At The Root Of The Republican Party War Against Women-- Primitive Southern Baptists

Yesterday, inspired by George Will's latest kvetching about the anti-women record of his boy Cory Gardner (R-CO), we took another look at the Republican Party War on Women. Ken sent me a fascinating article by Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books, Texas: The Southern Baptists in Power and rather than update yesterday's post, let me share a couple of paragraphs that pertain to American women's Southern Baptist problem. We'll start with the 1980 evangelical conference in Dallas when Reagan won their hearts by declaring, "I know you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you."

Reagan and his advisers sensed that Texas Baptists were at the heart of a major change brewing in America. Talk about red states and the Tea Party suggests something new in the world but Reagan was joining the Baptists to reject pretty much everything "modern" to emerge in American culture and society over the last two centuries. The three that most disturbed the Bible Belt South were the end of slavery, the "theory" of evolution that cast doubt on the literal truth of the Bible, and the emancipation of women.

The goal of "the Christian Right" as it waded into American politics was not vanilla concern with good government, but something gem-hard and Bible-based. The word "inerrant" is unfamiliar to most Americans, who take a softer view of religion than Southern Baptists. Dressing up for church, helping the poor, praying for peace, the sweet hope of marriage vows, the solace of ashes to ashes and dust to dust at the graveside-- that seems to cover it for most Americans. Southern Baptists have an iron spine forged in a hotter fire: they believe salvation is what the universe is all about; the way to be saved is spelled out in the Bible; you can trust the Bible because everything in it is true, and that includes the story of Eden-- woman’s role in man’s fall.

At the SBC’s annual meeting in Kansas City in 1984 the fundamentalists pushed through a resolution barring the ordination of women "because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall." With this measure the fundamentalists closed a perfect loop. Women were not allowed to be "over" men, which means they cannot teach men where religion is concerned, which means they cannot be ordained and serve as pastors, which means they cannot challenge the interpretation of the biblical verses that confine them to a secondary status. Driving the resolution was a fear held in common with their fundamentalist brothers in the Muslim and Jewish worlds-- fear of the loss of control of women.

The war over women, heating up through the 1970s as the Equal Rights Amendment moved state-by-state toward ratification, brought conservative Baptists into national politics, something they had traditionally avoided. [Author Robert] Wuthnow cites a crucial moment in November 1977 when two contending groups of politically active women met in Houston to battle for and against the ERA. The conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly had been accusing liberals of "trying to cram the Equal Rights Amendment down our throats with federal money." She called it "a grab for power" and vowed to defeat the ERA-- something that appeared almost impossible in 1977, when ratification by only a few additional states was needed to add the amendment to the Constitution.

In Houston the liberals were full of confidence and open to everything, not just the ERA. At the Pro-Life Rally in Houston where Schlafly was a keynote speaker she felt an instant change in public mood: the left went too far, she argued, and "sealed its own doom by deliberately hanging around its neck the albatross of abortion, lesbianism, pornography and federal control." Schlafly proved right; the percentage of American women backing the ERA fell from 67 in 1976 to 48 two years later, when Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler were organizing their coup in the Southern Baptist Convention. Citing polls as he goes, Wuthnow charts the rise of the Republican right in Texas, eroding and then erasing support for the rights of women and minorities on a host of issues. Sometimes the right stumbled, as Clayton Williams did with a throwaway remark about rape during his campaign for governor against Ann Richards in 1990-- "As long as it is inevitable you might as well lie back and enjoy it." Williams lost but noted later that his campaign had a lasting effect-- "I made it OK for Bubba to vote Republican."

Running on a Southern Baptist platform, George W. Bush, with the support of Bubba, beat Richards in 1994 and helped turn Texas as red as a Communist flag. Powers reminds us that, more than almost any other state in the Union, "Texas is a state of dramatic inequalities-- between white and black, between Anglo and Latino, between rich and poor, between men and women. White male non-Hispanics with money run the show and have a history of vigorous action to retain control... Texans fought a civil war to keep their slaves, then excluded African-Americans from the vote with physical violence, poll taxes, intimidating literacy tests, and a legally sanctioned, whites-only Democratic primary. Voter ID laws enacted in recent years have the same transparent purpose-- to intimidate and exclude. Votes for women were resisted for decades and efforts by the state to discourage, limit, or ban abortion have been unrelenting and appear close to success."

Powers wraps it up that Wuthnow, in his book, Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State, is quite clear about what's roiling Texas in particular and the Bible Belt-- or Old Confederacy-- in general: "questions of political and social control. In the South, he finds, the new Republican Party wants exactly what the old Democratic Party wanted for a hundred years-- power to control people of color, Latinos, women, tax policy, who judges the law, who issues the regulations, who maps voting districts, and, oh yes, whether it’s okay to put a Nativity scene on the State House lawn."




UPDATE: A Few Words From Ken On Primitive Religions

One of the thoughts that has been percolating in my head from Tom Powers's piece is:

You take your Southern Baptists and your Catholics and your Mormons-- three gangs that through history were united only in their consuming hatred for one another-- and they now form a sort of United Front for Primitivism. Whether their religions are being used for justification or pretext, they have merged religion and politics in the interest of upholding the Ancient Verities of sexism, racism, and any other kind of social "other"-ism.