This week, a lefty freelance author tied the evangelical Nashville Statement on biblical sexuality to the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Her tweet was just one more suggestion that the Right, and more specifically, conservative Christians, want to bring about a misogynistic government that forces women to have sex with men they don’t love and to bear children for them.
“I just want the Evangelicals to know, if you guys figure out how to do ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ IRL, I am fully prepared to bite some d*cks off,” Lauren Duca, a freelance writer for The Nation, New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and The Huffington Post, tweeted on Tuesday.
I just want the Evangelicals to know, if you guys figure out how to do "The Handmaid's Tale" IRL, I am fully prepared to bite some dicks off
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) August 29, 2017
Duca may not be the big deal she thinks she is, but she did receive a letter straight from Hillary Clinton thanking her for her reporting.
Thank you, @HillaryClinton. For this, and for everything. I promise to keep fighting (right after I'm done sobbing). pic.twitter.com/3trk8yav2p
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) June 9, 2017
Fox News contributor Stephen Miller tweeted these images mockingly asking, “Gosh, how was it Hillary Clinton wasn’t able to connect with normal working class voters?”
Gosh how was it Hillary Clinton wasn't able to connect to with normal working class voters? pic.twitter.com/9LwbJFLg9F
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) August 30, 2017
Miller was spot on, of course, but Duca is far from the first person to equate social conservatives with misogynistic extremists. In May, Clinton herself warned that if the United States government defunded Planned Parenthood, “The Handmaid’s Tale” would not be far behind. Abortion activists in Ohio, Texas, and Missouri have all dressed up like handmaids to protest pro-life legislation. When the Republicans came out with a bill to repeal and replace parts of Obamacare, SJWs on Twitter compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
SB 145 will ban the most commonly used abortion procedure in the 2nd trimester. #OHHandmaids are here to show the impact of abortion bans pic.twitter.com/GxwvM7l24j
— NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio (@ProChoiceOH) June 13, 2017
So what is “The Handmaid’s Tale”? The Hulu series is based on a book by Margaret Atwood that depicts a dystopian future. Following a calamity that makes most women infertile, the United States has been coopted by a movement known as “Gilead,” which removes all autonomy from women.
Gilead removes women’s property, fires them from their jobs, and forces them into a stratified society based extremely loosely on one specific Bible passage. The government assigns fertile women to the position of “handmaids,” silent servants who are systematically raped in order to bear children.
This is based on Genesis 30, where Rachel, anxious for children, tells her husband Jacob to have sex with her handmaid Bilhah. In response, Jacob’s other wife Leah tells Jacob to have sex with her handmaid Zilpah.
Nowhere in the Bible is this wifely rivalry in producing children praised as a good thing. In fact, it is likely part of the story so that God can show His disdain for the idea of polygamy itself. The general theme of scripture — from Genesis to Jesus’ words in the gospels — suggests that men and women were designed for one another in the covenant of marriage, which is one man and one woman.
The very premise of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that Christians — or some brand of Christian extremists — would read Genesis 30 as anything other than a cautionary tale against polygamy, is absurd. It is a violent abuse of the Bible to suggest anything of the sort.
So why does “The Handmaid’s Tale” carry a fascination among Left-wing activists? It is a useful cultural weapon with which to bludgeon conservatives.
The Hulu series is a moving, tragic, and horrifying cautionary tale against something that cannot ever exist. It is not only a twisting of the Bible but an utterly ridiculous premise based on ultra-feminist fear of anything remotely Christian.
The book and the series on which it is based are feeble attempts to justify the irrational suspicion feminists have of any traditional Christian idea. Lauren Duca used it for this reason, to stoke the common secular misconceptions about Christianity and to whip anti-religious protesters into a furor.
Ignorance and misconceptions about the concept of complementarianism (a biblical doctrine of manhood and womanhood) are similarly common. In April, The New York Times‘ Julia Baird attacked this idea, arguing it means that all women must submit to all men, that wives have no choice over their lives, and that women must submit to coercion or abuse at the hands of their husbands.
Denny Burk at the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) powerfully defeated this dangerous argument. He cited Genesis 1:26-27, which declares that men and women are equal in dignity as they are equally made in God’s image. He cited Ephesians 5, which calls on women to submit to only their own husband, not to men in general, and other verses like 1 Peter 3:1 that make it clear that submission to God is for everyone, not just women.
Furthermore, each scripture about submission is addressed to the wife, suggesting that she is called upon voluntarily to submit. Finally, the New Testament calls on husbands to love their wives sacrificially, to be willing to die for them. This is the very opposite of abuse.
In fact, the same group that put out the Danvers Statement on complementarianism also put out a powerful statement against sexual abuse, condemning it in no uncertain terms.
These complementarian Christians are the most traditional, and many Christians have embraced even more egalitarian positions about the relationship of men and women.
No major Christian group stands for — or would even want — a system where women cannot work, cannot vote, cannot own property. Any biblical Christian would be utterly appalled at the very suggestion of a system like Gilead.
If Lauren Duca, pro-abortion activists, Hillary Clinton, and others would take the time to understand the first thing about Christianity, they would know this. The only possible justification for men being given any “power” in the New Testament is only on the grounds that they sacrifice their whole personality to God, and that they love their wives sacrificially.
In reality, feminism, like other leftist causes in vogue among anti-Trump protesters, has overstretched its bounds and is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Most Americans may identify as “pro-choice,” but even the most pro-choice would restrict abortion to specific times and situations. The Democratic Party is struggling to open its ranks to pro-life candidates, because leaders know they cannot win on an abortion extremist platform.
No matter how vocally abortion activists protest, most Americans are not on their side.
But the Left continues to tar political opponents in hyperbolic terms. The same spirit that drives the Southern Poverty Law Center to mark Christian groups “anti-LGBT hate groups,” and to mark Muslim reformers as “anti-Muslim extremists,” is driving Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton, and Lauren Duca to call evangelical Christians proponents of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
One of the reasons Trump won is because Americans are sick to death of this utterly fake news, but the Left is too blind to see it.
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