Dr. Stephen Baskerville’s lecture “Politicizing Potiphar’s Wife: Today’s New Ideology” is a pivotal analysis of America’s descent into a politicized sexual riot now driving much of public policy and our uncontrollable deficit spending problem.
Today’s magnetic ideologies about sex disorient and invert traditional responsible views on morality and charity so completely as to render discussions of morals or religion offensive or impossible — even amongst surprising numbers of Christians co-opted by radical constructs of charity and humanity.
Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” is the instruction manual used to turn Christianity against itself and deliver it into the hands of big-government progressives. This will not change until we use the same methods to get in front of radicals and disorient them.
The most revealing and teachable moments in this discourse rise from the objections of detractors themselves. Whether by accidental or intentional ignorance, the points made by detractors fail to find any tangible factual flaw in Dr. Baskerville’s lecture despite heroic attempts to do so. The methodology employed by the critics are described in the lecture and become proof that Dr. Baskerville’s premises are correct.
Below are highlights of three of the critics, and why their points are incorrect:
- PHC Alum David Sessions asserts there are factual errors in the lecture despite citing nothing truly contrary in evidence. I do not understand why he suggests that Dr. Baskerville’s thesis as a conspiratorial ideology in itself, while lowering Christianity to merely another conspiratorial ideology in the sociopolitical culture war.
Mr. Sessions confuses the short-term crisis posed by the sub-prime bubble collapse with the longitudinal deficit-driving spending problem of which Dr. Baskerville speaks. Social spending has been saddling the nation with ever-larger demand-spending deficits since 1963. The Wall Street Journal has published many articles (1, 2, 3) about the damage the welfare state has done to federal spending. Social spending is the largest and fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. The rapid expansion of social spending leaves the debt-to-GDP ratio of the United States in worse shape than the E.E.C. and nearly as fatal as Greece.
Family Research Counsel, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Center for Marriage Policy all document the fact that we cannot attain a balanced or surplus budget until we reverse the trend of marriage-absence to facilitate natural decreases in demand-side spending associated with weak non-married parents. More granular facts addressing Mr. Sessions concerns are presented later in this letter.
- Two (apparently gay-activist) critics (1,2) assert that homosexuals had no participation in the rise of the Nazi party.
Dr. Baskerville is correct: The “Storm Battalion” (SA) was Hitler’s homosexual wing comprised of approximately three million corrupt street fighters, many of whom were homosexuals. Led by “out” homosexuals Ernst Rohm and Edmund Heines, the SA played a significant role seizing the estates of Hitler’s opponents and nationalizing private companies. The SA did not get the patronage it expected after Hitler rose to power. The tension between Hitler and the SA continued until Hitler committed suicide.
The lack of knowledgd demonstrated by the two critics above merits analysis. Hyperbole replaces rational factual discourse. This is the standard methodology applied by ideologues. They have stolen and redirected core fields of academic study and science to serve unscientific special-interest dicta, with disastrous policy consequences.
An exemplary parallel now widely known is the organized theft of global-warming studies by “scientists”. They are working self-aggrandizing “green” agenda proponents trying to generate billions in Federal and international funding. Their goal is to hand power to lawyers, socialists, and feminists in Brussels and the United Nations.
The “more honest” discussion of global warming now taking place has not yet occurred in fields of psychology, law, socioeconomic policy, and criminal law because the inner workings of social ideology has not been exposed to the general population yet.
I will now address the concerns of Dr. Baskerville’s critics with a finer grain of detail than provided in Dr. Baskerville’s lecture.
Sociopolitics is a labyrinthine Pachinko machine of thoughts, ideas and philosophies. Vile organizations hiding behind nice-sounding names, politicians trying to stay in power at any cost, and community activists are working the streets. It takes many years of real-time study to understand the American dilemma and why the Pachinko machine almost always wins.
The detail and analysis I provide below provides factual evidentiary support for Dr. Baskerville’s broader statements, a number of which could be construed as being excessive without granular factual support.
Women’s activism vs. politicized socialist feminism
There is a manifold difference between legitimate women’s activism and institutional politicized feminism controlling universities, politics, law, the White House Cabinet, and the welfare state.
Suffragettes were not power hungry feminists. They were female activists who wanted to have simple property and voting rights. In fact, suffragettes discouraged direct involvement in the Votes for Women Movement by the first wave of sexual-power feminists in the Women’s Ku Klux Klan, who wrote many popular mottos in the 1860-1890 timeframe that were later featured in the “original” writings of the 1960’s feminist sexual liberation movement. WKKK feminists later seized control of KKK in the 1920’s (using allegations of sexual improprieties by the Grand Dragon). A Congressional investigation in 1922 found that a woman, Daisy Douglass Barr, was running the KKK.
WKKK activists, not legitimate “women’s activists”, led and organized the Prohibition movement.
It is important to note that WKKK feminists opposed equal rights for blacks, while a reasonable number legitimate women’s activists (such as my grandmother, Florence Richardson Usher, who founded the Equal Suffrage Association in Missouri in 1908), wanted to include black women in the Suffragette movement. She had black dignitaries of the day, such as Ralph Bunche over to dinner to discuss advancing equal rights for blacks.
Most legitimate women’s activists folded shop after the 19th Amendment was enacted. Radical feminists left the KKK in the 1930’s and continued their work, aggregating the teachings of Frankfurt School expatriates (who migrated to New York after World War I) with Freudian pseudo-science and Kinsey, powered by Marcuse’s realization that sex was the only tool that could divide and break down the contented American middle class. The acid form of ideological feminism we see today exploded on the American scene in the 1960’s, alienating America’s children from religion and parents, assuming control of family law, welfare politics, and many religions.
You are probably wondering why I began my analysis with a short history of the WKKK. Its status as the great-grandmother of radical feminism is a pivotal and largely unrecognized fact of American political history that must be understood to understand how today’s radical feminist movement impacts present-day social policy and cultural thinking. The WKKK applied a political power model to become the “moral keeper” of America by using wild allegations of rape, violence, and even temperance, to bring about mass political discrimination (backed by the full force of the government) against black men. The lack of marriage in black families caused black families to be viewed as weak, disempowered, and problematic by everyone from Margaret Sanger to Congress.
The contemporary feminist movement applies the same deceptive moralistic vectors to empower feminists at the highest levels of government, bringing about the same forms of sociopolitical discrimination – but now targeting all men, their participation in marriage, and even marriage itself.
What is feminism? How does it work? Does it really control American law and politics?
We see two entirely different constructs between legitimate women’s activism (which seeks a specific and reasonable goal using direct language) and institutionalized political feminism, which pursues agenda that does not match the slogans they use.
Most notably, feminism misuses traditional beliefs in equality, protections for women, and charity to fool individuals into pursuing unequal and uncharitable and an anti-marriage agenda. This expunges men from participation in marriage, parenting, and society via policy and criminal law, leaving women and children in trouble, who then look to government feminists to take care of them.
Here are several shocking examples of anti-marriage feminist policy proving that feminist agenda runs America:
- Despite the fact that all credible studies report that women initiate half of serious domestic violence, the American Bar Association standards of practice legally defines the victim as “her”. Regardless of the reason for marital conflict, it is common for the husband to be presumed to be the perpetrator, removed from the home, and all his assets frozen in a restraining order.
- There is no funding and no help for men dealing with a violent wife. Men: call your local domestic violence hot line and say your wife has been hitting you. They will usually tell you to call a lawyer. Women: after you have heard that they do nothing for men, call the hotline and say your husband has been hitting you. They will probably offer to get a restraining order in 30 minutes over the phone, provide a free legal team, and send you to a shelter.
- The same feminist activists and lawyers controlling the practice of family law also control the White House Office on Women, which holds a cabinet-level position dictating social policy to the military, social services, and other government agency. This is the office responsible for turning the military into a circus of “reported rapes”. In the Military, False reports of sexual assaults are rising faster than reports of rape, taking many good men out of action and wasting military resources on feminist witch hunts. Take for example, the case of Kelly Wilson.The case of Catholic graduate Karalen Morthole illustrates the quandary imposed on military leadership. Young folks get drunk, inhibitions go out the window, and generals are pressured by White House feminists to override the findings of military investigators when they find no case to prosecute. It is instructive that the civilian prosecutor refused to file charges in this case because prosecutors tend to err on the side of prosecution in sexual assault cases.
- Feminist activists also control college campuses, injecting feminist dogma into core curricula via mandatory “Women’s Interdisciplinary Studies” programs, in which women’s studies students are sent out to inject their agenda into every other field of study. In law schools, family law is commonly taught by “Women’s Jurisprudence” departments (imagine a university teaching racial law subjugated by a “White Jurisprudence” department).
- At Yale University, feminists are turning the campus into a monolithic political matriarchy citing unfounded “record rates of sexual assault” not reported to police or tried in the courts.Women’s Studies students are being organized and getting college credit for “Wikistorming” intended to rewrite history, politics and the English language to match the feminist agenda.
- The Duke Lacrosse rape case destroyed the college careers of the entire Lacrosse Team, who were publicly pilloried by 88 Duke professors, the College Administration, and the State of North Carolina because of unsubstantiated claims of a stripper with a long criminal record. Within two weeks, I declared it a fraud, accurately predicting that prosecutor Mike Nifong would lose his law license and the university and City would be sued by the players. Despite all the evidence that the case was fraudulent in the early days of the investigation, the National Organization for Women insisted that the accuser was being abused by the media and police.
- Today, college campuses and even high schools are rife with allegations of rape and sexual abuse, mostly alleged by women’s studies students. Harvard reports a mysterious near-doubling of rape allegations. These allegations are heard by student body “courts”, where evidentiary standards do not exist. These allegations are rarely reported to police, because many cases are unfounded. Some of the dubious or false campus sexual assault cases filed by campus feminists (often heard only in “campus courts” to bypass the proper venue of police and courts), and pursued as highly-publicized moral witch hunts in the media include Morgan Triplett, Wanetta Gibson, Megan Williams, Bawit Dekele, Melinda Manning, Landen Gambill, and Charlie Rogers.
- The federal Department of Education has determined that flirting or an unwanted date request can be considered sexual harassment. The “reasonable person” standard has been replaced with a subjective standard based on whatever any one person “feels” – defining crime according to the feelings of the most sensitive individuals. This is the first subjective legal definition of a crime in my twenty five years of social policy research.
- The prevalence of false or baseless sex allegations was exposed two years ago in the Weekly Standard, but the machine continues to grind. It is unusual to see conviction, at least in publicized cases, because the allegations are usually by young women seeking big civil-suit winnings from rich men. Women also use sexual abuse allegations to get even with old boyfriends or to control outcomes in divorce and custody situations. The cases of Jordan Johnson, Robert Dewey, Wanetta Gibson, “Nun” Mary Turcotte, Kayla Earl, Leanne Black, Chaneya Kelly, Keith Hartigan, Morgan Triplett, Al Gore, and NYU professor Hellen Mees.
- The Department of Health and Human Services and a group of psychologists are attempting to decriminalize pedophilia and encourage homosexual and heterosexual experimentation by even very young children in the school system.
- The one form of sexual abuse that has reached epidemic proportions in the United is sexual abuse of students, most often by female high and middle-school teachers. It is also the only form of sex abuse lauded by feminists, as written in the “Vagina Monologues”, which contained a now-bawdlerized vignette about “the good rape” of a young girl by a woman.I am seeing several new cases of child sexual abuse, every week. Nearly all of these cases result in a conviction or plea bargain because they are almost always backed up with cellphone text messages and other physical evidence.Astonishingly, prosecutors and courts usually let most female child sexual abusers off the hook with little more than probation, sending a message that it is OK for mature women to perform personal sex education on young boys or girls.Inexplicably, these cases are usually not even mentioned in the United States media – most likely because there are so many embedded feminist reporters and editors. Here are cases just from the month of August, 2013: Kelly Miller, Ethel Anderson, Diana Farnell, Linda Leann Wallace, Pamela Ann Fahy, Tonya Harris, Stevie Glasspool, Rachelle Gendron, Jennifer Collins McNeill, Nicole Jacques, Summer Michelle Hansen, Lesley Ann Sharp, Abigail Marie Simon, Amber Stroda, Kalee Warnick, Kerrianne Johnson, Erin Haskell, Kathia Davis, and defiant lesbian Kaitlyn Hunt.
We are witnessing the consequences of the feminist sexual revolution. This revolution began in the 1960’s as a revolt between consenting young American, but moved on to become formalized in schools and informally by radical activist groups — sexualizing children, animals, individuals of the same sex, and even inanimate objects.
Impact of Feminism on Religion
I will share a few high-level observations about the invasion of religions by institutionalized feminism and its impact on religious institutions:
- “The patriarchy” must be destroyed in all its forms — most notably marriage and the church — replaced with government welfare replacing what marriage does naturally. In many churches “feminist theology” has replaced large portions of the Bible.
- In the secular sense, marriage is a crucial legal institution making all men and women equal in life, able to support themselves, raise children successfully, and care for each other throughout life with little “help” or intervention from government. Feminism sees marriage as an institution of religious “patriarchal dominance” that must be eradicated. Marriage is the cornerstone of most religions. The destruction of marriage since 1960, combined with mass redirection of traditional concepts of equality and charity, has left most religions weak and willing to actively replace liturgy for feminist theology.
- Religions that incorporated “feminist theology” have become little more than dating clubs, often with little involvement by pariahed men, who depend on the largesse of unmarried mothers and well-funded feminists for collections at the plate. These religions offer no liturgy encouraging or supporting healthy marital relationships.
- Government’s definition of “charity” destroys marriage with aggressive welfare payments, resulting in more human disasters calling for more charity and even less marriage. Too many Christians and Catholics feel sorry for victims of the “plantation” and strongly support legislation destroying marriage and subsequently religion. Representative Nancy Pelosi is selling convoluted “Catholicism” in support of expansive welfare spending programs, opposing necessary budget-balancing cuts by anachronistically asserting that “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make.” Pelosi provides us with a teachable cameo demonstrating how feminists maintain control of policy with volleys of flaming verbal arrows: Those who want to balance the budget are “anti-government … legislative arsonists.”
Religions cannot win in the secular world by moralizing outside the church. We failed to stop governmental destruction of marriage because our moral approach sounds like just another Temperance movement in the secular world. In the future, our message must be in plain English. We must lead with sound socioeconomic policy in legislation. Religions must take on the task of rebuilding marriage through attractive activism.
The word of God is a healing message only heard by those willing to accept its gift. Traditional marriage is the a primary component of most Christian churches. Churches that have support groups such as Marriage Savers, providing parishioners free support group tools to work through the normal problems of marriage and aging, coupled with healing prayer, will succeed and build a growing following.
Too many churches have become adoption centers working for government out of fear of more abortions. This only discourages marriage and builds big government that weakens the Church. Churches would be wiser to focus on building strong marriages and encouraging couples to marry and raise their children in the shelter of the church. Far fewer cases of out-of-wedlock pregnancy take place in counties where Marriage Savers programs are available in every church.
Reversing the trend of marriage-absence
The following chart contains many social metrics between 1959 and 2010, overlaying the metrics longitudinally to prove that everything we have done since the invention of the Great Society in the early 1960’s is a failure. My article “Poverty is caused by marriage-absence” analyzes the meaning of these metrics.
Dr. Baskerville and many others have documented the damage to society when marriage is replaced by welfare, child support, and the welfare state. We have known the problem for decades.
Unfortunately, we have not yet discovered what to do about it.
We must think outside of conventional experience, both in religion and public advocacy, to get ahead of the Left and reverse this trend.
Today, everyone focuses on the consequences of marriage-absence. Amidst political cacophony, we vacillate between throwing open the public coffers and shutting government down, while social metrics plunge. Nobody is getting in front of the problem to address the policy shortcomings that discourage marriage in the first place.
At the Center for Marriage Policy, our focus is on demand-side socioeconomics. This is parallel to supply-side economics but strengthens the marriage market. “Social issues” are cultural battles we usually lose because we wrestle the alligators in their own swamp. Demand-side socioeconomics forces the alligators to battle us on dry land, where we almost always win.
We have discovered that in each and every case, peer-reviewed science applied towards our policy model, is parallel to Biblical principles but functions in the secular world. In brief, Francis W. Schaeffer’s window of Apologetics no longer limits our ability to enact legislation that accomplishes what the church cannot possibly accomplish under the separation of Church and State.
Moral views that are uneducated on the scientific realities of the general community sample have the unintended effect of aligning the church with radical feminism, leading to destructive legislation. For years many religious leaders have improperly blamed men for the breakdown of marriage and other social ills. Two thousand years ago, before feminists and the feminist-inspired sexual revolution controlled the United States and most of Western Europe, this would be reasonable.
I will offer three serious examples of this problem:
- Former Archbishop Timothy Dolan, improperly blamed married men for most child sexual abuse (the vast majority of child sexual abuse is caused by unmarried men). The damage to marriages cannot be calculated. After that show there were most certainly a lot of wives out there investigating their husbands and looking for child sexual abuse under every rock. A cohort of my Catholic friends attempted to educate Archbishop Dolan and encourage a public correction, but he refused to even consider it.
- Sienna College, a Franciscan institution, has been strongly aligned with radical feminism for many years. Mo. Therese Hannah, an Associate Professor of Psychology founded the “Battered Mothers Custody Conference” about 12 years ago, establishing the “protective mothers movement” espousing paranoic radical feminist views about domestic violence. These fears magically appear during divorce custody cases, not as reason for divorce in the first place. Women imagine their husbands are abusing children and end up going to prison, while in the majority of other cases children are denied a father simply out of free-floating fears injected into the minds of judges.An examination of Therese Hannah’s 2007 “Truth Commission” findings judges the court system for not doing exactly what feminists want them to do. The list of presenters at their 2007 conference was a “Who’s Who” of feminists controlling the American Bar Association family law and domestic violence sections.In 2006, the Battered Mothers Custody Conference produced a noxious documentary about domestic violence aired by PBS titled “Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories.” At the time, I was on the board of RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting. We contested the documentary with the PBS and CPB Ombudsmen. The “documentary” was taken off the air in a few days for lack of balance.
- In 2006, the Battered Mothers Custody Conference invented the “10 Myths About Domestic Violence”, which was promptly published as fact on the American Bar Association website. I researched the points, resulting in a peer-reviewed study published in the esteemed Journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior by my cohorts Donald Dutton, Kenneth Corvo, and John Hamel, which found the Myths are myths in themselves.
Today, junk science clouds our minds and hides evil in a hurricane of claims that fool politicians, people of faith, and the people themselves. Fraud is now the norm in scientific publications, many of which are advocacy publications. This is particularly true in predictive, medical research, social, and healing sciences. The well-known cover-up of truth about global warming is a pristine example.
Reading reams of studies with a trained mind and a ruthless quest for the truth are required to separate the wheat from the chaff. Hiding behind the debate are unquestionable scientific truths that become obvious when examining a thorough dataset.
The above is evidence that religious institutions and universities need to redouble efforts to understand the real world, to separate out real science from non-peer-reviewed “survey science”, and to prepare students in psychology, law, and public policy to aggressively focus on problem-preventing marriage-building law and public policy.
We cannot reverse the trend of marriage-absence by blaming anyone. We must not lower ourselves to combat in the “culture war”. We must walk away from this evil and focus on rebuilding marriage inside the church by applying wise socioeconomic policy in the public sector.
Teresa Scanlan is attending Patrick Henry College soon, and intends to run for President of the United States in 2028. I pray that the College can prepare her for a very successful life in marriage and public policy that will reverse the trend of marriage-absence, heal the nation, and rebuild the Church.
To end this letter, I would like to briefly outline the new academic field of “demand-side socioeconomics” recently invented by the Center for Marriage Policy, which moves several academic fields of study such as social sciences, public policy, and law away from “wrestling with consequences” and towards pre-empting the problems before they occur.
This field is related to “passive” studies of marriage economics and the marriage market, but combines that knowledge with aggressive policy addressing the everyday problems of Americans that result in non-marriage.
Existing policy provides choices for every human problem. In our analysis, the options set out by government always lead to non-marriage, dependency on government, and are rarely what most individuals wanted in the first place. Our policy approach gives Americans the option that most of them want, most often leveraged at a point before a problem results in non-marriage.
Below is a high-level outline of this new field and how it works. We hope that Patrick Henry College considers adding it to research curricula for advanced students, and later to core curricula after the field is more thoroughly established.
What is demand-side Socioeconomic Policy?
- Demand-side socioeconomic policy is the equivalent of supply-side economics
- Supply-side economics stimulates business and economy through low taxes and minimal government involvement.
- Demand-side socioeconomics stimulates marriage, economy, tax revenues, and reduces social spending through positive, choice-based policy empowering citizens to get what they want and need out of life.
- Demand-side socioeconomics works by harnessing self-interest with a minimum of government involvement.
How does demand-side socioeconomic policy work?
- Individuals have short-term needs they must meet or desires they wish to attain.
- Unmarried low-income individuals often struggle with short-term survival and do not have time or resources to achieve long-range goals that would assure future economic success.
- Under existing “social” policy, the most attractive solutions available to low-income individuals discourage marriage, leading to bigger problems and entrapped dependence on government.
- Inexpensive demand-side socioeconomic policies establish attractive choices meeting short-term needs of low-income individuals while encouraging healthy forms of marital interdependency, creating time and resources for educational advancement and establishing a pathway to long-term success.
Demand-side socioeconomic policy Example #1:
- The Problem: The primary predictor of domestic violence, family money problems, unemployment, and relation breakup is substance abuse in the family.
- What individuals want: Most spouses want the substance abuser to get well, but Missouri has no policy giving troubled responsible spouses what they desperately want and need.
- The Answer: The “Family Intervention Order” (Missouri HB 402, 2012) establishes a targeted restraining order empowering the Responsible Spouse to leverage the substance abuser family member into recovery without creating all-out war over assets and children.
- The Benefits: Longitudinal substance-abuse recovery rates of 50% to 70% are expected. Each marriage saved or created will save the state of Missouri approximately $20,000 in social spending annually, for a total of about $200-million annually, with no budget battle.
Demand-side socioeconomic policy Example #2:
- The Problem: There are no neighborhood resources designed to prepare young couples for successful, lifelong marriage. There are very few good marriage counselors. There is no effective support group available to help troubled couples work through the normal problems of marriage and aging.
- What individuals want: Most individuals want and need advice they can seek out together without the stigma of going to a marriage counselor.
- The Answer: Community Marriage Savers Meetings are held at every church. Troubled couples are mentored by older, trained couples who successfully survived the same problems. Churches provide premarital mentoring to young couples to prepare them for a successful marriage.
- The Benefits: Marriage Savers is proven to reduce divorce rates by an average of 17.5%, cohabitation rates by 1/3, and improve marriage rates by 16%. Each marriage saved, each marriage built, and each illegitimate birth avoided saves the state approximately $20,000 annually in social expenditures and improved tax revenue.
Demand side policy is beneficial to individuals, business, and government because it is:
- Pro-Economy: Marriage is the fundamental microeconomic unit of a successful economy.
- Pro-business: Businesses do better with two adults able to share duties fulfilling responsibilities for work and family.
- Pro-productivity: Married individuals are the most reliable members of the work force and have the lowest absentee rates.
- Pro-woman: Fewer women will have to settle for surviving on welfare in dangerous urban areas and will live happier, more contented lives.
- Pro-religion: Marriage is the cornerstone of the church. Churches that become the home base for successful life-long marriages will grow and effectively regain moral control of marriage.
- Pro-Limited-Government: When marriage is the social norm, big government is not needed by anyone.
- Pro-balanced-budget: State or federal budgets can be balanced with marriage being the social norm.
- Pro-Life: Individuals interested in marriage are the least likely to need or want abortions and are far more likely to marry before bearing children.
- Pro-Constitution: Heterosexual marriage prevents serious social problems that led to evisceration of the Constitution in the name of helping troubled individuals.
- Pro-social: Marriage is the cornerstone of trust and cooperativeness with neighbors, community, and government.
I suggest that when we see a “Pro-marriage” sign next to the “Pro-Life” sign in front of every Church, we will be well on the road to restoring marriage as the social norm in the United States and Western Europe.
Sincerely,
David R. Usher President The Center for Marriage Policy