Redefining Human Rights

Roxxsmom · Jul 21, 2019

Brightdreamer said:
I think there's a matter of social conditioning involved. Women are trained from birth to be meek and obedient and hand all power over to a masculine authority: everything churches, particularly hardline Evangelical-type churches, ask of their parishioners. (We're also trained to see physical and emotional abuse as not only our fault, but proof of the abuser's love, and... well, Biblical examples of God metaphorically smacking humanity bloody because "He loves us" are innumerable.) It's reinforced, subtly but persistently, through media and advertising: a good woman is a good churchgoing mother. (See also: the PTA.)

I knew people growing up who were absorbed by local hardline churches. Some were raised in it, but not all. One in particular was clearly looking for love and boundaries that she never got from her own family; her grandmother was the churchgoer. It was very sad, actually, seeing the brainwashing take effect in real time.

I lived in Boulder, CO during the peak of the Promise Keeper craze. For the uninitiated, it was/is an organization for evangelical Christian men (started by the University of Colorado's then football coach, Bill McCartney), urging them to walk with "Christlike Masculinity," which meant they should "pray over" (whatever the hell that means) their wives and take back their rightful role as heads of their families.

It was sort of the Christian equivalent of the new age "masculinist" drum-beating retreats that were popular at the time, though Promise Keepers persists to this day.

For a week each summer in the early-to-mid 1990s, the CU campus would be swarming with middle aged and older white guys (with a few younger sons and embarrassed-looking teen boys) in shorts, polo shirts and sandals with black socks. Many hung out at the local Hooters (which went out of business the year the conference relocated to Denver) between rallies and workshops. There were numerous letters to the editor in our local paper at the time condemning and defending the organization. The defenders said they needed to "take the reins" back from their wives, for their wives' own good.

According to some of these letters, many men were there at behest of their wives. If this was true, I don't know if it was because the wives wanted to be subordinate, or if they thought subordination was a worthwhile price to pay to get their menfolk involved with their families again, or if it was simply a way to get rid of their husbands for a week each summer.

As the organization grew, "Christlike" men with "strong commitment to family values" like Newt Gingrich would speak at their events.

Introversion · Jul 21, 2019

Roxxsmom said:
As the organization grew, "Christlike" men with "strong commitment to family values" like Newt Gingrich would speak at their events.

hy·poc·ri·sy
noun
the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.

Webster’s is my “Good Book”.

Introversion · Jul 22, 2019

When you watch a stadium filled with white people chanting "Send her back!" about a US Congresswomen and our President silently endorses it, what comes up for you?

Quora said:
Honestly? This.

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This photo was taken sometime between May and December 1944. These people are enjoying a bit of “down time” before going back to work. At Auschwitz.

Not because I think what we’re doing is like what the Nazis were doing in 1944, but because this looks so normal. These people didn’t think of themselves as “evil,” any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do.

Here’s the point: the Holocaust didn’t drop out of a clear blue sky in 1941. The concentration camps had been operating since 1933.

The first people sent to the camps weren’t Jews at all. It was socialists, communists (remember that if you run across someone who tries to claim the Nazis were actually socialists), Jehovah’s Witnesses (because their faith prevented them from swearing allegiance to the Reich or serving in the military), homosexuals, and other people considered “socially deviant.” The camps weren’t awful places in 1933. Guards who abused prisoners were disciplined and sometimes prosecuted.

By 1935, this changed. As Hitler consolidated power, he pardoned the guards who had been convicted for abusing prisoners and made it clear that that behavior was now acceptable. Jews were now sent to the camps, starting with ones who had come to “civilized” Germany as refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe. They were described as “invaders,” accused of spreading disease and stealing jobs from Germans. I understand if that last sentence sent a bit of a chill down your spine.

There were dozens, probably hundreds of concentration camps in operation by 1937. Many prisoners died there from abuse or simply from being worked to death, but they still weren’t places people were specifically sent to die; it was just that no one cared whether they died or not.

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Redefining Human Rights

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

Introversion

Pie aren't squared, pie are round!

Introversion

Pie aren't squared, pie are round!