian as ever. Sometimes I did not understand how he could keep believing in a God who had made him this way and then said that he couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t understand how it was god-honoring for a person to live their life “the way god wanted them too” while being miserable and secretly hoping that they would get into an accident somehow that would force the removal of the hormone producing organs that caused them so much mental anguish. The thought reminded me of some Quiverfull women I had encountered who in their exhaustion wished that a horrible labour and childbirth would cause a uterine rupture or something, nothing too drastic, but enough to cause the removal of their reproductive organs and the reassurance that they would be done having kids without ever having to “disobey” God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. But the idea of limiting children through artificial means to save their life or their sanity wasn’t acceptable? It was better to live life trying to glorify God with the lot he had given you? I used to think that people like that just had a bad attitude and needed to find a way to be happy with whatever God had decreed for them, now I was starting to wonder if they were just stuck in a sick system.

My spouse often asked if he should stop talking about transgender questions and issues. He worried that maybe this was too much for me and that he should just fight this alone. But I had seen how healing it was for me to talk about my own issues and to let my kids express their feelings, and I didn’t want him to have to go back to bottling it all up. So I encouraged him to continue processing as much as he needed too, and told him I would always be here to listen. Now instead of being distant or depressed on a regular basis he tried to talk about the overwhelming gender dysphoria, trying to sort out who he was and where he fit.

He had begun to relax and be himself more. He started letting down his guard and not double checking how he was moving his hands when he talked or worrying that the way he crossed his legs was “too feminine.” He started buying his own clothes, choosing colors and styles that were closer to his sense of self than the pants and polo ensemble he had been letting me buy for him. We joked that he had enough style for both of us; I tended to be very practical in my clothing choices, comfort being my highest priority, but he actually cared about how he looked and that began to be reflected in his sense of style.

The dad who used to come home and usually disappeared into the basement to play video games had turned into a parent who played on the floor with the kids every day. He wanted to be involved in their day to day lives. He was learning how to feed them and dress them, he started taking them for bedtime walks bundled up in the wagon in the pajama’s each clutching a bedtime snack and their blankies. He would talk about how 3 babies seemed to be more work than 2, and I would laugh at him and explain that to me this was the easiest parenting period yet, because he was parenting them alongside me for the first time. He stopped complaining that grocery shopping was women’s work and began going with us to the store on his day off, I didn’t have to shop alone with multiple babies and toddlers anymore.

Genuine smiles had been few and far between during the last few years, I used to have to tickle him to get him to give a real smile for pictures. Now he was smiling all the time, and laughing. Instead of shrugging and vaguely referencing a life led by whatever ministry dictated, he was dreaming about the future again. Crazy loopy dreams, like driving out to Alaska or teaching English abroad or becoming a makeup artist in the movie industry. He was getting piles of books out of the library and reading sections of them aloud after years of saying he was too busy reading theology to check out anything else. It was as if his world had become more 3-dimensional. He was swimming regularly and had lost a lot of excess weight and had started letting his hair grow longer. Sometimes I caught him in front of the mirror, he would look at his reflection and say in wonder “For the first time I am starting to like what I see.”

It seemed so natural for him, that it didn’t feel strange to see him painting the kids toenails and then painting his own. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see him in a bubble bath at the end of the day, I laughed at how happy it made him. Choosing anniversary cards and birthday cards was easier. For the first time I felt like I knew how to really love him. A flower left on his desk or watching a movie while playing with his hair meant more to him then the silly sex ambushes all the marriage books recommended. After being married to someone who had kept part of themselves so mysterious for so long, it was a relief to be getting to know all of him. I didn’t want to lose that ever again.

That Christmas was the best we’d ever had. For the first five years of our married life I had wracked my brain every Christmas and birthday, trying to figure out what to get him. It was always bewildering to try and pinpoint what he would enjoy, and when I asked him what he wanted he couldn’t really come up with anything that sounded cool. I usually went with a book or some article of clothing in the end, but this year for the first time, I knew exactly what he wanted. I knew what he liked for the first time. I bought him a hair dryer and curling iron, tools for a trade that he told me he had always been interested in. We had hopes that going into cosmetology would get him involved in enough feminine things that he would be happy living as a male. He had experimented with some of my eye shadow, so I bought him a kit of his own to have fun with. And the pink fuzzy socks I threw in his stocking became something he wore almost every day they were clean.

It was a good Christmas.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Calulu

A few weeks ago I took my daughter out for an celebratory lunch at her favorite Greek restaurant. She’s gotten acceptance letters from all of the colleges she’s applied to plus we really needed to touch base, take a time out together from the busy of our lives. Over sovlaki and hummus she started talking about what she would say to our former pastor Patrick if she ran into him again. She had run into him an few months ago and had been so surprised she’d just hurriedly muttered out pleasantries before leaving him as rapidly as a man with his pants on fire would run for the lawn sprinklers.

I had to ask her what she would say to Patrick if they were face to face. She blurted out something like “F**k you, motherf**ker and thanks for ruining my f**king childhood!” before laughing. We both laughed imaging the faces of those sycophants and hanger on-ers Patrick was always surrounded by if she let the F word fly.

That’s one big marker of a cult-like unhealthy church atmosphere, if everyone treats the pastor as if he is either the world’s most famous rockstar or the big toe of Jesus touching down on the earth to be adored. We saw that, participated in the pastor-pleasing behaviors too, perhaps not to the depth that many did but we did it as a family. It’s dangerous business for the most part. When everyone is busy kissing the rear end of the pastor or bowing down to his every whim and word it starts to look like a one man show with no real room for the Lord or anyone else. Plus the pastor starts to think he’s in control or assumes control. It also breeds unhealthy competition among the members all vying for the attention and favor of the pastor.

There were certainly those at Possum Creek Church that courted Patrick’s opinion on every subject conceivable or at least enabled him to control most facets of corporate life at our church. Patrick picked the praise songs, rehearsed the worship team, picked out the study materials for all classes, picked who was allowed to do what and ordered others to do other things. I hosted our yearly baptism for years because Patrick ordered it so and I never thought to say no even as it was a huge amount of work for me. Baptism used every towel in my house, meant I’d have wet people traipsing in and out of our home and that I’d had to shock treat the pool with chemicals a few times before and afterward. Huge imposition but I didn’t think I had the option to nix.

He also preached that if you were good and holy you’d be rewarded here on earth. Patrick owned three houses and told us he obtained them by “God’s Favor” He flew out to the West Coast for his doctorate studies on the church’s dime. Patrick lived a life style much better than most everyone in the church with the exception of the one wealthy family.

We had a number of families in serious debt in our church that seemed to think it was okay to spend, spend, spend on their credit cards because, after all, God was going to bless them financially. It was their right since they lived lives of pure righteousness. I cannot tell you how many bankruptcies stemmed from this thinking at the church, but if I recall correctly it might have been as high as ten percent. This was when the economy was strong too. No telling how high the rate is now. Prosperity gospel mixed with the Rock Star Pastor mentality tends to use up your time, energy, emotions AND monetary resources.

Once the economy tanked and some of us that had good jobs left the church it seems that tithing dried up. It got so bad that Patrick issued a stern letter to the congregation stating that everyone who was a church member must attend plus bring their paycheck stubs. He was demanding to see exactly what everyone made and to extract a contract from them agreeing to tithe their full ten percent on the gross pay.  Well, this went over like a lead balloon with the congregation and some still there simply refused to tithe penny one or allow the pastor to know exactly how much they made.

When Patrick left PCC it all fell apart since it was all cohesive around him as the center. One of the big bombshells of his leaving is that it came out as the church had started to lose members during these tough economic times that Patrick had indulged in a little creative money management to keep drawing his salary. He’d drained other accounts, such as a building fund and endowment funds, to pay himself until all the accounts hit pretty much zero. That’s the sort of thing that can only really happen at these one man show places. I heard later that the elders knew what was going on but felt that they had no authority to stop him.

Now the few people left at the old church are struggling to raise enough funds just to keep the electricity on much less come up with the funding for a new pastor.

Unfortunately this isn’t exactly an isolated incident. Last week I heard of a large very popular church in our area that is going to lose the entire property their church sits upon. Why? Their long time pastor moved on after convincing the elders of that church to take on huge debt to build his personal dream, a large community center. Attendance and membership dropped off after Pastor Ted left. The few remaining folks not following Ted around are stuck footing the bill for something they can ill afford. The bank is calling in the unpaid mortgage and will be seizing the building soon. My new church has absorbed many members from the fall out there.

A few days ago while reading the news on a popular online news aggregate I saw that even Brownsville Assembly of God Church in Pensacola, Florida is in similar straights after Pastor John Kilpatrick departed to start a new church in nearby Daphne, Alabama, Church of His Presence. Once the Brownsville Assembly of God church was hosting nightly revival meetings attracting thousands from around the world. This went on for years. I’ve been myself many times to the revival services. (against the wishes of Pastor Patrick, he hated it when we went off to conferences at Brownsville, or Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship or Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Life Center Church)

I remember that the name “John Kilpatrick” was in the lips of many attending, discussing the teachings or planning to go. He was a big fish in the pond of Brownsville. The revival had already started to dwindle off before Pastor John left but it seems his leaving was something of a final straw. Many left followed him just right across the state line into Alabama to his new church.

Now I don’t know for sure that Pastor Kilpatrick was a Rock Star Pastor with a huge following but it sure seemed that way to me from my visits. The aftermath of huge debts and very few members at Brownsville makes me think that he must have been perceived that way by many. I’m not saying he urged anyone at Brownsville to go into massive debt. I’m merely observing there seems to be some markers there that the church had run amok at some point, following in the ways of those that are now trying to overcome bad decisions made by their superstar pastors.

The Rock Star Pastor can wreck a place without the pastor leaving at all. These last few weeks I’ve been reading many articles about the upheaval and allegations about TBN and it’s founders Paul and Jan Crouch. Another perfect example of control by the pastor and everyone going along with it, even if it borders on illegal and bypassed immoral ages ago.

I don’t quite think this is what Jesus had in mind with the 12 apostles or those that came after him, not controlling large groups of people or trying to live like a rap star. I think He’d be pretty aghast at what’s taken place in His name.

If your pastor is trying to preach the prosperity gospel while living like a petty dictator at the behest of his subjects then your church has morphed into a cult. Leave. Leave as soon as this starts happening because it’s not going to end well for anyone.

Finding it very sad that people can be led like sheep to abandon their own sense to follow not faith or belief but another human being just as flawed as all of us are off proverbial cliffs. Putting your faith in some Spiritual Superman is always dangerous. What I experienced with Pastor Patrick has led me to avoid the pastor at my current church much of the time. I have the opposite reaction now, I only want my own approval of my spiritual journey. Never again will I seek out the approval of pastors or put aside my own feelings and needs.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Calulu lives near Washington DC , was raised Catholic in South Louisiana before falling in with a bunch of fallen Catholics whom had formed their own part Fundamentalist, part Evangelical church. After fifteen uncomfortable years drinking that Koolaid she left nearly 6 years ago. Her blog is Calulu – Roadkill on the Internet Superhighway

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

I had always been under the impression that LGBTQ people were a new phenomenon. That the population of gay and transgender people had really taken off during the modern age those “godless” sixties. And that before it had become “cool” to be gay, virtually no one was. But that wasn’t making sense anymore. Even today, being queer continues to unleash considerable bias and discrimination. Kids are still routinely getting kicked out of their homes for admitting they are gay or trans. I couldn’t see any benefit to coming out as LGBTQ unless that really was who that person was.

In my research I had begun to uncover stories of gay people throughout history, and not only that, transgender people were around too. Throughout history is a whole list of people who upon their deaths were discovered to have anatomy which did not conform with the gender they had publicly lived as. Some of these persons were quite famous such as Chevalier d’Eon, a French diplomat during the 18th century; but most of them were ordinary people who knew that the gender assigned at birth did not match them. Growing up I had read some stories about women who disguised themselves as men to serve in the military such as during the Civil War, but what I hadn’t picked up on then but discovered later is how many of them continued to live as men after the war ended. Without the help of any of the medical advances of today, these people transitioned to living authentic lives in the gender that they felt fit them. My research was starting to point towards gender variant people as being a part of the diversity of the human family whose source was from antiquity. The myth of transgender persons being new or a radical experiment of the psychological community didn’t add up.

Because the Catholic church took a different position on LGBTQ issues than did the conservative Protestants among whom I had been raised, I talked about transsexuals with a man studying to be a catholic priest. I had hoped that he might be able to give me some knowledge, some wisdom, some word from god, but his recent and ongoing education seemed really out of date. He tried to be kind and considerate, but seemed convinced that transsexuals were either homosexuals trying to attract men who wanted to change their bodies to achieve that goal, or they were an autogynephiliac, meaning that they were “sexually aroused by the idea of having female body parts to play with.”

Neither of these sexually charged explanations made any sense to me. First off, from what I had read, many transsexuals (including my spouse) were very attracted to women, and they had no interest in changing their body to attract male attention. Any physical changes they made seemed to be made for themselves, not anyone else. And how did this theory on transsexuality apply to female-born persons who transitioned to living as men? Were they changing their bodies to be more attractive to men? The second explanation he offered wasn’t any better: my spouse did not have an obsession with having female parts to masturbate with. A transgender person who seeks to make physical changes, is willing to accept a variety of outcomes, including unforeseeable changes to sexual function. I could hardly see how someone with a sexual obsession would be willing to take those risks and make those sacrifices. And again, how did these explanations apply to transgendered people throughout history who had lived for years in the gender opposite that assigned to them at birth? This was centuries before the modern therapy options had become available, and they would not have been able to change much about their bodies. Many of them lived completely celibate lives, so that their secret would never be found out. This did not sound like a sexual obsession to me. Even today there are trans people who are happy living in their chosen gender without doing any modification to their bodies. The theories the priestly candidate gave me seemed full of holes. I started to feel more and more frustrated. People weren’t fitting into my nice little religious boxes anymore.

Furthermore, in my reading I had started to realize that LGBTQ people were denied many of the legal rights I took for granted. Growing up as a conservative Christian I was always under the impression that our rights were being snatched away one by one by the liberal and secular government. Now I was starting to realize how many U.S laws were based on religion. A straight person was free to marry who they fell in love with, but if a gay person fell in love and wanted to make a commitment to that person and have the legal rights that such a union provided they were not allowed to. Parents who came out as gay or lesbian persons often lost custody of their children to the straight parent in a divorce, and in many states LGBT people could be fired or even denied housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, real or perceived. I could not come up with a reason these laws existed other than religious understandings of the legal contract of marriage and sexuality, and the religious bias that made employers and landlords want the right to discriminate.

At this point I still believed that God was not OK with people “acting on unnatural desires,” but if people really were just born with these issues, and did not get them through any desire or action on their part, then why were religious people trying so hard to make life difficult for them regardless of the religion these people were a part of? And how was it alright for a government to be enforcing laws based on any religion? I thought about how scary it would be if an employer decided my spouse was too feminine and fired him and we had no legal recourse. How was this an OK law? I was horrified that people could have their children taken away from them simply because they didn’t fit into a nice little religious box and play up what society had decided was the “norm.” How did that have anything to do with their ability to love and care for their child?

When I tried to talk about this new understanding with people I knew, they were shocked. Some of them became visibly angry and accused me of abandoning my religious beliefs. In one conversation with one person, I tried to explain why I felt it was wrong for landlords to be able to deny people housing based on their sexual orientation, the reply I received was this:

“Melissa, think about it. If you could only afford to live in one apartment complex in town, and there were gay people living there, would you really want your children exposed to that?”

My heart sank into my gut. To this person LGBTQ people were perverts, a menace to society and a danger to children. If this person knew my spouse’s secret, or even my own same-sex attraction, would they feel safe having us around their children? Would this person feel we were unfit to have children ourselves? To most of the religious people I spoke with, giving all people equal rights meant that they were giving up religious rights somehow.

They simply could not put themselves in a gay person’s shoes, even for a moment, and I was ashamed to realize that
I had never tried to think about it myself until I recognized
the issue in my life.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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Popular conservative Christian pastor says “America is over” because shameless women who have sex and vote are running wild and screwing everything up.

by Vyckie Garrison

Ever wonder what goes on inside the small minds of fundamentalist Christian men? Want to know how they justify their blatant anti-woman policies and practices? Are they for real? Do they even know how hateful and intolerably ignorant they sound?

Thanks to Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a conservative black pastor and up-and-coming Republican leader, there’s now a YouTube video which perfectly sums up the Religious Right’s core beliefs about women.

“One thing I know for sure, without a doubt, women cannot handle power,” says Peterson, in a 12-minute tirade posted to the “bondinfo” YouTube channel recently as a part of the Reverend’s “Exploring Your Destiny” video series.

“It is not in them to handle power in the right way,” he continues, “they don’t know what to do with it.” Really? That’s some blatant misogyny right there, folks.  Ah – but Rev. Peterson is just getting started …

“It’s not real power anyway … it’s all ego-building. Real, true power come [sic] from God, and God is the one that gave man the power and authority over the wife, and to spiritually guide the world in the right way to go.”

According to the website listed at the end of the video, “BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, is a nationally recognized nonprofit organization dedicated to ‘Rebuilding the Family By Rebuilding the Man.’ BOND was Founded by Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson who is also its President.”

Rev. Peterson has been busy lately making himself a reputation for strident religiously-motivated bigotry. In January, the Tea Party leader and author of “Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America,” caused a stir by suggesting that unemployed African Americans need to be sent “back to the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working.”

“I hope that once [black people] hear the truth, they will pull away from the Democratic Party and their godless leaders,” Peterson told the Huffington Post. “When you tell them the truth first, they become upset … They think if you’re black and conservative, you’re an Uncle Tom. Once you let them yell and scream and carry on — because they will carry on — and when they calm down, they understand.”

“Women are now degraded. Women have no shame,” Peterson laments in reference to Sandra Fluke’s courageous congressional committee testimony. “This woman’s sitting there testifying about … all the sex they having [sic] … and it’s really all about maintaining the freedom to kill babies in the womb.”

During his sermon, Rev. Peterson is wringing his hands as he explains how “all these women are into all this stuff [sex out of wedlock] with no shame – women would not have done that in the good old days.”

That’s right – it’s all about shameless women, whom Peterson says, do not realize they present themselves as sluts.

Apparently emboldened by the fact that none of the Christian women in his audience objected by hurtling heavy objects at his imbecilic head, Peterson continues, “It’s unfortunate that women are allow.., that men are so weak, they’ve been so intimidated that they allow these women to just run wild and screw up everything – including their souls, and their children.”

In the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them … sadly for religious wannabe-cave dwellers, those days are gone …

“And if you speak up about it, Satan got [sic] it set up – through the women – that you’re gonna be punished in some kind of way.”

The Reverend is certainly not going to play into the Devil’s hands by refusing to speak his mind when it comes to the inherent, abysmal flaws of shameless women. “The can’t handle stress. They can’t handle anything. You walk up to them with a issue [sic], they freak out right away. … They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset – just like that. They have no patience because it’s not in their nature. They don’t have love. They don’t have love.”

Heard enough? The majority of people who commented on this vile video could not watch more than a minute or two without feeling nauseated and violently angry due to the straight-out ludicrousness and unqualified misogyny of Reverend Peterson’s sermon.

Those lacking a masochistic proclivity to endure malicious, hate-filled bible-thumping missed the ironic spectacle of a black man bemoaning the evils of women’s suffrage:

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should’ve never turned this over to women,” Peterson complains. “And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees [sic] with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction. And this probably was the reason they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen.”

He goes on to blame women for all the supposed evils of modern society: homosexuality, “this gay marriage thing,” losing our right to bear arms, freedom to “speak truth,” … all this debauchery “because women are in a position of power.”

“Wherever women are taking over, evil reigns.”

It is no surprise when religious misogynists focus on shame when attempting to keep women in line. According to psychologist Dr. Darrel Ray, author of Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality, “religions have found shame to be a powerful tool for maintaining religious conformity and to control or limit sexual behavior.”

There is nothing so disheartening to me as when I hear women defending “The Big Guy” – and African American men who rationalize and advocate for the subjugation of fellow human beings in the name of God are no less pathetic.

As PZ Myers points out, Rev. Peterson is “incoherent and stupid, completely lacking in charisma, with a speaking style that makes you wonder if he’d been stunned with a hammer …” – so what’s the big deal? Nobody takes this loser seriously, do they?

As a former fundamentalist Christian woman and editor of a “pro-life, pro-family” Christian political newspaper for 16 years, I spent a lot of time in the company of patriarchal right-wing men – and from my experience, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is not exceptionally extreme or outlandish in fundamentalist circles. What makes Peterson “edgy” is that he has the audacity to speak aloud what most right-wing men truly believe about women - the Reverend is aberrant only because he is outspoken enough to post his misogynist views on YouTube.

Recently, conservative analyst, Kristen Powers, confronted Rev. Peterson about his misogynistic sermon when she and Peterson appeared together on Sean Hannity’s “Great American Panel.” Watch as Powers shamelessly hijacked Hannity’s program to lambaste Peterson, saying, “You are a pastor distorting God’s word for misogyny … when you say you leave a woman alone in charge a family and she destroys the family.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLyy73HJwbM

Notice that when Powers directly called on the Fox News host to denounce Peterson’s regressive views on women, Hannity, who is a BOND advisory board member, issued not a single word of censure, but chose instead to steer the conversation back to the topic of President Obama taking credit for killing Osama bin Laden.

Peterson has endorsed Mitt Romney, saying, ”Love of God, family and country are the most important values in my life. All are under attack in America as never before. I believe that Governor Romney, though not without flaws in his record, is a decent, highly capable man who believes in these same values.”

[Trigger warning!]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeFhA_sL38c

Yes, America is under attack – and she’s going down because brazen women are taking over.

Where’s your shame, right-wing Christian political leaders? Where are the outcries of socially conservative evangelicals protesting the Reverend’s anti-woman screed? Their silence speaks volumes.

The real shame is this: as an ultra-conservative black man, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is the darling of the Religious Right. What he says is the undiluted substance of what the Republican troglodytes believe about “their” women.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum! Comments are also open below.

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by Permission to Live

Before I go any further I just want to make it clear that my spouse has participated in the writing and editing of this series, and has given their full support and approval of it’s publication.

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

Over the next number of months it seemed that we talked about transgender questions and issues constantly. My spouse had been unable to talk about this for so long and now it was like a floodgate had opened. He told me about how he had always felt different, that even as a small child he wished he could play with some of the girls’ toys and wondered why he couldn’t have long hair like his sisters. He remembered feeling sad when he figured out that he wouldn’t ever be a mother. But he learned early on to behave in the manner expected of him and he didn’t have a name to put to the feelings he had.

As a little Christian homeschooled boy, there wasn’t much available information on LGBTQ people, but one day at about 11 years of age, he was reading a large illustrated history of the 20th century when a small paragraph near the bottom of the page caught his eye. The title of the section was “Man becomes Woman” and reading it with his heart thumping wildly, he realized that there were other people like him. The short story was about one of the first transsexual women who went public with their story, her name was Christine Jorgensen and she had transitioned back in the 1950s. Several times a week he would pull the heavy book from the shelf and open to the page with the story, to read again and again about Christine. He was not alone.

He brought up gay or trans people up in conversations here and there with the people in his life, looking for clues as to how they felt about the issue. Having repeatedly heard the common Christian attitude on these topics, he quickly started to believe that talking about how he felt would be sure to bring rejection from those he loved most, and maybe even subjection to painful therapeutic procedures pushed by Christian ministries to “fix” him. He desperately wanted to please his relatives and his community, he prayed fervently for the misgendered feelings to go away, but they remained. He wished that it would be discovered that he was physically intersexed in some way, because if his body was somehow both male and female perhaps it would become acceptable for him to live as a girl. But puberty hit right on time, and the torment got worse. His body was maturing further into what his brain told him was the wrong gender. There was nothing he could do to change it, and waking up each day to the body he hated got more and more difficult.

He immersed himself in school, studied hard and started on a track towards becoming a minister, but the feelings were still there. Now that he was in junior college he had access to public computers and he took the chance to read anything he could on the condition he knew he had. I started to realize that despite my hours upon hours of research, I had merely scratched the surface of the extent of reading my spouse had done over the last number of years. He studied the treatments and surgeries and read about the side effects and problems. But all the while he had such shame believing that God condemned him for having those feelings. He wondered why God would give him such a heavy cross to bear, what had he done to deserve this? He knew all the “right” things to say on the LGBTQ issues if questioned, but inside he was afraid of his secret ever being discovered.

Gender dysphoria was always lurking under the surface, sometimes spiraling into bouts of depression. On dark days, wild ideas screamed through his mind, maybe he should run away from home and spare everyone the pain of having such a child in the family, maybe he could somehow cut off the source of the hormones wreaking such havoc on his body, maybe it would be better if he was ended his life and with it the possibility of his condition causing pain to those he loved. But in the end the only real option seemed to be to numb the pain as best he could. Suppressing, denying, and keeping as busy as possible. He had grown up with many of the trappings of an American childhood, the friends, the vacations, the hobbies. Yet under the surface the gender dysphoria was always there, it never went away.

He fell in love and we got married. His hopes were high that this issue was going to leave once he was safely in a god-sanctioned relationship where he would have the role of a husband and father to fill. Feelings of despair hit hard when soon after marriage he realized the gender dysphoria was still there. So many of his low periods during our marriage made more sense now that I knew what he had been struggling with.

Hearing more of the story was heartbreaking for me, and realizing how hard he had fought this his whole life made me start worry that my efforts to help him would just be a drop in the bucket. He had done his best to be “who God wanted him to be”.

He had denied himself everything,
prayed and begged God to heal him,
but he was still wrestling with it now, years later.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

The next day started out the same as pretty much any other day. We had breakfast, and my Hunnie went out to the office. But unlike an average weekday, as soon as he left, I put in a movie for the kids, plunked the baby into the bouncer and rushed to the computer. I hardly knew where to start; it was all so unknown to me. I typed in “what is transsexual?” and sat there staring at the screen. My gut reaction to new things was to learn as much as I could, and I had a lot to figure out. In fact, I spent the next few weeks doing constant research; it was pretty much all I could think about. My kids watched far more TV than usual as I spent hours reading whatever I could find on the subject. When my spouse was home I asked him question after question about his experience, and he tried to answer every question as honestly as he could.

For starters, I learned that “transsexual” was just one of the terms used in reference to people who did not feel that their gender matched their bodies. And since “transsexual” seemed to be used more often in reference to people who were living life in the opposite gender they had been assigned at birth, I started using the more encompassing term “transgender” instead.

The old term “transvestite” that I had heard my parents use was actually a name of a sexual fetish that comprised of crossdressing to get a sexual thrill of some kind. I had never seen my spouse crossdressed, but as soon as he came home for lunch I asked him if he ever did. He admitted that he had been crossdressing in private since he was young, but said that it didn’t do anything for him sexually. Back to the drawing board.

I learned about men who considered themselves “crossdressers” meaning that they dressed up as women sometimes for the fun of it, or to express their feminine side. I learned about gender dysphoria, the name for the persistent subconscious understanding that you were somehow the opposite gender than you had been assigned at birth, and in discovering that, I found that there were people who had been born physically female who had this condition as well. I read about transgendered people who had felt that life was better for them living as the opposite gender, and I read about transgendered people who had decided to get medical treatments to make their bodies feel more in tune with their minds.

Once I felt more acquainted with the terms, I started googling things like “married to a crossdresser” and “my husband is transgender.” Was there anyone out there who had this sort of experience? From what I could see, many people who faced this issue after marriage ended up divorced. The fear was crippling. Divorce wasn’t supposed to be a word that Christian couples even used, and yet here it was popping up everywhere in marriages like mine. I saved countless links organized in folders to read again later or use for reference. It was so much information. I felt overwhelmed. Sometimes I cried at the computer, trying to understand what was going on and what was going to happen to us.

I prayed, again and again, that God would send a sign, or tell me what all of this meant, or at least give me an inkling of what to do. I googled things like “Christian and transgender” and “what does the bible have to say about transsexuals”. And I read through page after horrible page of links from ministries and groups who condemned LGBTQ people and insisted that they were deviant and would cause harm to children.

Many of these links said that they could help fix people with these perverse tendencies, but I still struggled to match what they were claiming with my Hunnie. These groups claimed that they had all the answers as to how these “perversions” were started, so I investigated, but all of the questions I bombard my spouse with met dead ends. He had never been sexually abused. He had never been exposed to explicit sexual materials. He had not had an abusive or absent father. He had not had an overly controlling mother, or a mother who wished he was a girl. I asked if he was gay, but while he admitting to having had same-sex attraction at times, he had always been more sexually attracted to girls, which had given him hope that maybe the gender dysphoria would magically go away if he just got married and had kids and had that role to fill, except it hadn’t. Even wracking our brains together, we just couldn’t get to the bottom of what had caused this problem, it just was.

I was encouraged to find that the teachings of the Catholic church were different than many of the Christian groups I encountered. They didn’t teach that being gay or transgendered was a special kind of sin that was extra evil or caused by anything. Instead, they taught that some people were born with these desires but God decreed that they must not act on them. This was a relief to me: being gay or transgendered was no different than any other struggle. I even felt encouraged in regard to the same sex attraction I experienced myself. Maybe I wasn’t evil or demon-possessed, I just had an unnatural interest that I needed to continue to battle, just like my spouse.

More than anything else I felt blessed to have a spouse who had trusted me enough to tell me his struggle. With our prayers and efforts combined, surely together we could conquer this issue. I wanted to help him in this fight he had been struggling with alone for so long. There was nowhere else to go for help – my spouse was a pastor, and I knew what happened to pastors who were suspected of being gay or queer in any way. My spouse had remained faithful to me and he was committed to our marriage. So he had a strange feminine side that I hadn’t known about, that was OK with me.

He could be a more feminine guy
and we would fight off the transsexual thing together.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

As many of you know, my spouse and I got married young after a short parent-supervised courtship. We began our marriage “the right way” according to everything we believed. We had obeyed our parents and stayed pure from emotional relationships or sexual activity, so when we got married neither of us had ever been intimate with any other person. We were wholeheartedly committed to our Christian beliefs at that time, feeling certain that birth control was wrong in almost any circumstance and that men should be the family leaders and women should be submissive. My husband was in seminary to be a Christian minister and I was a stay-at-home wife. We worked together to start a church for homeschool families with a strong emphasis on faith practices in the home and we used our experience growing up in conservative homeschool families to encourage them. We talked about how homeschooling had protected us from the world, and how well courtship worked to keep young people pure and got them into solid god-honouring marriage. We prayed together, read our bibles together, and sought to follow God’s will in everything.

But none of this changed the secret that we never really spoke of.

We had only been married a few months when my spouse confessed that he had “seen some bad stuff on the internet.” I had been raised believing that men were sexually-driven pigs, so I assumed this meant he was looking at porn, and I was too afraid to ask for detail, so even though I was frustrated by the thought of him having an affinity for porn I forgave him, prayed with him, and tried as best I could to help him fight this “spiritual battle.” We didn’t talk about it much. Every couple of months he would make another vague confession and we would lather, rinse and repeat. I believed that most couples had something like this they were dealing with, and I loved my spouse and believed that he was doing everything in his power to fight this temptation, whatever it was.

One day we were flipping through the channels on the TV (TV was still pretty new to me at the time) and we happened onto a Tyra Banks show where there were Transsexual people talking and competing in a fashion show. I knew hardly anything about transsexual people. As we watched the tall thin women on the screen talk about how they used to be men, I felt uncomfortable. But I could tell that my spouse was very interested in the show and even seemed to know a lot more about what was going on than I did. When I asked him how he knew so much about transsexuals he said that he had read some about them on the internet. I began to worry that perhaps his struggle on the internet involved transsexual porn. But we continued our little tradition of confession, contrition, and prayer in reference to the periodic slips into “sin” on the internet, and I never asked for more detail.

Life went on – we had two children now – and my spouse finished seminary and simultaneously became interested in the Catholic church. We read through the entire catechism together and felt a strong pull to be in a religious system that had such firm beliefs, strong structure and accountability. But so many factors had set us up for a life in ministry, and we now had the qualifications and training needed. We took a call to a church, excited to be taking a step to serve and encourage a community of Christians.

We were both relieved to be done with graduate school. We were exhausted from juggling two children, long school hours, and a difficult church plant. Our family life got better right away. Instead of long hours away working, my spouse was able to get his work done and be home more often. He began getting involved with the kids for the first time and was becoming a better parent. We had our third baby together and he learned how to change a diaper and even began cleaning up some around the house. Living a thousand miles away from family with our many small children was challenging. We only had each other for support and our relationship became closer and more intimate than ever before. I truly felt like we were best friends, able to share anything with each other.

So one night in the early spring of 2010 when he confessed to me that he had once again seen “bad stuff” on the internet, I decided to ask for more detail.

“When you talk about seeing stuff on the internet, is it about transsexuals like we saw on the Tyra Banks show that one time?”

I wasn’t sure when I had ever seen him this uncomfortable, but he had always been such a terrible liar, I think he knew it would be pointless to try and dodge the question.

“Um, yeah. Actually that is what I am talking about. I try to stay away from it, but eventually after a few months I find myself reading about them again.”

I felt sort of bewildered.

“Wait, so you aren’t looking at porn on the internet?” I asked. He looked confused.

“What? No! I mean, I’ve come across porn before, but only a couple times, I never look for it. I read about transsexuals, like their stories and their treatments, and their journey’s through transition.”

He fidgeted in his seat, looking down at piece of paper he was slowly shredding in his hands. I felt silly over my long time assumption that he had a porn problem, and confused by the new term.

“What is transition?” I asked. He looked at me cautiously.

“Well, a transsexual feels like they do not belong in the body they were born in, and sometimes they start to live life as the opposite gender, that’s called gender transition.”

My heart was pounding in my ears, but I plowed ahead.

“Why are you so interested in transsexuals? Is it because you wish you could be with a transsexual? Or because you wish you were one?”

He hesitated a moment, then he breathed in and took the plunge.

“I think it’s that I could be one. I’ve felt like my gender doesn’t match me for a very long time.”

I was surprised by how calmly I was hearing this, and yet at the same time I was freaking out. What did this mean? How could my spouse be saying he was a transsexual? He had never said anything about this to me! I had hardly any idea of what being transsexual even meant. In my sheltered upbringing the closest my parents had come to the topic was a veiled reference “transvestites” and how they were confused messed up people who refused to accept the way God had made them and were usually sexually abusive and predatory. But this explanation did not add up to my sweetheart sitting on the couch with me. My spouse was an intelligent, loving, creative person. He was gentle and caring. I could trust him with anything. He was a devoted spouse and parent. He was a pastor who spent hours every week researching and writing for heartfelt sermons and visiting and encouraging the elderly and sick in our congregation. And I knew I loved him.

That night, I think the most prominent emotion for both of us was fear. I was afraid of the vast unknown ahead. He was afraid that I would despise him. We were both afraid of God’s anger and being misunderstood by practically every single person we knew.

We held each other and cried together.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Barbie Getzreal

“Where do you get your energy?!”

This is a question which is frequently asked of Quiverfull moms by amazed and admiring onlookers who cannot imagine being able to keep up with the exponential demands of “biblical womanhood” including: perpetual pregnancy, child-bearing, adopting sibling groups, breastfeeding, baby wearing, chronic sleep deprivation, raising half a dozen or more closely-spaced, “stair-step” children, homeschooling - year round through chronic illness, child-training, character training, tomato-staking, discipling children, homemaking, penny-pinching, organic gardening, baking from scratch, once-a-month cooking, homesteading, sewing modest clothing, showing hospitality, operating a “cottage” business, staying trim, fit and healthy, and of course, serving as loving helpmeet … all without the modern woman’s “village” of helpers: daycare, preschool, play dates, public school, the boob-tube babysitter, pre-packaged and frozen foods, day spas, “me time,” credit cards, government assistance, “allopathic” medicine, Sunday School, youth group, therapists, Ritalin for the kids, or Xanax for mom.

Even a cursory perusal of the above-linked Quiverfull blogs will leave a woman feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. “Where do you get your energy?” is the obvious and unavoidable question.

The most flippant, unprofitable, guilt-inducing, and insincere responses often sound the most spiritual:

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

“With God all things are possible.”

“He will not give us more than we can handle …”

or how about this “encouraging” little pep-talk: “Just like a battery charger, the Holy Spirit dwells in us–with unlimited power and energy!” Oh joy! Christian moms of many just need to get “plugged-in” … and there is a handy dandy list provided of even more things we need to do in order to get “connected.”

Thanks. That’s really helpful.

An important aspect of energy which I have never seen discussed in Quiverfull circles has to do with how our interaction with other people affects our energy levels. Specifically, the difference between introverts and extraverts is never addressed in relation to large-family dynamics.

While an extravert is energized by frequent social involvement, an introvert gains energy through quiet, private reflection.  Being surrounded by people makes extraverts feel happy, enthusiastic, animated, and pumped full of optimism, but constant interaction drains the introvert’s energy and leaves them feeling tired, irritable, anxious and angry. It is absolutely essential to an introvert’s health and well-being to be able to get alone for significant periods of time in order to restore and recharge their own personal energy.

While it is popularly believed that introverts are shy while extraverts are out-going and sociable, there are many “social-butterfly” types who are in fact introverts because, even though they thoroughly enjoy the company of their friends and peers, when the party is over and the guests go home, the “life of the party” is wiped-out … sometimes for days afterward. Conversely, there are extraverted people who absolutely need to interact with others in order to gain energy and ward off deep depression, who unfortunately are socially awkward and have difficulty making friends.

Another important distinction is that extraverts tend to think as they talk which means that during conversations they are actually processing their thoughts, while introverts need to think everything through before they feel comfortable verbalizing their thoughts and ideas.

The difference between introverts and extroverts is not some modern psychobabble notion dreamed up by secular humanists to deter true believers from pursuing large families.

Think about it for a minute. Where do YOU get your energy? Do you feel energized after a pleasant chat with friends? If even congenial conversations which you very much enjoy leave you feeling drained of energy, you are probably an introvert. It’s not that you do not welcome the company of others, it is simply that you fill up your emotional energy reserves from within rather than drawing from other people.

With this concept in mind, consider for a moment: what if a person attempting to live the Quiverfull ideal tends to be naturally introverted?

What if all the socializing required for Dad’s job leaves him wrung-out like a wet rag by the end of the work day and desperately feeling the need to relax and breathe in the quiet seclusion of his own home?

In “A Full Quiver,” Rick Hess sloughs off the valid concern of “time” with this pious admonishment:

Worried if you will be able to stand the sacrifice of giving up your time? As one who has been there, let me reassure you that you will be rewarded many times over for giving more and more of yourself to your children.

Already sucked dry? Not a problem! All you need to do is give more and more of yourself …

What about moms like Michelle Duggar who, “spend more time together than the average family that may have two or three children just because we’re home day in and day out homeschooling and doing all our things that go along with that”? If Mom’s an introvert, how does she not go crazy from all of the non-stop interaction with her quiver full of children?

To these overextended women, Nancy Campbell offers a simple solution:

To be an encourager, you have to stop thinking about yourself and give some room in your mind and heart for others. I will never forget some words God spoke to me years ago. .”Nancy,” He said, “how can I reveal to you the needs of others if you are always thinking about yourself?” Oh how true this is.

As troublesome a problem as introversion is for Quiverfull parents, at least Mom and Dad have chosen this lifestyle. They are grown-ups with access to a broad range of coping strategies.

But what happens to the introverted children in Quiverfull homes?

This is not simply a large-family issue, it is specifically a Quiverfull problem because not all large families are as excessively family-centered and discipline-oriented as homeschooling, homesteading, family-integrated, “dare-to-shelter” – type Quiverfull families. I spent a whole day digging through pro-Quiverfull books, publications, websites, and family blogs; all of which poo-pooed the idea that children might actually need their own space and prolonged alone time.

Amy at Raising Arrows acknowledges that having their own space is important for everyone, including children in large families, though she insists that her 13-year-old son likes sharing a room with his two little brothers, and by “giving them space” she means lock boxes for older children, personal shelves, several short “brain breaks” throughout the day for children afflicted with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), headphones, and random one-on-one time with Mom and Dad.

“However,” writes Amy, “we do not allow insurmountable amounts of time spent “alone.”

Children left to themselves are problematic. (Prov 29:15)  Minds left to wander without boundaries and guidelines tend to gravitate toward foolish pursuits (Prov 22:15).  And often there can become a craving for escape.  They want more and more and more time alone, and pretty soon you find they are totally disconnected from the family.

I first learned about introversion from my daughter’s speech therapist.  As it turns out, her speech impediment was a symptom of the frustration and extreme vexation she was feeling as a result of not getting adequate space from her siblings in order to recoup all the energy she expended on interacting with them day in and day out for weeks and months and years at a time.  A simple explanation of her need for ample alone time was all her dad and I needed to motivate us to address the problem. We arranged for our daughter to “chill out” by herself and almost overnight, she was transformed as if by magic into a much more pleasant person.  Her speech improved dramatically. She became more cooperative and personable.  Her concentration and study skills improved. She developed a refreshingly positive outlook on life.

And it occurred to me that I am an introvert too.  An introvert who was constantly surrounded by my extraverted husband and a passel of children and a martyr’s mentality which rejected and disdained the very concept of “me time.”  No wonder I felt utterly frazzled, bone-weary, spiritless and despondent.  When I felt it would be impossible to squeeze out one more drop of energy from my bankrupt inner being, I was “encouraged” by the Titus 2 women to persevere even while I was bed-ridden.

Given that those individuals who are prone to careful contemplation and thoughtful deliberation, as well as a significant majority of “gifted” persons, generally tend toward the introverted end of the extravert-introvert spectrum, it’s a sure bet that introverts actually predominate in Quiverfull homes. This may be a key reason why, when dynamic, industrious, enterprising, indefatigable Quiverfull believers finally snap, they crash and burn in the most spectacular manifestation of downright mania.  Men abandon their families. Mothers drown their children. Kids cut themselves and attempt suicide.  How much misery and destruction could be avoided if individual family members were simply allowed an adequate amount of personal solitude?

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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by Calulu

(Editorial note: What follows below is my own personal thoughts on this, no one elses, I’m not speaking for the group, just me. I cannot stay silent to this. If you’re offended or triggered I’m so sorry. Warning if you are triggered by scriptures or the like.)

This morning several of us at NLQ were directed to look at “Women’s Prayer Group Praying That the Women at MRFF All Get Incurable Breast Cancer”  posting on  Free Thought Blogs.

Apparently there is a group of ladies calling themselves Christians who’ve decided to make praying for the death of anyone connected with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation their number one priority. And why is that? Perhaps because the MRFF is a watchdog organization that keeps the the Dominionist evangelical Christians in the military from discriminating, harassing or intimidating people that believe or don’t believe differently than them. Yes, the MRFF protects the religious FREEDOM our country was founded upon. Oh how very evil!

When I first read through it my immediate response was what the hell? What. The. Hell. Is. This … well you know the word. I felt like going all nasty dung-throwing rantiness on it. But I get the sense that’s sort of what they’re looking for so that this group can justify their own nastiness with a ‘See, see how EVIL they are!!!’. I wanted to throw up my hands and shout “WTF!”

I have to laugh and agree with both Chris Rodda on Free Thought Blogs and Leah Burton of POLITICUSUSA about how completely UNChristian these women are. I also want to know if in the eyes of the Lord does spelling count when issuing imprecatory death prayers. They’ve been sending around an email spelling out the names of people they are praying to be stricken with breast cancer along with some very, um, interesting spelling. Below is the email:

“Mickey Wienstien, we called you on the weekend to advice you that our womens prayer circle at our church will be ending your wickedness against Christ Jesus and his anointed of the USA in our military. In America which is Jesus’ country we can pray all we want for anything we want. you hung up on us and were rude to our leader. but will that stop us or Christ Jesus? No it will not and never could have, wicked Mickey. Our prayer circle has never failed to acheive our hosts granting of the scripture we pray. for direct intervention against you as you are a true demon to America. Luke 9:1 We will not stop our prayers until you stop the evil you do with Lucifer on a daly basis. Luke 9:1 But not against you Mickey. We know by your internet site and your book who it is to be. Now for our prayer, we pray that the women who work in your MFRR and the women in your family will befall fast moving breast cancer which can not everbe cured. We pray this for Leah Bruton, and Becki Miller, Patricia Corigan, Chris Rodda, Edie Disler, Vicky Garrison, Kristin Leslie, Melinda Moeton and Joan Slish. And you evil clan too, we pray this for Bonnie Wiensten and Amanda and Amber Wienstein and the woman lawyers Cariline Mitchel and Katherin Ritchy and all women of all who work at with for Military Freedom Against Religon Foundation. know that we pray and pray hard all the days until you stop your destruction of our American army and accept Christ Jesus as Lord and join His army.”

Guess none of them ever read Luke 6:27 through 36 or they’d know that you’re supposed to bless your enemies, pray for them and do good to them. Or are they just ignoring that part of Luke because it doesn’t line up with their personal agenda? You cannot have it both ways, either you love the Lord and seek to keep His word or you aren’t really Christians because you don’t even follow what you say you believe.

Also, Luke 9:1 that they cite in their email has nothing to do with Lucifer or their prayer circle or America. What is says “When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases,” I seriously doubt any of them are part of the Twelve. Driving out demons and curing diseases is also very diametrically opposed to praying for disease to kill someone. It’s emotional murder, harboring the spirit of murder as surely as pointing a gun and pulling the trigger. The desire is there.

Actually the only real thing that their email does expose is the condition of their hearts, that they don’t have love in their hearts, that they’ve chosen curses instead of blessings. Chose today, blessings or curses. Pretty easy to see what they’ve chosen. I’d be curious to see what the outcome in their own lives will be in six months or a year as a result of their choice to curse. One of the things I’ve learned in my years as believer and before that, be very careful what you wish on other people because the universal law of reciprocity tends to bring that thing you’re wishing on others straight back to you. When you pray for judgement on others or bad things then you’re telling the universe or God that it’s alright with you to release the same thing on you. It never ends well. Better to forgive, forget and live in peace, move on. Or you might find yourself eating a rubber biscuit. The kind you throw at someone else to hurt them, it bounces off the wall and lands right in your big old trap to poison you.

Karma can be a big old nasty bitch. I’m almost afraid for these ladies because what they’ve released in the spiritual realm can’t be a good thing. Look what happened when someone cursed King David in the Psalms 109:28 “Let them curse, but You bless; When they arise, let them be ashamed, But let Your servant rejoice” David knew enough of who he was and who the Lord is that he asked God to bless him and to outdo the curse and then turned the curse back on those that uttered it.

I remember back when I was working for a big computer company in the Virginia Technology Corridor I came to work one day just in time to see people huddled fearfully in groups here and there in the parking lot. Spray painted on the side of the building were upside down crosses, 666 and the words “Satin Rules”! Someone had thoughtfully placed a big black Hefty bag filled with dead chickens on the main door step, right smack dab on the welcome mat. Several of my coworkers were shaken up by all of this because dead chickens left on the steps of a building are a curse of death on the occupants in black arts and voodoo. One lady started crying, refusing to enter the building, thinking she was going to die. I had to point out to her that it was likely it was just one of our loonier disgruntled former coworkers that did this and that they couldn’t be much of a Satan worshiper if they couldn’t even be bothered to spell their master’s name right. It was strictly a tactic to make people fearful and fall into a self-fulfilling prophesy.

This is just more of that I think. Silly ecclesiastical posturing in an attempt to sow fear.

To those praying for death I have only to say chose carefully, blessings or curses this day. I would hope you’d chose blessings.

PS. Reminds me of this song

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