A mandatory lecture given to the students of the Christian conservative Patrick Henry College on Friday offered apologies for rape, domestic violence and child abuse, and blamed American mass incarceration on feminists’ insistance on prosecuting sexual violence.
Patrick Henry professor Stephen Baskerville, a so-called “men’s rights” advocate, delivered the college’s annual “Faith and Reason” lecture, Libby Anne reported at Patheos. Baskerville started off with his thesis that feminists and Islamists are working together to push Christians out of public life, sort of like the alliance between Hitler and Stalin:
Though they claim to advance rights, or equality, or justice – values that in their place may be seductively legitimate – the real aim is power – or as currently phrased, “empowerment.” In comparison with this shared common goal, differences in contentare secondary. This is why alliances are readily formed between seemingly incompatible agendas: Hitler and Stalin, or Islamists and feminists. “Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism,” wrote Milovan Djilas during the repression of the 1950s.“Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral considerations…– all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.
Feminists, he argues, have used the sexual revolution to impose “state repression” and “transformed our government into a matriarchal leviathan” by criminalizing rape, domestic violence and child abuse. Baskerville cites the work of University of Pennsylvania professor Marie Gottschalk to claim that the criminalization of sexual violence has led to the United States’ historic levels of mass incarceration. Gottschalk argued that women’s groups’ working with law and order groups in the 1960s and ‘70s “contributed to a more punitive climate,” not that the criminalization of sexual violence led to mass incarceration. But no matter— in the prosecution of rape and domestic violence, Baskerville sees “our own homegrown version of Stalinism”:
What Gottschalk has stumbled upon is our own homegrown version of Stalinism: the process by which triumphant radicals first challenge and then commandeer both traditional values and the instruments of state repression for their own purposes as they trade ideological purity for power.
Since the inception of their Revolution – and well beneath the media radar screen – militants have been creating a panoply of new crimes and expanded redefinitions of existing crimes – all involving sexual relations. While it is very likely that the Sexual Revolution has also increased incidents of real sex crimes, the new gender crimes are different: They play on the fear of sex crimes, but they redefine these politically to include not simply acts but heterodox political beliefs. The reality of the witch hunts thus bears no necessary relation to what is suggested by the inflammatory language and jargon:
- “rape” that includes consensual relations and in most instances is no more than that;
- domestic “violence” that involves no violence or any physical contact or threat of it;
- sexual “harassment” that can mean anything from simple flirtation to unauthorized opinions about morality or politics;
- “child abuse” that is routine parental discipline, or homeschooling, or concocted altogether to win advantage in divorce court;
- “bullying” that involves criticism of the homosexual agenda or other differences of belief and opinion;
- “stalking” that is forcibly divorced fathers trying to see their own children;
- and much more.
These new gender crimes have been created not despite the new sexual freedom but as the inseparable corollary to it. The new crimes operate in concert with the new freedoms and smoothly combine expanded sexual license with diminished civic freedom, and indeed, state repression.
…
The crime usually begins as some new sexual freedom demanded in strident terms as necessary to liberate women from some form of “oppression” – though crucially, the new freedom is also enticing to men, especially young men with strong libidos and few responsibilities. This then degenerates into a corollary criminal accusation against (usually) the man who takes the bait by indulging in the newly permitted pleasure:
- Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of “rape” in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual. (This is especially rampant on college campuses.)
- Demands for access to workplaces, universities, the military, and other previously male venues (accompanied with equally strident demands to engage there in female-only activities, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding) invite accusations of sexual “harassment” against the men when relations inevitably develop (and often turn sour), regardless of who initiates them.
- Cohabitation and “no-fault” divorce are demanded to liberate women from “patriarchal” marriage but quickly generate accusations of male abandonment (even when the woman ends the marriage), as well as domestic “violence” and “child abuse,” in order to procure custody of children and the financial awards they bring.
- The proclaimed right to raise children outside wedlock and without fathers to protect and discipline them soon turns into demands to prosecute adolescents and even children for “bullying” one another and eventually for more serious matters.
- Defiant declarations that women do not need men for financial support quickly give way to demands to arrest and incarcerate without trial men who do not provide women with adequate income in the form of alimony or child support.
- Assertions that women do not need men for protection soon produce hysterical outcries for intrusive police powers, innovative punishments, and expanded penal institutions to punish ever-proliferating and loosely-defined forms of “violence against women,” even when no physical contact or threat of it is involved. (Homosexuals are now mimicking this strategy.)
- The demanded right to engage in homosexual acts and public sexual displays translates almost automatically into the power to arrest or otherwise stop the mouths of preachers, “bullies,” and anyone else who objects or ridicules or offends the “feelings” or “pride” of homosexuals.
- Demands to legalize prostitution feed hysteria to find and prosecute unnamed “sex traffickers.”
- My favorite, given our setting in higher education:) Demands for unisex bathing facilities in university residences lead to… – well, any young man lacking the intelligence to detect the trap awaiting him there may not belong in a university in the first place.
And more.
Radical ideology has thus transformed our government into a matriarchal leviathan that operates like a massive, bureaucratic version of…Potiphar’s wife. We have not eliminated a “gender stereotype,” as we were promised; we have merely politicized it – in this case that of the temptress, the seductress who lures men into a “honeytrap” by offers of pleasure before springing a trap that today can mean decades in prison.
Elsewhere in the lecture, Baskerville rails against gay rights and no-fault divorce, concluding that marriage equality “can end nowhere but in prison and in death.”
Past redefinitions of marriage effected by unilateral and involuntary divorce laws have already resulted in the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States. In the name of divorce, legally unimpeachable citizens are now summarily evicted from their homes, forcible separated from their children, expropriated of all they possess, and incarcerated without trial – while the world mouths excuses and averts its eyes. The divorce apparat is the government’s purpose-built mechanism for dismembering families and criminalizing the embodiments of the hated “patriarchy”: fathers.
The continuing redefinition of marriage now being proposed by homosexuals is another new freedom that can end nowhere but in prison and in death.
