The scene is a packed YMCA gymnasium where I am coaching a middle school girls basketball team. The place is abuzz with hundreds of players, coaches, and their families scurrying to and fro between games. I’m strangely calmed by the familiar sound of sneakers squeaking on the freshly polished gym floor and the tweet of the whistle on the adjacent court.
We have a grand total of six players, which means there’s no wiggle room for injury or foul trouble. Only three of my girls have any true grasp on the basics of the game. I routinely have to remind them of the little things: “No, you cannot pick up the ball and run 14 steps with it” and “While I appreciate your passion, you cannot, in fact, wrap your arms around the opposing player’s back like a bear hug. You’ll get in trouble for that.”
Our team’s only real hope is a rock star athlete named Olivia, who scores probably 80% of our team’s points all season. She’s fast. She’s strong. She’s about a head taller than all the other girls her age. And when she gets the ball, she’s a force with which to be reckoned.
As the second half of our game is about to start, I draw up a very basic offense on my little whiteboard, but I know it’s probably not worth the effort. Our girls are smart enough to know that the primary game plan is to get the ball in Olivia’s hands, which they do almost as soon as the clock starts rolling. And off Olivia runs like a freight train in motion, picking up steam to the sound of parents hollering from the bleachers as she leaps a step and a half into the air to complete an uncontested layup to begin the second half.
She looks to the bench and seems confused to find me with my head cradled in my palm. Why wasn’t I applauding? Shouldn’t I be happy?
You see in all the commotion and the noise and the excitement and adrenaline, Olivia had forgotten that, at halftime, we switch hoops. She had just scored two points for the opposing team. She couldn’t hear us hollering our warnings through the hoopla. She had just committed to her course and barreled full speed ahead.
Lately, being a Christian conservative has felt a lot like watching Olivia score points for the wrong team.
Our rock stars, the people on whom we rely to get the job done, are sprinting passionately ahead in directions that actively harm our collective causes, and they’re so busy celebrating their successes that they can’t hear anyone on the sidelines pleading with them to pump the brakes and reevaluate for a hot minute. After all, they’re the superstars; what the heck do we bench warmers know?
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rightwing approach to virtually all issues that disproportionately affect women. I’ve been watching in stunned frustration as a strong and not-so-subtle-streak of chauvinism has crept its way into the broader conservative discourse. While the left tends to place all the blame for the world’s ills squarely on the shoulders of straight white men, the right is actively playing the same blame game by attributing the collapse of western civilization entirely to the lunacy of liberal white women.
And let’s be honest; there is truth to the claim that a faction of liberal white women are ruining things. I’ve even written about it. But for too many people on the right, the proposed solutions to this problem are rigid, authoritarian gender cages and draconian laws that that essentially legislate women out of any semblance of autonomy and back into the proverbial kitchen and under his eye.
I work with a lot of political nomads, especially women who are limping away from the left after realizing they’ve been betrayed and sold down the river to the transgender cult. These are women who are eager to link arms with sane individuals and groups who champion material reality and defend the dignity of the female sex. There has never been a better time for the right to step up to the plate and roll out a welcome mat for these women. Literally all we have to do is not be psycho. To borrow from my basketball analogy, these are the free throws. But instead of racking up the easy points, we’re dunking on the other team’s hoop by mainstreaming chauvinism at every turn.
Our rock stars are running amok. What does this look like?
It looks like scores of conservative influencers popularizing the #repealthe19th hashtag and peddling theology that insists women are more easily deceived and should thus be excluded from leadership as a general rule.
It looks like a now viral video of a group of enthusiastic, fully clothed young women doing a line dance with the caption “Why don’t men want western women?” a common refrain in the redpill manosphere, where western women as a whole are deemed “trash.”
Guys, if you haven’t seen this yet, stop what you’re doing and scroll through the thread. Scores of “Christian” men, including pastors, joined the pile-on and heaped additional contempt on these women, who were literally doing nothing wrong. “No man would ever want to date this trash.” “Pump and dump.” “Licentious promiscuous cun*s.” Pastor Joseph Spurgeon joined the witch hunt and lamented, “I got to talk with my daughters about modest dress and modest behavior. The difference between having fun and being loud and brash…The answer is a gentle and quiet spirit that scripture says God finds precious.”
Today’s girls can’t even perform an innocent dance in public without Republicans reminding them that they’re worthless.
Women leaving the left are leaving because they’re not valued there. Their voices don’t matter. Can we PLEASE give them a better option over here on the right?
The abortion abolition movement isn’t helping anything with their punitive, bloodthirsty vengeance operatives. The abolitionists are the Westboro Baptist Church of the anti-abortion scene, proposing legislation to execute post-abortive women instead of helping them. The same men most aggressively championing the death penalty for abortion are men who loudly boast about their indifference to the plight of single moms in crisis. God forbid we should actually try to help these women in their hour of need.
The conservative’s unwitting war on women also looks like Dusty Deevers filing bills that would require battered wives to remain tethered to alcoholic abusive husbands for at least five years before being allowed to leave. These guys score massive virtue signal points by waging war on no-fault divorce without ever once stopping to consider what life was like for abused women before no-fault divorce existed. There’s precisely zero regard for how difficult and how dangerous it can be to try to prove your husband is habitually drunk or neglectful, especially if he holds the purse strings and you have to lawyer up to prove he’s a tyrant. These types of laws will get women killed. Dusty Deevers and company are racing down the court giving each other high fives for their successes without even noticing how many fence-sitters are running straight back to open arms of the left who, despite their flaws, at least gets this crap right.
And then we have the trans debate, where women have done a huge share of the heavy lifting. I’ve written about this before, too. You may not know their names, but there are a great many brave, selfless women who have sacrificed everything from jobs to relationships to stand against transmania. But instead of applauding their efforts or working to build bridges, we’ve got guys like Jason Whitlock doing the opposite. He sits on his pedestal throwing stones at the women doing the work. Most notably, he rallied his thousands of menfolk to tell J.K. Rowling to “fall back and let men handle it” when she used her influence to boldly stand against the gender cult. He actually had the nerve to publicly say to her that, as a woman, she’s “not built for this conflict.”
Who does this? And to what end? Can we just not be crazy for a minute?
Also on the trans front, we’ve got 20 something-year-old know-it-all Ben Zeisloft launching an attack on Riley Gaines and her very effective efforts. Why? For daring to show an inch of midriff during a speech. Guys like Zeisloft seem to believe the actual war worth fighting is the war women wage against men’s sexual impulses via yoga pants and navels. We can’t just let women dominate any corner of the public sphere. Nope. Gotta tear them down and replace them with…men. At least that’s what Pastor Brian Sauve uses his platform to preach. According to him, not only should women not vote, but “Women weren’t made for polemics.” Apparently it causes us too much anxiety. Best to leave all the advocacy to the guys.
Not only are women not supposed to self-advocate (Remember, now, our husbands will vote in our best interest, and the men will take over the culture wars on our behalf), but now we’re also not allowed to complain when bad men are elevated to the status of role model. It was just a few short months ago that Christian influencer Zuby encouraged his millions of followers to view friggin Andrew Tate as a “positive impact on men.” Andrew Tate, guys. Anyone need a refresher? The guy who brags about owning women? Who refers to us as “status symbols? Who built an empire by sexually degrading and pretending to rape women on camera?
We’re not allowed to protest. Zuby refers to any disagreement with his position as pearl clutching hysteria. He can’t hear us on the sidelines shouting, “Hold up! You’re validating the left’s worst stereotypes about conservatives. You’re scoring points for the other team!”
In Christian circles, we’re often admonished to never focus on the negative because that takes attention away from Jesus and places it on the devil, and we need to keep our faces to the light. “Don’t give the devil the attention he seeks.”
I’m probably not very good at putting this advice into practice because, from where I sit, it seems like an awful lot of people are blissfully unaware of just how much darkness has crept into the spaces reserved for the light. It’s like we’ve all become those bottom-dwelling fish that have just acclimated to fumbling around in the dark to the degree that we think it’s normal when our teammates devalue women.
Well I’m not comfortable here. I actually desperately want women to know how much freedom is found in Jesus. I want them to know how precious God’s daughters are to Him. I want to invite them into a family that nurses them back to health and amplifies their voices and values their talents and defends their dignity. I want to be able to confidently say to them, “Come join our team! You’ll be safe and free and honored here!”
Right now I can’t do that because Olivia is running in the wrong direction. But she’s the superstar, and I’m not. All I can do is shout “Stop” and pray that I’m loud enough for her to hear me before it’s too late.
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You are a beacon of clarity and sanity. Thank you. Of all the Christians I've ever read, I can count on two fingers the ones who I am convinced **actually believe** that God loves women, that God made women for some purpose other than winning men to Jesus "without a word" by taking their abuse cheerfully. You can choose which of those fingers you'd like to be represented by. (You can guess which one is my favorite... 😂😂😂 ). Everything you've said here is why I don't vote. I am probably going to do some work soon to help the Vermont GOP, but only because this is Vermont and nobody here thinks that an egg that was fertilized this morning has the same moral worth as me. And I'm still not going to vote. They blather their bullshit about women being unfit for voting (but never say a word about also relieving me of my massive tax burden) so fuck them, I won't vote, and they can all enjoy another term of Biden. And considering I was willing to vote with the right if they had just been not-insane, this is truly pathetic of them to have lost me. Outlaw abortion in your state? Fine, it's legal in my state, I was willing to live with that. No, they have to rule on IVF as they did in Alabama and leave a raped seventh grader in Mississippi to give birth despite the risks to a 12 yr old's body. Fuck them all. I have a stockpile of Plan B, multiple income streams, and both sufficient skills and work ethic to get through another four years of this bullshit. I will not be forced to choose between a party who doesn't know what a woman is and a party who thinks that it knows, but whose answer is something like "a woman is not quite a person, fit only to pay taxes and incubate new taxpayers for the state without any right to vote." A pox on both their houses. I apologize if this comment causes an argument or controversy in your comment section; feel free to give me a timeout so nobody will expect me to reply (and I might actually get my work done, ha ha....) Love you, girl! ❤️❤️❤️
Excellent work!