(I just got a notification from Word Press that today is my four year anniversary of registering with them for this blog. Yay, four year anniversary.)
Christian ‘historian’ David Barton: Allowing women to vote ‘hurts the entire culture and society’ and prohibiting the female vote kept the family together
(Links to pages with Barton’s quotes are farther below)
I am no secular feminist. I’m not left wing or a Democrat or a liberal (“progressive”), but I find some of my fellow right wingers to be odd balls on occasion, and this is one of those occasions.
It’s bad enough that some conservative Christians defend sexism under the guise of it being “biblical” (the terms they slap on church sanctioned sexism is sometimes referred to as ‘gender complementarianism’ or ‘biblical womanhood’) –
But to see a well-known Christian personality such as Barton defend the sexist notion that women should not vote, or it was good that at one time they were not permitted, because it makes for “stronger families” is another indication that some Christians have turned the nuclear family, marriage, and parenthood into idols.
Views such as this also do not take into account that some women never marry and never have children.
Some women who do marry are infertile, or their husband is, so they never have children.
Yet other women are widowed or divorced.
You will notice in Christian gender complementarian views, women who “fall between the cracks,” ones who are unmarried or childless, are not recognized.
This Barton guy has crack pot views about marriage and coffee and PTSD as well (see links at bottom of this post).
I think keeping women from voting on the basis of their gender alone, and supposedly that it’s due to keeping families together, is sexism.
Please, some Christian, try to defend the idea that being sexist is okay with God and oppressing women in this way is justified to “defend the family” or “defend culture.” (This is a rhetorical proposition.)
Although I am socially conservative and a right winger, I think other so cons and right wingers need to keep things in perspective.
Sacrificing equality of women in the name of “the family” – when it comes to this particular case (voting) – is unjust and shows just how much some Christian conservatives have turned “family” into an idol.
(Link): David Barton: Allowing women to vote ‘hurts the entire culture and society’
(Link): David Barton Invents Reasons Founding Fathers Did Not Grant Women the Vote
(Link): Christian ‘historian’: Allowing women to vote ‘hurts the entire culture and society’
Christian ‘historian’: Allowing women to vote ‘hurts the entire culture and society’ by David Edwards
Excerpts:
A so-called “historian” who Glenn Beck hired to teach at his online university insisted this week that women had originally been denied the right to vote “to keep the family together,” and for the good of “the entire culture and society.”
On the Thursday broadcast of Wallbuilders Live, David Barton explained that biblical principles — and not sexism — were behind not allowing women to vote prior to 1920.
“So family government precedes civil government and you watch that as colonists came to America, they voted by families,” he said. “And you have to remember back then, husband and wife, I mean the two were considered one. That is the biblical precept… That is a family, that is voting. And so the head of the family is traditionally considered to be the husband and even biblically still continues to be so.”
Barton argued that in the time since the women’s suffrage movement succeeded in the United States, “we’ve moved into more of a family anarchy kind of thing.”
Christian Pundit 