Depend on the Southern Baptists

 

There is a movement in the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination that is often a bellwether for evangelical America, to purge women from its leadership.

-- "Southern Baptists Move to Purge Churches With Female Pastors," NYTimes

Rick Warren

No one seems to know exactly how many Southern Baptist churches have female pastors, associate pastors, sub-pastors, youth pastors, etc. Some estimates go as high as 2,000 different churches. Five of those churches, including the famous Saddleback Church in Southern California (made famous by founding pastor Rick Warren and his bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life), have been expelled from the denomination. Warren had retired as pastor and named a husband and wife team as his replacements, a dangerous precedent that the fundamentalists can't countenance:

The right wing of the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is now — like conservatives more broadly — cracking down on what it sees as dangerous liberal drift. Most people in the denomination have long believed that the office of head pastor should be reserved for men. But an ultraconservative faction with a loud online presence is going further, pressing for ideological purity and arguing that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.

Wow. Whatever else, Southern Baptists are now not only tops in membership but tops at driving away young people. 

The annual Southern Baptist Convention is going on this week in New Orleans, and a proposed amendment to the S.B.C. constitution would further restrict the role of women. The amendment sez a church can be Southern Baptist only if it “does not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”

Tops at driving away educated women too, especially at a time when the whole church is under federal investigation for concealing and allowing widespread pastoral sexual abuse.

What's the polemical temperature of the "messengers" at the convention this week in New Orleans?

On Tuesday night, Mr. [Rick] Warren made that appeal [to have Saddleback Church reinstated in the denomination] from the floor of the convention to more than 12,000 delegates who would vote on whether to readmit his church.

“If doctrinal disagreements between Baptists are considered sin, we all get kicked out!” he said, noting that the S.B.C.’s theological statement is 4,032 words. “Saddleback disagrees with one word,” he said. “That’s 99.99999999 percent in agreement! Isn’t that close enough?”

The crowd shouted back at him, “No!”

The trumpian psyche in religion. But by their fruits you shall know them. Perhaps not incidentally, yesterday the Convention voted against allowing back into the denomination Saddleback Church and one other in Louisville that had allowed the ordaining of women.

Former Feminist Virginia Foxx Becomes Aunt Lydia

 

Virginia Foxx, after she takes
her makeup off

Yesterday, the Right to Contraception Act passed the US House 228-195. The bill affirms an individual’s right to access and use contraceptive methods, health care providers’ right to prescribe them, and allows for the Justice Department and individuals harmed by the refusal of contraceptives to seek legal recourse.

Who voted against it. Why Virginia Foxx did, former feminist and once-upon-a-time supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment back in the day, before she understood that her path to power would necessarily be paved with her discarded former beliefs.

In Boone and its suburbs, she used to be considered something of a fierce warrior for women's rights. Now she signs onto the most repressive, backward, and ridiculous anti-female Republican positions.

Also voting "nay" on the right to contraception were all the other seven Republican reps from North Carolina, including that idiot who wants to be our next senator, Ted Budd, and that other idiot who just lost his primary, Madison Cawthorn. They're all in lockstep and total agreement about what women can expect from the Trumpified GOP.

Nuttin', Baby, but forced status as brood mares.

Your Sunday Morning Laugh

Put goggly eyes on your I.U.D.!

Cartoon by Jon Richards. Hattip: The Impolitic

Mourdock? What''s a 'Mourdock'?

Republican "Family Values"

Republican Senatorial candidate in Missouri sez that "free enterprise" means it's perfectly all right to deny equal pay to women. Seriously.

Transvaginal Airlines' NC Hub

Quote of the day, from Rob Schofield, in the Raleigh News&Observer:

The Republican legislative leadership [in the NC General Assembly] is male dominated in a way we have not seen in Raleigh in recent years. Is there a chromosomal dimension to their bitter feud with a female governor, their targeting of female legislators, their war against a female-dominated teachers association and their effort to restrict the reproductive freedoms of women?

May we all answer in unison ... "Well, yes!"

Fairly Fresh French-Fried Friday Filets

I'm feeling the need to go prune something but can't seem to drag myself away from various spectacles on the InnerTubes:

1. Yesterday Republican Speaker of the NC House Thom Tillis ordered citizens cleared from the hallways outside his corner office in the General Assembly in Raleigh. The crowd was orderly, respectful, quiet, and merely curious about what surprise moves the Speaker might be planning to take away rights from the people. John Frank of the News&Observer was on hand to record the event. Apparently, protesters of Republican smash-and-grab politics are now not welcomed on the second floor of the building, while lobbyists from Time Warner and other fat-cat corporatists are. Who knew?

2. Meet Foster Friess, the billionaire born-again backer of Rick "Womb Police" Santorum, the money-man who's been pretty much single-handedly keeping the loser senator's race for president alive ... that and the reanimation of the War on Women's Rights. Friess jokingly told Andrea Mitchell yesterday that in his day (approximately 1905), women didn't need expensive contraception, only an aspirin held tightly between their knees, a joke as revelatory of the century Santorum seeks to reestablish in America as it is tone-deaf. Molly Redden's profile of Friess is not to be missed. And you can thank the good Lord again for a Supreme Court that unleashed the likes of Friess on what's left of our democracy.

3. Speaking of the war on women, female-impersonator Congresswoman Virginia A. Foxx was front and center (and "indignant," according to this reporter) in the Washington carnival of Republicans suddenly newly energized to stop female contraception. Foxx's "indignant" moment came when the reporter pointed out that the man she's endorsed for president, Mitt Romney, while he was governor of Massachusetts "remained mum as the legislature implemented a law requiring insurers to provide contraception in 2003 and his health department issued regulations requiring all hospitals — including Catholic institutions — to offer emergency birth control to rape victims in 2005." You can put a string of pearls on rank hypocrisy but you can't make it think.

4. Meanwhile, the state of Virginia (not named for the Congresswoman, but still) has motored completely off the round ball we call Earth with not one but two legislative assaults on women: (a) declaring that a sperm that has penetrated an egg is a "person" with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of someone actually breathing air. Now we would assume that once those wise Virginians have amended their Constitution in this fashion, they'll be recalculating when those former fertilized eggs can register to vote ... precisely 18 years from conception, right, or else Virginia has taken away one right in order to manufacture another. (b) A new law forcing -- and we mean that in its rawest, cold-metal form -- a women seeking a legal abortion to undergo a state-sponsored "transvaginal ultrasound," actual penetration with a probe, because -- hey! -- there ain't no humiliation too severe to visit on women who think they own their own bodies.

NC GOP Will Join This Stampede

The war on the reproductive rights of women is not just being waged in the U.S. Congress. It's being ginned up in the states by new Republican majorities, whose fear of women's liberties has never been far beneath the surface of their legislative desires. These proposed new laws try to legislate morality, and they insult women by treating them like children. Worse, some of the laws appear to consider women like breeding stock that must be carefully monitored by the state (hattip: Think Progress):

OHIO: State GOP Rep. Lynn Wachtmann will unveil the so-called “Heartbeat Bill” today, the “first proposal of its kind” that “would prohibit women from ending pregnancies at the first detectable fetal heartbeat,” which can be heard “within 18 to 24 days of conception” and “in almost all cases by six weeks.”

TEXAS: This week, the Texas Senate will consider state Sen. Dan Patrick’s (R) anti-abortion measure mandating that “pregnant women be shown an ultrasound of the fetus at least two hours before an abortion.” Physicians would be required to show the fetus’ dimensions, presence of limbs or internal organs if applicable, and –if audible – the fetal heartbeat. Similar provisions failed in 2007 and 2009 but two weeks ago, Gov. Rick Perry (R) “fast-tracked the sonogram bill by declaring it an emergency item” to allow early consideration. The bill’s author, state Sen. Dan Patrick (R) says the emergency designation is legitimate because “we have 80,000 abortions in Texas every year” and the emotional pain caused by this bill will inevitably compel “one out of five women” to bring the baby to term.

ARIZONA: State GOP Rep. Steve Montenegro introduced two bills to criminalize abortions if they’re sought because of race or sex. The bill would slam doctors who “knowingly perform abortions for these reasons” with Class 3 felony charges. While neither Montenegro nor independent searches of state records provide support for his claims, Montenegro insists “that there are targeted communities that the abortion industry targets.” He even believes that “an abortion based on race would include situations where the parents are the same race as the fetus.” Arizona Department of Health Services does not collect information on fetus gender and only recently began asking about racial statistics. As of last week, Montenegro has yet to provide the “promised” statistics to support his bills.

FLORIDA: Ordained minister State Rep. Charles Van Zant (R-FL) recently introduced the Florida for Life Act, a bill that mimics Florida’s recent “fetal personhood” amendment which defines all human beings as persons “regardless of age, race, health function, condition of physical and/or mental dependency and/or disability.” The Florida for Life Act is “more overtly religious,” stating that “all life comes from the Creator and begins at conception.” The bill also states that the Supreme Court is unqualified to “determine, establish, or define the moral values” of Floridians and that the Constitution expresses no qualifications for states to “protect life in a manner consistent with the moral consensus of the people, and reflecting the peoples’ belief in a Creator.” The bill would not only prohibit induced abortions but would “punish abortion doctors as felons, should they violate the measures” of the bill.

IOWA: Two Iowa Republican representatives are opposing a bill seeking to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks because “it doesn’t go far enough.” Because she feels the bill “would codify deaths of babies from zero to 19 weeks,” State Rep. Kim Pearson is “not willing” to support this legislation and will instead introduce her own bill “that would define life as beginning at conception” and effectively “end all abortions in Iowa.” GOP state Sen. Randy Feenstra is trying to push the marker with a bill to restrict abortions after the 12th week of pregnancy. If all else fails, a resolution to amend the Iowa Constitution to “define a person as starting from a single-cell human embryo” is now pending in the Iowa House.

Men Beat Their Wives in the Pursuit of Holiness

Damn uppity women. Causing men to abuse 'em.