Christian Assault on Women Leads To “Your Body, My Choice”
Christian Assault on Women Leads To “Your Body, My Choice”
MAGA hate messages target Black and Hispanic people and women
Even before Donald Trump won, the worst strains of hatred and resentment that fueled his campaign began to show themselves. Since his victory, they’re targeting the people Trump and his party have targeted.
Threatening texts have been sent to Black people and Hispanic people. Rape threats against women are propagating online and, reportedly, in real life. At schools.
Almost immediately after Trump’s election, someone apparently used a purchased list of numbers to send Black people as young as middle school official-seeming alerts in at least 30 states advising them that they’d been selected to pick cotton, with instructions for arranging transport to a nearby plantation.
Hispanic people reportedly got messages about their ostensible deportations.
Women have been targeted with variations of the slogan, “Your body, my choice.” It’s a perversion of the reproductive-rights slogan, “My body, my choice,” not merely celebrating an end to reproductive rights but actively asserting the implementation of rape culture.
On Election Night, as Trump’s victory seemed increasingly certain, “Christian conservative” Nick Fuentes Tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
These threats against various groups have propagated online and in real life, tied to fringe-right elements. But the ideologies behind the threats have standard-bearers in mainstream American politics, especially after a presidential campaign in which immigration and misogyny featured so heavily.
The Supreme Court for decades has been rolling back protections against racist vote suppression. Congressional Republicans have fought regulations that reduce racial discrimination, most notably in bank lending. They falsely blamed the 2008 economic crash on banks being forced to lend to ostensibly uncredit-worthy Black homebuyers.
As NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said about the texted threats, “These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday's election results.”
The targeting of women, however, has an especially strong religious element. As TFN wrote last week, the single group that went strongest for Trump was white evangelicals.
Evangelical Christian misogyny includes violent elements such as the notion that it doesn’t count as rape if a husband rapes his wife.
When Ohio this year passed a new law criminalizing marital rape, it was opposed by Republican lawmaker Neil Parrott, who only lost his congressional bid last week by 8,700 votes. Parrott is described as a devout Christian.
Rape is just part of the spectrum of long-simmering right-wing desire to control women. Even abortion and contraception aren’t the end of it.
The Washington Post reported last week that some observers began to notice a swell last year of interest in ending no-fault divorce. In other words, more people began to consider legally forcing women to stay married if their husband doesn’t also want a divorce.
Ironically, it was a Republican, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan (R-CA), who signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce bill into law. Until then, anyone wanting a divorce — and that’s mostly women — had to show cause to their state government.
But no-fault divorce only became ubiquitous in 2010. Right-wing Christians have never stopped seeking to roll it back, and now they have allies in the highest corridors of power.
Devout Catholic Vice President-elect JD Vance says it’s too easy to get divorced, for instance. And the Post reports that proposed new limits on divorce are now part of Republican platforms in some states.
But it’s not just states.
As I reported in 2022, an influential Christian group that counts a number of Republicans and even some Democrats among its ranks has been working for years to boost allies in other countries who have pushed a range of misogynistic policies, including abortion, contraception, and even the basic right to divorce.
That group, the Fellowship Foundation, includes Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL). His wife, Caroline, sits on the boards of the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, created by The Fellowship, and Concerned Women for America (CWA).
In a 2017 interview, Caroline Aderholt explained that the CWA opposes feminism because of “Things like providing no-fault divorce that were harmful for the family.”
In fact, female suicide rates plunged as no-fault divorce became the law of the land. But it’s not the law of Jesus.
Nor is there any federal or Constitution right to divorce. And Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), an open theocrat who helped The Foundation finally stage its prayer breakfast inside the halls of the Capitol this year, is also opposed to no-fault divorce.
You can support this work by becoming a TFN subscriber or making a one-time PayPal donation. Thanks for your support.
It registered! I think any women’s marches, protests, anything women do alone or in groups this hat is mandatory! If they think we can’t define a woman I’d like them to define family. If this represents the men, in family, they have some sorting out to do with their Jesus or maybe accountability app/sons just isn’t working out as so well.
None of this is surprising