• Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances – from WYG site

Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances – from WYG site

The one thing more difficult than losing my mother was the lack of emotional support I received after she died – that plus the insensitive comments and platitudes I got from other people.

I’ve been thinking of writing about my experiences with how horribly extended family, immediate family, online friends, real life friends, and church people hurt me or totally let me down in my time of grief, for this blog.

In the meantime, there is this page, linked to below, from WYG (“What’s Your Grief”) which outlines many of the ways you will be mistreated during your time of grief: you’ll either be ignored, wounded, insulted, or offended by the people in your life who should be emotionally supporting you (and perhaps offering practical help to you) during your time of grief.

I completely related to several items on this page.

I’m only going to place a portion of the WYG article on this page; if you’d like to read the entire thing, please use this link:

Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances

Nothing puts a person’s support system to the test quite like a crisis. When the clouds of hardship dull the glare of more happy and carefree times, a person often sees their support system accurately for the very first time.

For some people, this is a reassuring experience, as they find their support system is similar to what they had assumed it would be. For others, it’s a bit, shall we say, disconcerting.

Many grieving people find that changes and disappointments within their support system become a secondary loss. They had assumed a certain type of support would be given and they feel hurt and angry when it isn’t.

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• Gender Complementarian Vs Gender Egalitarian Song Lists

Gender Complementarian Vs Gender Egalitarian Song Lists

This first song is how gender complementarians envision marriage and relationships between men and women.
It’s unbiblical, insulting, and why even so many Christian marriages with “traditional values” fail and end up in divorce.

1. Put Another Log on the Fire by Tompall Glaser

2. Strut by Sheena Easton

Complementarians often teach pure male entitlement (and lie and say it’s “God’s design”) – they also have a lot of false ideas about women’s sexuality.

Namely,  complementarians assume that only men want sex, and women don’t want it, don’t like it, and don’t need it. (Think of, for instance, complementarian morons such as “preachers” Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson.)

Complementarian pastors, who are male (of course), therefore never (that I’ve heard) address the topic of husbands sexually pleasing their wives. Pastors never address what women want and prefer in sex.

Complementarians value women only as brood mares: for wifey-hood (i.e., doing housework), sex, and having and rearing children.

Also, hypocritically, a lot of Christian men use pornography, including pastors, and some of them commit fornication (see again: Mark Driscoll for one), some of them are molesting teen-aged girls who attend their churches (see: Andy Savage), but every Sunday, they are paying lip service to being chaste or staying a virgin until marriage.

Anyway, the assumption with these sexist ass-hats (complementarians) is that a man’s sexual needs and preferences are paramount, so they coach wives in their sexist, stupid books, sermons, and blog posts, that the wife should always have sex whenever and however the husband wants.
Which results in this song:

Read the lyrics to the Strut song here or here.

• Conservatives Still Misunderstanding and Misrepresenting the Concepts / Terms Toxic Masculinity and Traditional Masculinity – The Christian Post Editorial by M. Brown

 Conservatives Still Misunderstanding and Misrepresenting the Concepts / Terms Toxic Masculinity and Traditional Masculinity – The Christian Post Editorial by M. Brown

A very brief reminder of who I am or what I believe:
I used to be a Christian gender complementarian, but I left complementarianism years ago, and I now question (but did not reject altogether) the Christian faith.
I do not identify as a feminist for reasons I explain here.
I remain a conservative but left the Republican Party approximately three years ago.
(In other words, I am not a liberal, I not a feminist, and I am not an atheist.)

In the past few weeks, debates and conversations about the concepts and phrases of “Traditional Masculinity” and “Toxic Masculinity” broke out once again thanks to the APA and a television commercial by razor company Gillette.

A few days ago, I was skimming the headlines at The Christian Post site and stopped to read this, by a Michael Brown:

Is it harder to be a man or woman in America today?

In that editorial, the author, Brown, discusses Traditional Masculinity and Toxic Masculinity (in this post of mine, I will pretty much use both phrases interchangeably).

In that editorial, Brown linked to a Tweet he made, in which he inserted a Twitter poll, asking ‘who has things worse, men or women.’

After I finished reading Brown’s editorial on The Christian Post site, it was evident to me he has a flawed understanding of what the term “Toxic Masculinity” means, so I tweeted at him to say as much, and I was very polite through the entire exchange.

I did not use profanity, lose my temper, engage in name-calling or personal attack (ad hominem) when tweeting to Brown.

• Christian Tells SC Lawmakers Not to Hang “Evil” Photo of Female Legislators

Christian Tells SC Lawmakers Not to Hang “Evil” Photo of Female Legislators 

I’m surprised that this news story didn’t make more inroads on Twitter or on some of the abuse survivor blogs that sometime cover sexism against women by men in the church.

Even when I was a very devout Christian, I never wanted to live under a Christian theocracy in America (as some Christians fantasize about having) precisely because of kooks like the one mentioned below.

Even when I used to be a Christian gender complementarian, I did not agree that the Bible limits women as severely as some male complementarians teach.

When I was a complementarian, I saw nothing in the Bible  that taught that women were less intelligent than men, that women were more naive, more easily deceived than men, or said anything that prohibited women from holding public office or taking on other roles for all time (many of the Bible’s apparent prohibitions on female behavior in the church, and so on, were cultural and not intended to be timeless). But complementarian interpretations, as taught to me by complementarian pastors and web pages, told me, or gave me the impression, that God felt that women were lesser than men.

Speaker at Hearing Who Says Women Not Fit for Office Stopped

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A panel of lawmakers stopped an activist from speaking at a public hearing after he spent three minutes saying women are not fit to run for office and called feminism “destructive and evil.”

Christian Tells SC Lawmakers Not to Hang “Evil” Photo of Female Legislators

Snippets:

by Hemant Mehta

[Women members of South Carolina’s legislature wanted to put up portraits of women members on State House grounds to inspire other women to enter politics]

…Columbia Christians for Life director Steve Lefemine argued that women are unfit for public office because something something the Bible. Even South Carolina legislators thought he went too far in pushing his faith and ranting against “destructive and evil” feminism.

Just as Lefemine began to explain Tuesday why the “Biblical doctrine of the headship of man disqualifies a woman from civil office,” state Rep. Russell Ott interrupted.

The Calhoun Democrat said he also is a Christian but has found nothing in the Bible that “backs up anything that you are saying.”

• Preacher Murdered His Wife Because Divorce Was Considered Unacceptable In His Denomination – What Does This Say About Legalistic Christian Teachings On Divorce?

 Preacher Murdered His Wife Because Divorce Was Considered Unacceptable In His Denomination – What Does This Say About Legalistic Christian Teachings On Divorce?

I watched a televised program about a preacher who hired two hit men to kill his wife of 20+ years, and one comment on this program that stood out to me was one that went something like this:
“He had his wife murdered because divorce was not acceptable in his denomination.”

This murder happened in the late 1980s.

The police detectives started suspecting the Church of Christ pastor, Charles Sennett (Senior), was behind the murder, one reason being, they discovered he was having an affair – and I believe he was having an affair with one of the women in his congregation (how much of this was 100% affair vs. a case of Clergy Sex Abuse I do not know, because the show did not go into great detail about this relationship).

As it turns out, the preacher lied to his mistress, Doris Tidwell.

Sennett lied and told Tidwell that he needed her to give him $3,000 for a legitimate reason (I think he may have told her he wanted to repay a loan) – but in reality, the preacher had to pay two hit men a few thousand to have them bump off his wife, who was about 45 years old at the time.

The mistress gave him the money – which he used to pay for the murder.

• Americans Trust Clergy Less Than Ever, Gallup Poll Finds By Carol Kuruvilla

Americans Trust Clergy Less Than Ever, Gallup Poll Finds

Americans Trust Clergy Less Than Ever, Gallup Poll Finds

Snippets:

Americans’ confidence in religious leaders’ honesty and ethical standards has been tanking in recent years.

By Carol Kuruvilla

The level of trust Americans have in clergy members has dropped to a record low, a recent Gallup survey suggests.

The polling organization found that only 37 percent of 1,025 respondents had a “very high” or “high” opinion of the honesty and ethical standards of clergy, according to a report published on Thursday. Forty-three percent rated clergy’s honesty and ethics as “average,” while 15 percent had low or very low opinions.

• When Men Rule the World by Andrew Bauman

When Men Rule the World by A. Bauman

I do think that in some ways, complementarianism may be worse than “wordly” sexism, because Christians take sexism, slap some Bible verses on top of it to justify it, and say it’s all “God’s design.”

When Men Rule the World by A. Bauman

Snippets:

Women were less than. No one would have said that out loud, but growing up in my white evangelical utopia deep in the South, we all knew it was true: men ruled the world.

My presidents: always men, my pastors: always men. Most CEOs, elected officials, and anyone I knew who had real power, authority, or influence, was, like me, a man. I wanted power, too. I genuinely wanted to make a difference in the world and thought that developing a domineering masculinity was the answer.

American culture taught me that women were sex symbols; subjects for my lust and objects to be taken advantage of, not honored.

What I learned from the Church wasn’t much different, it just looked more respectable on the surface. Sexism was just as present, objectification just as potent, and the subjugation of women was actually worse, because it was cloaked in “Godliness”.