Female Frontal Lobal Mutilation: It's all part of god's maniacal plan.

A very dear friend sent me a link the other night to the most frightening thing I’ve seen since the movie Jesus Camp. The link was to the web site of – I am not making this up – Future Christian Homemakers™ - whose subtitle is “Teaching Girls To Become Successful Homemakers”. As one might expect the predominant colors of the site are white, green and a pink that any Mary Kay sales executive would be proud of. The mission statement of this organization dedicated to turning perfectly normal girls into Stepford Wives reads as follows:

“Future Christian Homemakers teaches girls how to become successful homemakers.

We believe that a successful homemaker is a Godly woman equipped with the Biblical knowledge and practical skills to manage her home well. The Bible is God's word instructing us how to live now, and for eternity. A woman will find true joy and success in her life when she lives according to God's word.

Along with Biblical knowledge, women need to know how to cook, sew, and keep their home. This instruction should begin at a young age in the home. Future Christian Homemakers seeks to provide materials to help girls learn these skills at home, or through groups in churches, homeschool co-ops, or other settings.

Future Christian Homemakers encourages women to teach the younger women to love their husbands, love their children, and be "keepers at home." Titus 2:3-5 We have much to learn from each other, whatever our age! FCH helps women share their knowledge and skills with the next generation and build strong Christian families.”

Of course, after first being appalled by the very concept it occurred to me that there’s a great deal of absurdity here. Can’t you see the Home Ec class:

Sister Faith: And we will now read from the Gospel according to Betty Crocker, Chapter 14, verses 4 through 10.

And, Lo. It was revealed unto me that first thou shalt preheat thy oven to the temperature of three hundred and seventy-five degrees, for this is the temperature that the Lord hath ordained, that thy oven may bake for thee as is meet and right. Thou shalt, as thy oven heateth, take thy sticks of butter unto three quarters of a pound, no more and no less, and soften it according to the laws of our fathers with thy spatula for it is better to cream thy butter than to leave it whole. And when thou hast thy butter creamed thou must add to it a measure of two cups of the sweetener men know as sugar. And the Lord hath ordained that thou must cream it now also until the mixture is, as the Lord saith, fluffy. And unto that fluffiness of butter and sugar thou shalt beat in 2 eggs (for the Lord careth not for the unborn chicken) and but half a cup’s measure of molasses. And when thou hast created a good and fitting batter, thou shalt lay aside thy beater and arm thyself with thy sifter and sift together with one another in good fellowship four cup measures of fine flour and two teaspoons’ measures each of baking soda and the powder of cinnamon, of cloves and of ginger. And into thy batter shalt thou mix these dry siftings little by little with strong and measured beating until thou hast a soft dough. And so saith the Lord, thou shalt break off a piece of dough and roll it between thy hands into a ball that is nigh unto one inch in diameter. Thou shouldst then flatten thy ball of dough placing each on thy cookie sheet which thou hast heretofore coated with grease as is pleasing unto the Lord leaving a finger’s span between each piece. And the Lord said place thou thy cookie sheet in thy preheated oven and leave it there for twelve to fifteen minutes of the clock for in this way has the Lord ordained that thou shouldst make thy ginger snap cookies.

Satire is always a great way to emphasize the absurdity of a con like “Christian Homemaking” but it begs the larger question of why are these self-professed CHRISTIANS so interested in promoting a traditional, subservient model of womanhood. Tradition is not, in itself, a bad thing but so why does this emphasis on tradition seem so perverse?

I am an atheist. I do not accept the idea of a big, imaginary friend in the sky especially since to do so, in my estimation, requires ignoring obvious empirical facts that no amount of faith or belief can overcome. But I must say that I admire many people who do not share my complete skepticism. I was brought up in the Christian tradition and found in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth a prescription for how to behave in the world whose keynotes are love and forgiveness. Yet it seems to me that those CHRISTIANS who express their shallow religiosity through the fundamentalism espoused in the site at hand live by fear and hate, very un-Christian vales indeed.

We are not facing a tradition here. We are not facing a necessary building block of human society. We are facing fear of change and intolerance of diversity which is self-denying. The women who provide this web site and its teachings can’t possibly be the silent, compliant “keepers at home” that the writer posing as St. Paul demands they be.Who do they admire? Ann Coulter? Bay Buchanan? Lynn Cheney? Phyllis Schlafly? Are these the example of “keepers at home” that they present to the girls that they would subjugate?

What we have here is the fundamentalist CHRISTIAN intellectual equivalent of female circumcision. When one reads accounts of women who have been subjected to that barbarity in every instance the account says that the children are led to the place and time of their mutilation by their mothers, aunts and or grandmothers. These elder women dutifully subject their own children to a horror that they too must vividly remember. I don’t know what goes through their minds as they subject a girl to pain and a bizarre ceremony but we know that they are willingly complicit in the mutilation because they have been brainwashed into believing that their traditions and faith require it.

We understand that an unwarranted disfigurement of a child is the result of brainwashing and barbarity. I suggest that the intellectual brainwashing and barbarity of Future Christian Homemakers™ is no less disfiguring, no less an attempt to brainwash and no less a barbarity.