Falwell, women, and politics

Jerry Falwell hopes Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate in the 2008 Presidential campaign. According to a a report by the Los Angeles Times, this is because "nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton...If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't."

I went to college at a Jesuit university where many (but by no means all) of the students were Roman Catholics. (This is where I got to know a Muslim girl very well, though less well than I would have liked; whenever anyone goes on about "Muslims are..." or "All Muslims should...", she is the face I see.) There were a few Protestants thrown in, and even a small group of "Born-Agains" (or "Neo-Christians", as I called them), students who had converted to various Protestant sects fairly recently and generally walked around with just-been-lobotomized beatific looks on their faces. I was friends with more than a few of these.

One day a group of us was having dinner together in the upstairs dining hall, and there was at least one of the Born-Agains there - Dave F., a former drug addict who had nearly dropped out of college early on before finding Christ and becoming insufferably nice and clean-cut. I believe there were also two of the Born-Again girls with us there, too, as well as several of my other friends.

The year was probably 1988, the first semester of my Senior year, because talk had turned to elections. And very quickly we found ourselves discussing sex, politics, and religion over dinner - never a good idea.

One of the candidates running for some office at the time was a woman - not that unusual, even way back then. But Dave F. opined that he could never vote for a woman running for office, especially not for President. Women should not hold political office. The Bible told him so.

I couldn't accept this. "So if you had two candidates running for office, and one was a man, a Satanist who believed all Christians should be arrested and tortured to death, abortions should be mandatory, and all children should be made into sex slaves, and the other was a woman, which one would you vote for?"

"The man," he said, the calm, beatific, glassy look never slipping from his face. "Women should not hold public office."

The thing is, he wasn't joking. He was as earnest and serious and devout as ever.

Jerry Falwell is using the Ann Coulter "Chill out, I was just kidding" defense, whereby any statement, no matter how inflammatory or outrageous, can be retraoctively labeled a parody, satire, or joke, or made better with a hastily added smiley. (Example: "Hey, Ann, I hope somebody guts you with a rusty butter knife, ties you to Karl Rove's bloated corpse and leaves you to be eaten by maggots in the middle of a swamp. Ha-ha, just kidding. :)" ) Which means that any statement made by Falwell, Coulter, or anyone else who subscribes to that same philosophy can't be taken seriously, ever. Too bad their disciples don't know that.

But the statement Falwell made isn't simply a demonization of Hillary Clinton. It's an expression of a deep-seated misogyny inherent in certain Christian fundamentalist organizations that the Republican Hate Machine plans to exploit to its fullest. And that's no joke.