"How conservative Christian women came to claim “true” feminism" (Salon)

Concerned Women for America (CWA) was founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye, wife of conservative activist—and later Left Behind co-author—Tim LaHaye. Irritated by the ascendance of Betty Friedan’s National Organization for Women (NOW), LaHaye founded CWA to represent traditionalist women who balked at feminist “liberation.” Since its inception, the group has worked to bring “biblical values” to bear on the American political process, with special attention to issues of sex and gender. Over the past three decades, CWA has become a powerful political force, claiming over half a million members.

Leslie Dorrough Smith is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University in Kansas City, Missouri. Her book, Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America, published this spring by Oxford University Press, provides the first full-length analysis of CWA rhetoric...

I wouldn’t use the words “tricky” or “manipulative,” because those words imply that there’s a certain moral ineptness inherent in chaos rhetoric. What I’d claim, rather, is what I said earlier: most of us tolerate chaos rhetoric quite well when it’s being used by a group that we like. In other words, various methods of persuasion (in this case, chaos rhetoric) are called “tricky” or “manipulative” only when a group that we don’t favor shows up to the party.

And that, really, is much of the point of the book, wherein I grapple with whether chaos rhetoric is a unique practice. I demonstrate that it’s not, as I show how many other, seemingly different, groups (including the very scholars who study the Christian Right) do the very same thing: they use chaos rhetoric to portray their own ideological opponents as a force that violates everything that is good, noble, productive, etc. so that they can represent their own perspectives as more logical or mainstream.

The only ones practicing “chaos rhetoric”are Leftists. Accusing conservatives of this tactic means they are finally catching heat for their constant use of it. Solution? More chaos rhetoric, of course, in the form of accusing their victims of using it. And it’s not that this is some sophisticated mind judo - no, rather, Leftists and their liberal tools simply are not creative. They are evil, and evil can’t create, it can only copy and repeat. So that’s what these scumbags are doing, copying and repeating, over and over and over.

Feminism’s big problem right now is that conservative women are openly reclaiming the femininity and natural feminine power feminists stole forty years ago. Feminists never had real feminine power - they just banned acknowledgement of it in favor of stolen male power which they can’t control and which drives females insane because it’s not FOR them in the first place. And I’m not talking about leadership positions or education or pay equality. I’m talking about turning against feminine energy itself and assuming male energy, through everything from imitative emotional affectations to physical swagger, but especially through hateful caracatures of masculinity created by contemptuous Leftist madness.

American women have been so incredibly fooled. Leftist feminists are the true women haters, and have led millions of women into unnatural lives of hateful misery, prescription drug addiction, alcoholism and constant insecurity and fear - all to get their Democrat votes by teaching them to blame their self-created collectivist hell on conservatives.

If liberal women understood what has been done to them by these feminist monsters, they’d rip Hillary and her communist minion feminist Leftists into bloody chunks with their bare hands.

But alas, they remain utterly clueless, and continue to drink the salt water of their feminist masters, hoping against hope that someday they will know peace again, and never comprehending that the collective can only exist in misery.

One thing that surprised me about reading this is that I expected it to thoroughly demonize conservatives at every step, but while the woman author does claim that conservatives employ “chaos rhetoric” unlike how any other group does, she admitted that every group uses it itself, which is something liberalism has stopped doing. These days it casts itself as having the absolute truth and anyone opposing it as stupid or liars. I don’t agree with her, though, that Christians engage in it. We are speaking from our beliefs, but she can’t see that.

I’m so tired of people telling me how to “be” feminist.

I want equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work - that’s it.

Please stop telling me how to vote, abort, have sex, spend my disposable income, or conduct my financial or religious life.

I’m not a child.

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