The Handmaid's Revenge does Evangelicalism

So Beth Moore chimed in - in support of the victims in this rather vague development in the already vague #MeToo movement.  She insists she's not siding against Kavanaugh.  Yet her endorsement of the victims sounds more and more like the radical feminism of old that equated all sex with rape.  The same radical feminism that is able to declare Kavanaugh guilty as pointed at, his life to be ruined presently.

Of course being a good old Bible believing Christian, she can't go so far as saying all sex is rape.  But she can insist that all of her sexual experiences that she regrets, consensual though they were, could have been the result of sexual assault, bullying, or sexist men:

Countless women and girls (and boys) consent to sexual advances they do not welcome or want and that scar them for a lifetime. Or sometimes they consent to one thing and get something completely and disturbingly different(*). They do so for the same reason I did. They feel enormously pressured, extremely unprotected, overpowered and, at times, utterly powerless. I well remember feeling something akin to paralysis. The word “no” was not even in my vocabulary. The boundaries around my life were bulldozed early and by a bully, I might add, because, while not all bullies are sexual predators, all sexual predators are, in one way or another, bullies. There was no manual within my reach about how to rebuild those crumbled boundaries. (emphasis mine)

(*) Explanation needed. 

In other words, it wasn't her fault if she said yes. Even though she said yes to the boys (and we'll, for the moment, assume any sexual experience was always and in every way initiated by the boys), it was still sexual assault.  And she was the victim.

Again, this was the wild dream of radical feminism back in the day.  All sex was rape they were reported to have said.  Moore might not be saying that.  She does at least include boys as victims in theory.  But she and a growing number of women - including Christians - are saying any sex they regret is nothing other than sexual assault by the always vile and bullying attacker, and therefore not their fault.

It's also worth noting that when Ms. Moore was called out for appearing to support execution by accusation, she fired back.  She insisted she has no desire to see anyone innocent falsely accused:

"Let me assure you, sir, I have not one whit of desire for anyone to be falsely accused. That is highly counterproductive and would only end up making it harder for victims. I'm advocating for women to be heard, taken seriously and not placed in harm's way for coming forward."

Personally, I would think the reason she doesn't want someone to be falsely accused is that she doesn't want to see an innocent person falsely accused.  Instead, she says she wouldn't want that because it would be highly counterproductive and would only end up making it harder for victims.  Again, call me an old codger, but I think false accusations are bad because they destroy the reputation of an innocent person.  But thus is the #MeToo era, even within Christianity.

BTW, some might say I'm being harsh with this.  That I don't know the details.  No, I don't.  Because women can accuse men in general based on no details or facts.  Moore doesn't name names, or give facts or details.  She isn't giving me the down and dirty about what happened.  All she is saying is that she did things she regretted, until she realized it wasn't her fault; that she was the victim.

If these boys threw her down and assaulted her, or raped her, or in some way physically attacked her against her wishes, then I'm all behind her.  She is certainly a victim of sexual assault.  But she uses words like consent, and agree, and that isn't rape.  That's not sexual assault. Again, even assuming it was only and always the boys initiating the encounter (not always my experiences), she still said yes.

And this idea born of radical feminism that all reality, including consensual sex, is the result of sexist, rapist men is antithetical to not only the Gospel, but also common sense.  Heck, back in the day, mainstream feminists tried to distance themselves from such bilge.  If Christians are now embracing it, we can understand why Christians throughout the ages embraced the things they did.

This also counts, I should add, if she was somehow assaulted when young.  Even if she was a victim when she was young, it does not stand to reason that any further sexual relationships she had were the result of male sexual predators.  That if she said yes, it was only because of her past trauma, and therefore the boys she said 'yes' to should be considered to have sexually intimidated her, and therefore she was devoid of all responsibility for her actions.  Time doesn't permit for how such an approach is antithetical to Christian and common sense thinking.

If anything is to roll back the decades of debauchery and decadence of the sex and drugs generation, it won't be going radical feminist.   I have no doubt that the trail of abuse and assault runs large in the wake of the sexual revolution, as does so many trails of human suffering, death and loss.  I also have no doubt that both men and women have played their own parts in exploiting what they could get out of it.  The fact that some men committed horrid crimes against women does not present a Get Out of Jail Card for personal responsibility for women.  Nor does it wipe away the notion that women are capable of sin.  All this will do is open up new problems without ultimately solving the old ones.