Posts Tagged ‘
quiverfull ’
Aug 26th, 2015 11:31 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Vyckie Garrison said something very important and clarifying in a public Facebook post just now:
Quiverfull is not a cult. People like the Duggars who embrace the worldview and practice the lifestyle are not adhering to some unique, anomalous form of Christianity. Quiverfull IS regular Christian “family values” teaching writ large and lived out to its logical conclusion.
True Believers™ are not the primary problem here … the only thing “extreme” about Quiverfull families is the degree to which they put Christian ideals into practice.
Being in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is a set up for dysfunctional game-playing and crazy-making head trips. According to Christianity, Jesus subjected himself to torture and death, so that we could have the
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
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Tags: quiverfull
Jan 8th, 2014 9:25 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Libby Anne wonders if Vision Forum is collapsing altogether.
There has been no public announcement, but the Vision Forum Ministries site now includes only the resignation statements and the Vision Forum Inc. site is no longer selling anything, or even listing any products. This suggests to me that Vision Forum has collapsed entirely, and that the corporate wing is disappearing in addition to the ministry wing.
If this complete collapse is the case, as it appears, this is an extremely positive change. Vision Forum has been probably THE pillar of the Christian Patriarchy movement for the past decade, and is now gone. This is not to say that Christian Patriarchy is gone. It is not. There are still organizations like
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, quiverfull
Jul 26th, 2012 5:26 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I just spent a couple of hours talking to Vyckie Garrison of No Longer Quivering, who is in town on a visit. It was a great conversation.
We talked about her transition from the Quiverfull life to freedom, and the worries about putting her children in school for the first time. Were they too sheltered, were they too angry? But they flourished. Her third-grader Andy had an especially good teacher, Mrs Bloom, who showed Vyckie a paper he’d written; the assignment was to write about “changes.” One classmate wrote about how life changed when the family got a kitten. Andy had rather more profound changes to write about.
Everything she said amounted to an endorsement of secular life as … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, quiverfull
Feb 24th, 2012 10:21 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Want to splash around in morbidity for a moment?
There’s always the new season of 19 and Counting.
And Counting – geddit? It’s not really “and Counting” now because Michelle Duggar miscarried #20. The new season is kind of morbid that way.
And not just that way. I find it kind of morbid overall. “Morbid” isn’t really the right word, I suppose – the Atlantic’s “creepy” is better – but it is, in a way – what’s dead is the mind. The whole atmosphere is Stepfordish. Yes they’re all very cheery and smiley and friendly and warm – but so would programmed pod people be.
This is, at least on film, a defiantly wholesome family; these kids aren’t constantly moaning
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, quiverfull
Nov 8th, 2011 4:33 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh hey, what exciting news, the Duggars are going to have child # 20 – that is, Michelle Duggar is pregnant with child # 20. Quiverfull strikes another blow for theocracy.
The Quiverfull movement places emphasis on the importance of women submitting to their husbands and fathers, and is often recognized as a backlash to the gains made in women’s rights by the feminist movement. It is an anti-feminist backlash that holds that gender equality is contrary to God’s law and that women’s highest calling is as wives and “prolific” mothers. In line with other fundamentalist Christians, they believe a woman’s place is in the home, breeding children and serving her husband.
The movement embraces misogyny as God’s law. Women
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, quiverfull, Theocracy
Nov 4th, 2011 2:52 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
There’s a terrifying piece at No Longer Quivering, by a former believer in the child-rearing methods of Michael Pearl. She followed the plan; it didn’t work; she did what Pearl said to do, and followed it harder. Hit harder, was what you were supposed to do when it didn’t work. Hit harder, and blame the child. She had a hard time with that, but her ex-husband didn’t.
My ex-husband got angry with the kids for thwarting the Pearl method, but he remained coldly self-controlled. He also left bruises. A lot of bruises.
Why didn’t I stop him? I finally did, but early in my marriage I was paralyzed by fear and brainwashed by bad teaching. We both feared raising
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Michael Pearl, quiverfull, Religious coercion
Oct 24th, 2011 5:20 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Vyckie Garrison reviews a Quiverfull classic, Me? Obey him?
I am no less rational than my (ex)husband. He also is gifted with a strong intuition and emotional intelligence. Convinced as we were that I was more susceptible to Satanic deception, our family was deprived of my reasonable input in decision making. My intelligence was squelched, my intuition was distrusted and my feelings were denied. My husband developed an artificially inflated sense of his own powers of logic. I can’t count how many times he said to me, “What you are saying sounds reasonable, but how do I know that Satan is not using you to deceive me?” I had no good defense. According to the Scriptures, we had every
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, quiverfull
Sep 20th, 2011 12:45 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Libby Anne gets responses from people saying “yes but we home-school and we follow Jesus but we don’t fit your description.” She gently points out that if they don’t fit the description then she’s not writing about them…and goes on to provide a list of the genuine problems with “the various teachings of Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull” [italics hers], not having a large family or homeschooling. Among them -
- When parents teach their daughters to dream of nothing but homemaking and seek to kill any other desire or dream, that is a problem.
- When parents teach their daughters that boys are to go out into the world and take dominion while girls are to take dominion by doing laundry,
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Patriarchy, quiverfull
Sep 11th, 2011 3:56 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Digging.
No Longer Quivering has a section for nlq stories. There are a lot of stories. I’m reading chapter 2 of one story, by Tess Willoughby.
It was the year when we went to a conference and met a pastor who advocated corporal punishment for wives, and Nate took to his teachings like a duck to water…
Nate and I were part of the Christian separatist movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s, rooted in the belief that liberals and “secular humanists” would destroy the moral fiber of America. Christian separatists— right-wing religious splinter groups including white supremacists, Y2K survivalists, secessionists, reconstructionists, and so on—believed that the upstanding patriotic Christian Americans needed to separate themselves and create
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Patriarchy, quiverfull
Sep 7th, 2011 5:27 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Libby Anne is, naturally, worried about her siblings.
…it is hard for me to watch my siblings being raised with beliefs and methods I have come to so oppose. I have to watch my sisters being taught that their only role is in the home, and to see my siblings expected to obey and conform. The hardest part is watching my sisters. I hear them talk about the blessing of fatherly protection against the evils of the world and their future plans to eschew all kinds of birth control and have as many children as possible. I watch them and wonder if they will ever, like me, break free.
That would be very difficult.… Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Patriarchy, quiverfull
Sep 2nd, 2011 11:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Another escapee is Libby Anne. She gives a ten-part account of being a good child of Patriarchy and then of being turned around.
The childhood is by no means all horrible, even seen from the outside. Much of it is quite appealing.
I also enjoyed gardening. We always had large gardens, and we children did a great deal of the tending and weeding, sometimes waking at dawn in the summer months to weed before the summer heat. In addition to learning to garden, I found books at a homeschool convention about edible plants and medicinal herbs and set out to teach myself these important skills. I learned that dandelions could be eaten in salads, that plantain was good
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Patriarchy, quiverfull, Vision Forum
Aug 28th, 2011 3:18 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Meet the Population Research Institute. It sounds respectable, doesn’t it. But
Founded in 1989, the Population Research Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization dedicated to objectively presenting the truth about population-related issues, and to reversing the trends brought about by the myth of overpopulation. Our growing, global network of pro-life groups spans over 30 countries.
It’s dedicated to objectively presenting its pronatalist antifeminist views as truth, so that’s an oxymoron, innit.
Its mission is to
Debunk the myth of overpopulation, which cheapens human life and paves the way for abusive population control programs
Expose the relentless promotion of abortion, abortifacient contraception, and chemical and surgical sterilization in misleadingly labeled “population stabilization,” “family planning,” and “reproductive health” programs.
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
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Tags: Anti-feminism, quiverfull