Yesterday, The Missoulian reported on Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte’s ties with white nationalist activists. The article also mentions Gianforte’s relationship with Douglas Wilson, the founder of the Association of Classical & Christian Schools. Gianforte sat on the board of Wilson’s organization and his family foundation has given it over $30,000.
But as the Huffington Post noted back during Gianforte’s unsuccessful campaign for governor, Wilson is notorious for his remarks about racial minorities and women.
The Republican candidate for governor of Montana has ties to Douglas Wilson, an Idaho pastor who once wrote, “one could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery,” and maintains that women are “created to be responsive and dependent to a man.”
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Wilson and a co-author rewrote slavery’s violent history in a 1996 pamphlet called “Southern Slavery, As It Was.” They cite narratives that they claim show Southern slavery was “a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care,” and note that “one could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery.”
In the same document, they claim “feminists, in rebellion against God, invert the order of the home established by God. They do so in a way that seeks to rob women of their beauty in submission.”
Casey Sanchez of the Southern Poverty Law Center found that Wilson, a self-described “paleo-confederate,” lauded slavery in the South as a “life of plenty.”
Defending the Confederacy as “right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war,” Wilson has distinguished himself from neo-Confederates in this way: “I would define a neo-Confederate as someone who thinks we are still fighting that war. Instead, I would say we're fighting in a long war, and that [the Civil War] was one battle that we lost.”
He also declared his support for “execution for adultery” and the “exile” of “some homosexuals,” claiming that “sodomy is worse than slavery.”
On women and sexual violence, Wilson said that women who refuse to walk with a male escort are complicit in their own rapes: “One consequence of rejecting the protection of good men is that you are opening yourself up to the predations of bad men.”
He also wrote:
A final aspect of rape that should be briefly mentioned is perhaps closer to home. Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.
When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.
But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.
True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours.
Rather than reject a right-wing activist propagating such extreme views on slavery, women, and homosexuality, Gianforte seems content with praising and funding his endeavors.
