Deus f*ckin' Vult

 Insecure man and evangelical preacher Joel Webbon recently tweeted (X-ed?) that "Young men are waking up. Women will learn to have a quiet and gentle spirit, or they will learn to be alone." And then he caps it off with a favorite incantation of Christian Nationalists, "Deus Vult."

Our hard-drinking, unqualified Secretary of Defense has the same phrase tattooed on his arm.

Nothing classes up your gang of misogynist punks like a punchy slogan in Latin. It sounds really tough. You can sort of puke up that word "vult." Spit it in some liberal's face. "Uh oh! Take cover! They got Latin!"

It's just another way of saying, "inshallah." Or maybe, "mashallah." Crusader versus Muslim, more god-on-god violence in a clash between religions of peace.

The fundamentalists on either side of that pairing, and numerous other religions, are notoriously incapable of handling free women making their own choices, living as fully adult citizens.

I have the impression that a lot of women are quite willing to choose the "alone" option in the face of even less coercive philosophies than fundamentalist Christianity. And who can blame them?

Young men who follow the teachings of weak men are not waking up to anything. They're just surrendering to the natural insecurity common to all young men. The saying that "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them" is based on very real observations over generations.

Men are not just performing for women. They are performing more for other men than for women. We're talking about cis hetero men now. That's all that the evangelical crowd will admit to being, and is the basis for their public judgment of the behavior of others. Manliness is expressed through power and control.

Just as slave owners attempted to convince the enslaved that they belonged in their inferior status, so too does sexism attempt to convince women to give up and let the man decide. As a competitive strategy, it makes sense. Why compete against a large field for whatever status you crave when you can persuade a bunch of them to forfeit without even trying?

Women have options. The religious right hates that, and is doing everything it can to eliminate those options.

I can understand why a woman would want to forgo the option of independence. Adulthood is scary. Women have had the shelter of a dependent relationship without the social stigma that would attach to a fearful young man who didn't want to face life as the master of his own destiny. But apparently some women felt enough shame and insecurity about that to oppose feminism for as long as there has been feminism. The stay-at-home wives and mothers want their role to be unchallenged. Don't make them look bad by achieving things. They have a strong ally in the religious right.

The problem with good old fashioned subjugation of women is that not every woman is going to find a lord and protector. What happens to the spare women that no one has wanted? If there is only one measure of womanhood, and that is marriage, the unclaimed brides can all go do what? Drown themselves?

Monotheism breeds simple minds. Atheists will go one step further and say that theism breeds simple minds. There's something to that, but we are so many generations away from giving up the belief in things unseen that we have to figure out how to get along in the meantime. Don't let the religious folks get too riled up into an apocalyptic frenzy. Don't let them make the laws. We can't stop them from talking shit to vulnerable young people, but we can prevent them from enacting drastic official legal penalties for behavior that doesn't adhere to their scriptures.

We have a problem with superstition in this country. People who do not attend an evangelical church, or maybe any church, continue to be swayed by moralistic-sounding arguments from authoritarian religious figures. It's Pascal's stupid wager, made by people who don't even know what that is. They enact it because they're not interested in a life ruled by religion but they're not sure enough that they can disregard it to shore up the wall between church and state.

At the risk of sounding like a libertarian here, we have to get back to celebrating the increasing freedom of individuals. We cannot extend unlimited liberty to groups who only feel fulfilled by taking away the liberty of others. Individual freedom does not transfer to organizations and associations that those individuals may join.

In defense of government, no one can have completely unlimited liberty. Participation in a civilized country has to include some firm elements of a social contract. We debate these constantly, as we should. But we can't let a mania for liberty lead to chaos and destruction any more than we let a mania for authoritarianism do it. Government has a role to protect and serve. Citizens have a role to guide those decisions. Not every government function constitutes oppression, but oppression is constantly trying to take over government functions. It's making a damn good try right now.