It was no secret that the nation’s so-called moral guardians didn’t think too much of last year’s Women’s March. If you’ll remember, Rick Joyner and Lance Wallnau thought the women who took to the streets of Washington and dozens of other cities were driven by witchcraft. Jim Bakker and his friends thought it was absolutely demonic. So it should surprise no one that at least one prominent fundie has already given the 2018 edition of the Women’s March a bad review.
Based on data compiled by Erica Chenoweth of the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut, a lot of women took the streets this past weekend.
Folks, we're at 352 @womensmarch events and counting. We estimate between 1.6m and 2.5m people marched this weekend in associated events around the US, averaging > 6.7k-10.4k per march. Coding of global events just now underway @djpressman @crowdcounting https://t.co/2GYBzStXdi
— Erica Chenoweth (@EricaChenoweth) January 21, 2018
Not as many as the four million women who showed up last year, but still pretty impressive.
One female general in the Trumpvangelical Army, however, is decidedly unimpressed–American Family Radio morning drive host Sandy Rios. On Tuesday’s show, Rios warned the women who took part in the marches that they weren’t acting the way a Godly woman ought to act. Listen here.
Rios said that she had been “ashamed of the women of my generation” for some time, and didn’t understand the “foolishness” she’d seen from some of them. She thought that such “foolishness” wouldn’t happen if more women were “deeply grounded in not only God’s word, but the principles of God’s word.”
Rios believed that if they were, they would understand the “moral behavior that is beneficial to us as well as our daughters.” They would understand that women are supposed to act in “a way that brings honor,” rather than the “crassness” that was displayed this past weekend. Apparently Rios thinks women marching against police brutality, disability rights, and other rights are being “crass.”
But Rios doesn’t think it was just crassness.
“It’s a very ugly thing. It is a very ugly thing when women behave in this way. They become ugly. They don’t become like men with all the privileges. They just become ugly, because they are not—they are acting outside of the realm of God’s parameters. And what God designed is what’s best.”
If that wasn’t enough, Rios mused that the marchers were going down the same path that Eve went when she ate the apple.
“The women, you know, they have to have that apple. They’ve got to have the whole thing. They’ve got to be able to do everything they want, have sex with as many men in their lifetime, or women, as they can. You know, go for the gusto. They want the whole apple and it’s not going to turn out well for them or their daughters.”
The message was obvious–women who took part in that march are loose somehow. It plays to the typical stereotype fundies have of feminists. I know of quite a few women who took part in both the 2017 and 2018 marches who are devout Christians. Oh, that’s right–in the fundies’ mind, you can’t be a feminist and be committed to Jesus.
So there you have it. In the religious right’s world, women who stand up for themselves, and who stand up to Trump, aren’t just “nasty” any more. They’re ugly.
(featured image courtesy Mobilus in Mobili, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
