Episode 72
Good morning, class, and welcome to Propagandist Indoctrination 101 (aka A Survey of the Rise of the Republican Party). Here, you will learn about political power plays but they'll be framed as humanitarian acts. You'll be taught to respect politicians for “freeing slaves” but won't learn the real reasons why it happened because it makes conservatives look bad. And even in our very liberal education environment, we MUST perpetuate these fairy tales so the rich stay rich and the poor get poorer. Because that's the American way! I'm Spider...
And in this week's episode, we're going to take a look at the progression of the Republican party from Lincoln to 45 and hopefully show how things have been business as usual – and business over the individual – from literally day one. This week WILL be a sort of survey class, leading into a conversation next week about why evangelicals fit the Republican mold so well. But before we get into any of that...
[CBB]
So we're talking about the Republican party this time around: where it came from, where it is, and where leaving it largely unchecked has already led and will continue to lead if it's allowed to go there.
Main source: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12148750/republican-party-trump-lincoln
How Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump, in 13 maps
The Republicans and Slavery
For the first 50 years or so after the founding of the United States, slavery was just one issue in American politics and really wasn't one that got much attention. The southern economy relied on slave labor and neither of the two major parties at the time: the Democrats or the Whigs were exactly outspoken about slavery. The south was basically allowed to do what it wanted and got way too used to it in a very short expanse of time.
When the U.S. began expanding westward, there were questions of which states would allow slavery and which ones would not. There were many who opposed slavery and were rightly concerned that if too many states became slave states, those states would have too much power, especially in terms of steering presidential elections.
This didn't start out as a North vs. South thing either. There were a few radicals out there rousing the rabble. It wasn't even a moral question, just in case anyone has any lingering doubts about how inherently racist white people are. And we are. All of us. You'll never sway my opinion on this as long as Jane Elliot's experiments keep churning out the same results. We'll talk about racism as it relates to evangelicalism in a later episode, but, oddly enough, evangelicals are NOT the problem when it comes to racism in America. It was alive and well at America's founding. Evangelicalism was barely a thing and wasn't a thing in any corporate or organizational sense.
What was the north worried about if it wasn't the enslavement of their fellow humans, then?
The real concern was the fear of "Slave Power." They worried that the South “would become a cabal that would utterly dominate US politics, instituting slavery wherever they could and cutting off opportunity for free white laborers.” Source: Cox, Heather, To Make Men Free.
Republicans never cared that the slaves were black. They cared about what the slaves contributed to the southern economy and that jobs that could have been filled by free white laborers (who would be earning wages that would be put back into the economy) were instead being filled by slaves who didn't have money to spend.
And it was over this issue and others that were equally opportunistic and not all that humanitarian, that the Whig party collapsed and the Republican party rose from the ashes. The year was 1854. Kansas and Nebraska were being admitted into the Union and there was “intense controversy” over whether or not those states would be slave or free. With the Whigs all but scattered to the four winds, a new, uniquely Northern party emerged.
“While not calling for abolishing slavery where it already existed, and certainly not calling for racial equality, this new party would be resolutely opposed to expanding slavery any further. Its supporters and sympathizers won an impressive share of seats in Congress, and it became known as the Republican Party.”
So let's not think that because the Republicans led the fight against slavery that made them sympathetic to or accepting of blacks. They didn't really care about the human rights aspect of slavery. They cared about the economic impact and availability of jobs for free Americans. In other words, they were looking out for the white people. And they've been doing that ever since.
The Civil War and the Emancipation of Slaves
The North vs. South conflict emerged with the formation of the Republican party and grew more and more heated between 1854 and 1861. There were Free-Soilers fighting pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. Our Supreme Court in true white supremacy fashion ruled in Dredd Scott that blacks could not become citizens, and abolitionist John Brown led an armed insurrection against slave owners.
So things started to get very tense. The south liked its free labor. The North wanted to make sure that the “Real Americans” got paid for the work they did and that the work existed for them to do in the first place. This wasn't a bad thing in and of itself but the motivations were questionable.
The Republicans continued building momentum in the North and in 1860 Abraham Lincoln – a Republican – became president. And the Great Emancipator, contrary to what elementary school history classes want to tell you, wasn't specifically anti-slave. In fact, Lincoln repeatedly promised that he fully intended to let slave states remain slave states and work to keep and establish as many free states as possible. Even Abraham Lincoln didn't seem to have a moral issue with slavery.
There were, however, a number of white slave owners in the south who really didn't like the idea of having to follow the lead of a bunch of Yankees, so what'd they do? They got 11 states to secede. The emergent “nation” was called the Confederate States of America which didn't bode well with the North and there began the U.S. Civil War in 1861.
So what was the Civil War about, really?
At first, the North’s stated aim was merely to restore the South to the Union — not to free slaves. But as the war dragged on, strategic imperatives inexorably pulled Lincoln and the Republicans further toward abolition, as they sought to undermine their Southern opponents.
The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 is often taught in public schools as the ostensible end of slavery, but it wasn't. Again, freeing the slaves had precious little to do with the lives and dignity of the people affected by slavery and more to do with punishing the states that rebelled. The four states that didn't rebel were allowed to keep their slaves. It was a power move, pure and simple.
This whole thing has much more of a Capitol versus the districts vibe than any of us should ever become comfortable with.
In early 1865, the Civil War was coming to an end and it was in this year that Congress approved the 13th Amendment, banning slavery nationwide. The states ratified the amendment later that same year. Year.
So to review: the Republicans didn't want to end slavery per se. All they wanted was to stop its expansion into the North. All of this preamble is necessary to understand what the framework of the Republican party looked like because knowing that makes it easier to see how the party got from Lincoln to President 45 and it wasn't the giant leap that some history books want it to look like.
Republicans and Black Rights
In the years following the Civil War, the Republican party did take on a more humanitarian persona, especially when it came to black rights.
For a very brief period after the end of the Civil War, Republicans truly fought for the rights of black Americans. Frustrated by reports of abuses of and violence against former slaves in the postwar South, and by the inaction of then President Andrew Johnson to put a stop to it, a faction known as the Radicals gained increasing sway in Congress.
“[The Radicals] drove Republicans to pass the country’s first civil rights bill in 1866, and to fight for voting rights for black men (though not yet women) at a time when such an idea was still controversial even in the North.”
The Republicans also penned two crucial constitutional amendments. They changed the language of the Constitution to make anyone born in the U.S. a U.S. citizen (the Citizenship Clause) and removed race restrictions in voting rights with the 15th amendment of 1870. They required the states that rebelled to embrace these concepts on a legal level or else face not being re-admitted to the Union.
“Just a few years earlier, the idea that a major party would fight for the rights of black citizens to vote in state elections would have been unthinkable.”
Unfortunately, this newfound commitment to black rights wouldn’t last long.
After 1870, the makeup and persona of the Republican party really began to take shape. It became the party of rich, white northerners and economic issues were at the forefront of issues with which the party was concerned.
The north was always more industrialized than the south which was predominantly agricultural and industrialization began intensifying in the North after the Civil War.
The Civil War was also a time of aggressive government expansion. Many people became rich and owed their good fortune to the Republican party. The party’s economic policies, Cox Richardson writes, "were creating a class of extremely wealthy men." The party began attracting a lot of industrialists and financiers and their interest in getting and staying rich became the party's reason to be.
They were kind of awful then, even if they tried for a hot minute to look more humanitarian. They really didn't do that great a job. “Republicans had done a lot to help former slaves in the South, but many of the gains they had made existed more on paper than in practice, and others were in danger of being rolled back.”
And there was plenty of backlash and backpedaling on some very new Republican policies. White southerners and Radicals were strongly at odds and exchanges were becoming more aggressive by the day. Northerners basically decided that they'd done enough to improve the lives and liberty of southern blacks and attempted to shift the focus back onto something that meant something to them: maintaining their wealth and their power. There was unrest over the subject of state's rights and many wondered how long it would be until the Federal government stepped in.
Republicans really began distancing themselves from the subject of race around the mid 1870s. The states that were re-admitted to the union were basically left alone to write their own laws when it came to any matter concerning race. The result was an upsurge of white conservative governments on both local and state levels. So what about those changes and additions to the constitution that were supposed to identify blacks as equal to whites? Well, those lower governmental bodies that didn't like them did pretty much what the Supreme Court did with Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby: they basically ignored the constitution and did whatever the fuck they wanted with total impunity.
And what was the response of the Republican party to this? How did they step up and stand up for black rights? How did they perpetuate their reputation as being a political party that's actually concerned with human rights?
Nothing. Just like pro-lifers.
They created policy, they got the U.S. Constitution amended, and then walked away. They gave birth to a good concept but abandoned the cause shortly after. “The cause of equal rights for black citizens would now essentially vanish from national American politics for decades.”
The Rise of Conservatism
“We know the Republican Party today as a party that hates government interference with business. But as the 20th century started, progressive reformers who wanted to check the power of corporations and the wealthy had some support in both parties — and notably, from Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.”
Of course, that really didn't last that long. Fast forward just a few years. It's 1913. Woodrow Wilson – a Democrat – has won the white house and the Republicans are none too happy. They argued that Wilson's progressive reforms expanded the power of government too much.
Republicans and Democrats have their own stereotypes and always have. Republicans typically want smaller government with less oversight and power, especially over corporations, whereas Democrats typically like a big, robust government with lots of social programs and they fund them by taxing the rich. That is basically a kindergarten level description with all kinds of places to go from there. And all of that isn't necessarily true or consistently true.
When Republicans regained power in the 1920s, they positioned themselves as the party of business. They thought that business and business expansion was the definition of prosperity and they governed in a way that largely favored business over the needs of the individual.
Then the Great Depression happened, and power shifted again.
We really aren't all that smart. And we really don't learn jack shit from history. The Republican party had the white house from 1921 to 1932 and during that time they minimized the importance of the individual and gave so much power to corporations that when the entire structure fell like a house of cards, no one came out on top. Not the banks, not corporations, and certainly not the working class.
The way they were doing things flat out wasn't working. And when you look at all the circumstances that led up to the Great Depression, it looks like a proverbial latex balloon – a huge, massive, invasively large balloon that spent 9 years being inflated and exploded with a huge bang from all the stupid policies, business dealings, and unchecked trading of stock that was insanely overvalued. Here's a quick timeline:
“Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed “the Roaring Twenties.”
The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured their savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929.”
Production in a large segment of industry was declining throughout the 20s
Unemployment was on the rise as the result of the loss of jobs when industries began scaling back production
Stocks were trading at prices that were way above their actual worth
Consumer debt was on the rise
Farms were struggling because food costs were on the decline
Banks had too many large loans that they could not liquidate
Then in 1929, the country went into recession. Now with no one spending money, unsold consumer products began piling up and industries of all description began slowing factory production.
And through all this, stock prices continued to rise. Why?
I won't get into a long discussion on the subject of margin lending, but that was the crux of the problem. The concept emerged in the late 1800s as an effort to fund railroads. But if it can fund railroads, why can't it fund anything? Here's a quick explanation of what this is and if your brain starts complaining at you over this, don't worry, so did mine.
“Margin buying refers to the buying of securities with cash borrowed from a broker, using the bought securities as collateral. This has the effect of magnifying any profit or loss made on the securities. The securities serve as collateral for the loan. The net value—the difference between the value of the securities and the loan—is initially equal to the amount of one's own cash used. This difference has to stay above a minimum margin requirement, the purpose of which is to protect the broker against a fall in the value of the securities to the point that the investor can no longer cover the loan.” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_(finance)
Here's the problem: in an alarming number of instances, minimum margin requirements weren't being met and there was virtually no oversight or checks and balances. So shares kept getting traded, their value on paper remained high, but in reality, an insane amount of stock was nothing but valueless paper projecting the illusion of actual value. When the margin call came in on these shares, there was no money to deposit to cover the sale of the stock and a crippling number of stocks were then liquidated.
All of this was allowed to happen by a governmental system that refused to hold corporations accountable for the real value of their stocks. Margin trading made things look good, but the reality was anything but.
So what was America's solution to this problem? Give the white house back to a Democrat. And this has been our history ever since. Republicans write policy that damages America in all kinds of ways, not just economic, and when things get bad enough, we send in a Democrat to clean up. History shows this pattern over and over again in our national politics. After the Great Depression hit and for a near further decade after it ended, Democrats held the White House.
Recessions and economic crises have historically coincided with Republican control of either the white house, Congress or the Senate. It's a broad-sweeping and not at all conclusive statement, but when I did a little digging on U.S. recessions, most took place during or at the tail end of a Republican administration. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it is observable in enough circumstances to at least consider how one affects the other. Not every Democratic administration has been a walk in the park for America either, but the negative socio-economic impact of governmental policy on America points to Republican government influence far more often than it ever does to any other party in America's history.
Republicans and Southern Democrats
There was a time when the U.S. South was predominantly Democrat and there were plenty of conservative Democrats who more closely resembled Republicans in their politics than what we think of as “Democrat” today. One group in particular, the Dixiecrats were kind of a flash in the pan political party but they did make their mark.
“The States' Rights Democratic Party (whose members are often called the Dixiecrats) was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States, active primarily in the South.” They failed to win, but narrowed Harry S. Truman's lead in the 1948 presidential election considerably. Their candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, and received one additional electoral vote in Tennessee. Thurmond became a Republican in 1964, and the term Dixiecrat was used well into the 1990s to describe any conservative southern Democrat.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
Republicans Lose Black Voters
Remember, that the emancipation proclamation was the product of a Republican white house and regardless of the motives, black voters sided with the Republicans for decades. But those loyalties began to wane with the advent of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Then, in the 1950s, a major shift took place. All of a sudden there were twice as many black Americans voting Democrat as there were those who were voting Republican.
“Still, considering that the South had been Democratic for so long, it did briefly seem that it was possible the Republican Party would discover its roots as the party of civil rights for black Americans. It was Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower who sent in federal troops to Arkansas to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools, after all.
But instead, it was a Democratic president — Lyndon B. Johnson — who signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964. Republicans gave the bill a good share of support in Congress, but the party’s presidential nominee that year, Barry Goldwater, argued that it expanded government power too much.
As a result, Republicans went from losing black voters to losing them spectacularly. Ever since, it's been common for 80 percent or even more of black voters to support Democrats.”
Interesting how the Republicans has always had a history of putting band-aids on the race relations problem in America while democratic administrations tend to enact actual legislation to ensure lasting rights and protections. Eisenhower sent in troops to further a specific image and solve a single problem. LBJ signed the civil rights act. Eisenhower=Republican, LBJ=Democrat.
The South Goes Republican
"I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," President Johnson said shortly after signing the Civil Rights Act, according to his aide Bill Moyers. And indeed, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican specifically for this reason.”
It wasn't an immediate thing since party loyalties run deep in many people, but the shift, although gradual, has been quite permanent. LBJ was right. This was a really big give/take scenario with the eventual effect being the saturation of Republican government with religious ideology, most predominantly evangelical faith. With the insertion of evangelical ideology into the infrastructure of Repulbican politics (thanks to the Moral Majority and other smaller groups and even individuals) came an entirely new and very aggressive voice on multiple social issues, not the least of which being abortion.
White evangelical Christians became newly mobilized to oppose abortion and take stands on other "culture war" issues, and felt more at home with the conservative party. There was that suspicion of big government and lack of union organization that permeated the region. And talented politicians like Ronald Reagan promised to defend traditional values.
Still, Democrats continued to maintain control of the House of Representatives for some time, in large part because of continued support from Southerners, as shown in this map by Jonathan Davis at Arizona State University. But in 1994, the revolution finally arrived, as Republicans took the House for the first time since 1955. And many of the crucial pickups that made that possible came in the South.
For 20 of the past 26 years, Republicans have controlled the house which has given it a dangerously powerful position in U.S. politics. They have historically carried the white southern vote and that has allowed them to maintain their foothold. It has also allowed for the U.S. to keep falling further behind in areas like healthcare, vacation, maternity leave, and other things that benefit the PEOPLE who cast those votes because none of those things are ever good for business and that is, more often than not, the actual, factual bottom line. Oh, and it also perpetuates declines in education, social programs, and much more and also gives rise to things like removing restrictions on religious gatherings during a pandemic and companies like Hobby Lobby outright barring access to birth control for its employees because children are a gift from god and you shouldn't be fucking without a wedding ring to begin with. Were these things done because they're what the Constitution wanted to facilitate or because the decisions made Republican voters happy? What's the more likely answer here?
Well... republican voters who actually survived COVID, I mean. The ones who didn't aren't happy about much anymore. And might have been happy for years to come if they had just stayed home from church that week.
Dissension in the Ranks
But what about when one of the most evil, vile, corrupt, and unpatriotic political parties in the world isn't quite evil enough? Well... at that point you form an even nastier version of that party. The Tea Party was first organized in the early days of the Obama administration. It opposed things like foreclosure relief and tax reform, but they were all for corporate bailouts though. That's worth mentioning. Bailouts that, among other things, saved the same banks that fucked over home buyers a few years earlier and left an alarming number of Americans either homeless or unable to find suitable housing because even with bankruptcy protecting some of their interests, many of them found their credit ratings shot completely to hell.
Ever try renting an apartment legally with bad credit?
The Tea Party also was a challenge to the Republican Party establishment. Several times, these groups helped power little-known far-right primary contenders to shocking primary wins over establishment Republican politicians deemed to be sellouts. Those candidates didn’t always win office, but their successful primary bids certainly struck fear into the hearts of many other GOP incumbents, and made many of them more deferential to the concerns of conservative voters.
Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their party’s national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.
Talk radio and other conservative media outlets helped stoke this perception, and by May 2015 Republican voters were far more likely to say that their party’s politicians were doing a poor job representing their views than Democratic voters were.
This deep distrust of elites helped pave the way for Trump — and primary runner-up Ted Cruz, another candidate eager to heap scorn on party leaders.
Republicans and Minorities
There's one thing that the republican party needs to keep running like the regrettably well-oiled machine that it is and that one thing is white people. Lots and lots of white people. Now, there most certainly are “minority” conservatives, but the supporters they really want, and need, are white people.
One problem: white people won't be in the majority anymore in the next few generations. Hispanic populations have been growing in this country for decades and that creates a problem for Republicans for a few reasons, most notably that hispanic voters are more than 70% Democrat and consistently vote for the liberal candidate. The larger minority groups get, the fewer white people the party will have to keep them in power. So when Obama won a second term in 2012, the Republicans decided to do something rash: support immigration reform.
The Republicans are literally afraid that there aren't enough white people here anymore.
After the 2012 election, Republican leaders began to view the demographic changes in the country as a political crisis for their party. When Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency, he got blown out among Hispanic voters — exit polls showed that 71 percent of them backed Barack Obama.
Hispanic voters become a larger segment of the electorate every year. That means that it gets harder for the Republicans to maintain their foothold every year, too.
Knowing this, the Republicans came up with a plan. And that plan had all the sincerity and humanitarian motivation of freeing the slaves.
“The party would change its tone on immigration, adopting more tolerant rhetoric, and it would also embrace immigration reform. In the Senate in 2013, old hands like John McCain and rising stars like Marco Rubio collaborated with Democrats on a bill that would give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal status.
The final Senate roll call vote was 68-32 — with all 32 no votes, plus 14 yes votes, coming from Republicans. But a huge backlash from the Republican Party’s predominantly white base, which views the bill as "amnesty" for people who broke the rules, ensued. As a result, the bill died in the House of Representatives, never even being brought for a vote.”
That led to distrust of GOP leaders among voters, as well as the eventual end to the campaigns of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, both of whom were closely tied to immigration reform efforts. This ham-handed attempt at looking like humanists backfired so badly on them that it practically cleared the way for 45 to both secure the RNC nomination and quickly amass a huge following of racist white people. There was a reason why his campaign was a firestorm of hostility toward unauthorized immigrants.
The Rise of 45
There were many reasons why the 2016 election went the way it did. Notably, 45’s campaign appealed to Republican voters’ resentment and mistrust of party elites. He did a stellar job of selling the “regular guy” persona... at least as regular as a perceived billionaire mogul can be. He was crass, vulgar, and decidedly unpresidential – all things that appealed greatly to his unwashed disciples.
Then there was the stunt with immigration reform among Republicans (and that's all it was – a disingenuous stunt designed to make friends with the kids the republican party spent years shaking down for their milk money) – one of the worst and most costly moves the party would ever make. 45 also basically owned the media, too. He was at least perceptibly rich and he was a bona fide celebrity. He had, and has two political advantages that make him and his own ideologies (if you even want to call them that) very, very dangerous. First, he maintains formidable bases of white working class constituents in both the North and the South, and, second, his appeal to White Evangelicals (and evangelicals in general) is very, very strong. We already did an entire episode on why this is, but those same people were Republican loyalists long before the 45th presidential administration.
And that is where we will pick up the conversation next week. What is it about the religion of Love Your Neighbor that finds appeal in a group of people whose goals and objectives couldn't be further from that concept? What could happen if we don't keep pulling back the curtain on evangelical lies, hypocrisy, and alarmism and keep lessening their influence over U.S. politics? We will look at these questions and more in our next episode.
Until then, just keep these very important takeaways in mind:
The Republican party platform has always been one of opportunism. They aren't, and never have been people-oriented and they have never cared a damn for the individual unless that individual was rich, powerful, or influential in ways that advanced their agenda.
Lincoln never “freed” a single slave. What he did was punish the states that seceded by taking away their cheap labor. The emancipation of slaves was serendipitous at best. Slavery was abolished because abolishing it served Republican interests, not because they thought there was anything wrong with owning people as property. Their God already validated that. Just read Exodus 21. The only reason we even learn as children that slavery was and is wrong is because of the fictitious and hopelessly racist slant put on the subject in public school textbooks: the story of the white top-hatted hero who stood up to slave owners and made black lives in America super way better. Yeah, ok...
And so we're clear: slavery in America is alive and well behind the walls, bars, and razor wire of America's prisons to this day. This isn't something that happened then. It's happening right now in America. It's just not happening in front of society anymore.
Recessions and economic downturns in America have almost uniformly happened as a result of Republican policy and lawmaking. When things get shitty enough, we bring in the Democrats to un-shitty everything. Then we forget and we elect a Ronald Reagan, a George W. Bush, or that guy who headed up the 45th presidential administration and the cycle repeats. Is it that we haven't learned or that there are still enough people out there who refuse to be educated swallowing the rhetoric to keep this racist, hate-fueled agenda on life support?
I'm not naïve enough to think that we can somehow get our messaging through those formidable red ball caps, but I do think that the voices of Republican hate and rhetoric are getting smaller over time and I can observe that they know it. Will any of us see the end of this 19th-century thinking in our lifetimes? I don't know. What I do know is that people like Shelle and me must do what we can to keep exposing the man behind the curtain to people on the fence and those truth-seeker types we love to churn out this content to educate, and you should, too. Keeping the truth in the foreground is the only way that our society has a chance of getting and staying unbound.
CBB Notes
CBB 72
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/07/19/fundamentalist-preacher-once-your-honeymoon-is-over-divorce-is-not-an-option/
in straight up misogyny news, we learn that divorce is NEVER an option for anyone at all. Not anyone. Ever.
With ONE exception.
Pastor Jason Graber of the Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Spokane, Washington makes it clear that divorce is never on the table, it doesn't matter if there's abuse or adultery or anything else. Once the honeymoon's over that's it. You've made a promise under god, you're chained together for life. Because according to him, “It's not what God wants!”
(Look this guy seems like he's about 20 years old and I feel like that line could be delivered in a nasal childish whine.)
He goes on to explain that if someone who's divorced marries again, that god says it's adultery and the punishment for adultery is death so that means divorce is out of the question...if it's after the honeymoon.
[He's right – it's in 1 Cor. 7]
His exception? “if you go on your honeymoon and you find out that your wife is not a virgin, you can bow out and get your marriage annulled.”
Notice that this exception is only for men. And let's be honest here, most men don't have a clue as to how women's bodies work and still think the hymen is like something they have to puncture, so how would they even know their wife isn't a virgin?? Crazy.
The worst part is that he's telling this to women, mostly young women, letting them know that if there's any abuse at all, that she has no choice but to stay and keep having kids. I can't imagine how many injuries, how many deaths this attitude will lead to.
[HAS led to – we can speak in past, present, and future tense because this has been a problem since Dt. 22]
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/07/22/a-christian-preacher-demanded-modesty-on-the-beach-this-woman-wasnt-having-it/
And in other news, we have the latest in beach trends!
In a video going viral on Tik Tok, a Christian preacher is carrying a sign that says “God says Christian women dress modest” ...on a beach. In Florida. Oh, and the sign also says “Repent” and “Turn to Jesus”. Such beachy vibes! He also indicates the verse 1 Timothy 2:9, which many refer to as the modesty verse. But they are not talking about bodily modesty! They're talking about fine, expensive clothing, hairstyles and fancy jewelry—modesty of lifestyle and appearance. They didn't talk about sexual modesty they're talking about being humble in appearance.
And why is it always the women who get dinged on our appearance?? it's crazy.
But Katie Simmons, poster of the Tik Tok, wasn't discussing theology and didn't care to. “Sir, it's a beach, are we supposed to dress modest at a beach.” and then she says, “What if God's fake?”
She's not going to change his mind with this. But he's also not carrying that sign for anyone but himself. Maybe that guy should pluck the beach out of his eye, lest he sin. Discipleship requires sacrifice!