Marriage

 

"Mawwiage." (From "The Princess Bride.") Image source.

[content note: it's about how, historically, sexual violence has always been a big part of marriage]

Thinking a lot about marriage lately, and what marriage is overall, in a general sense. As in, if you look at all marriages throughout history. The overall picture of it is very bleak for women, and I don't know what to think about that. My own marriage and my own culture- where you get married to someone because you genuinely love them and want to marry them, and you are equals- this is very much an anomaly if you take an outside, objective view of what marriage has always been.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Can Complementarians Please Stop Using the “You’re Equal to Your Boss” Analogy? (March 2) "When complementarians say, 'Well, that’s what the Bible says' it is fair to answer them back, 'Well, either you are wrong in your interpretation or God is sexist.'"

2. on the other trafficked girls in Esther (February 26) "All of them are captured by agents of the State— "deputies" – to take these girls from their families and get them to travel sometimes exceedingly far distances so that the king can decide if they "please" him."

3. Created to Die? Exploding Termites and the “Very Good” Creation (February 8) "It’s a familiar strategy: describe complexity, express incredulity, declare design."

4. The market for marriage (February 19) "The usual pattern is that pastoralists are inegalitarian, inequality drives polygyny, and polygyny drives male control of women."

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As a reminder, you don't have to read all the news links. But, *do* something. Check on your trans friends, protest, call your congress people, get connected to local groups, donate to groups that help immigrants.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. ACLU Files Lawsuit Against Kansas Trans Drivers License Revocations, Bathroom Bounty Hunter Law (February 27) "The lawsuit is being brought by two anonymous plaintiffs, both transgender men. Both hold driver's licenses with male gender markers. SB 244 retroactively invalidates those licenses, which will 'forcibly out Plaintiffs as transgender.'"

2. Trump administration drops suits against law firms after judges find president's orders unconstitutional (March 3) "'This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the ethical courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying and then won, and those that compromised their ethics and gained nothing,' Gupta said in a statement Monday. 'Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed.'"

Oh but wait, DOJ is [not?] dropping its appeals of losses in the law firm order cases. What is going on? (March 3) 

3. Who attacked a girls' school in Iran, and will there be accountability? (March 3) "As the death toll in the conflict passes 175, calls rise for an investigation into potential human rights violations and war crimes."

4. Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this (March 4) Yes, we should fact-check and not believe everything!

5. Why supporting a shelter for women is now 'kind of radioactive' (March 4) "A global survey by U.N. Women published in October 2025 found that more than 40% of organizations working to end violence against women and girls had to scale back life-saving services or shut down completely in the past year because of funding cuts."

These MAGAs talk about how they're the ones "protecting women" by discriminating against trans people, and at the same time they're massively cutting funding for women's shelters. It's another example of the ideology I talked about in my post about being right vs doing good.

"This advice isn't meant for abusive relationships"

Silhouette of a man and woman holding hands. Image source.

[content note: abuse, rape, victim-blaming]

Here's a good post from Sheila Wray Gregoire: Why You Can’t Say: “This Advice Isn’t Meant for Those in Abusive Marriages”. Gregoire has written many blog posts and books criticizing the harmful marriage advice that is constantly being promoted in Christian spaces, pointing out how this advice is often so bad, it will make an abusive relationship even worse. And sometimes people respond by saying this criticism isn't valid because the advice was only intended for normal, healthy relationships, not for abusive relationships.

(Here's a link with a bunch of examples of Christian marriage books with this kind of unhealthy advice.)

In her post, Gregoire says this response doesn't make sense, because statistically, something like 25% of the readers of these books are in abusive relationships. And people in abusive relationships often don't recognize the abuse until years later. They just read these Christian marriage advice books, and try so hard to follow the advice and fix their marriages.

This is a really good point and I'm glad Gregoire is writing about it. I want to add a few of my own thoughts here.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Psychics in Silicon Valley (February 5) "While it’s incredibly easy to do this with a single believer and even more so with a crowd of believers like those in the audience at a show (because any “misses” might be “hits” for someone else in the crowd), I’ve actually managed to do this even for skeptics who KNEW I didn’t have magical powers, knew that there’s no such thing as magical powers, but were still choked up because suddenly they were envisioning their own dead father standing there saying that he’s proud of them. It’s really convincing."

2. This extremely useful chart about dinosaurs.

3. Chinese Scientists Save Patient Using Pig Liver Outside the Body (February 9)

Also from Sixth Tone: As Services Expand, More Foreigners Seek Treatment in China (February 13) "'This was his only chance but no hospital in Mongolia could perform the procedure on an infant,' his mother, Khurelbaatar Nasantogtokh, told Sixth Tone."

How Chinese Millennials Are Reimagining Weddings (February 13) "From mountaintop elopements to music festival photoshoots, young people in China are transforming weddings from family obligations into personal statements about values and autonomy."

4. A daughter reexamines her own family story in 'The Mixed Marriage Project' (February 10) "And so many of them would say, 'I found out that I had to live in a colored neighborhood. I had to leave my white neighbors. I had left my family in order to marry this Black man and move into the Black Belt. I now couldn't even tell my employer my address, because if they found out my address, they'd know I must be living with a Black man.' Why else would a white woman be living in the Black Belt?"

5. It's a dangerous complication of pregnancy — but a new drug holds promise (February 14) Hey this is really cool- a new drug that treats pre-eclampsia in pregnancy. I had pre-eclampsia during my 2nd pregnancy, and as I understood it, it's very dangerous and there's no cure except to not be pregnant- hopefully you are far enough along in the pregnancy that you can deliver the baby and the baby will survive. If this new drug is able to treat it, that would be great news! Still very early though, so we shouldn't get that excited yet.

6. Kansas City illustrator turns library checkout cards into tiny works of art. She only gets 'one shot' (February 13) "A few decades ago, checking out a library book meant writing your name on a lined, 3-by-5-inch card that a librarian then stamped the due date on."

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Kidney transplant recipient in ICE custody is finally getting meds, wife and attorney say (February 9) "A kidney transplant recipient from Minnesota now in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Texas is finally getting some of the his life-saving medications he needs to prevent his body from rejecting the donated kidney, according to the man’s wife and his attorney. But they say federal authorities still are not giving him the correct dosage and full regimen of the medications."

2. Hating the Game (February 8, via) "The Post's framing only makes sense if, as is often the case, the demand of white bigotry is being accommodated. You can be one of the most popular figures on the cultural landscape and it won't matter; if white racists don't like you, you're controversial and polarizing."

3. Former ICE Facility Worker 'saw people laying in feces' at Baltimore Detention Center (February 6, via)

4. 13 of the most questionable redactions from the Epstein files (February 10) "The draft indictment is particularly notable because it includes three co-conspirators that prosecutors apparently considered charging. The co-conspirators are described as being employed by Epstein, but their names are redacted."

5. DHS's investigation of a man who emailed a DHS lawyer is over — but not the concerns it raises (February 11) "This all began when Jon Doe, the pseudonym used to identify the man, wrote an email asking the DHS lawyer to “err on the side of caution” in addressing the asylum case described in The Washington Post article that Doe read."

6. The Children of Dilley (February 9) "Among them was a letter from a 9-year-old Venezuelan girl, named Susej Fernández, who had been living in Houston when she and her mother were detained. 'I have been 50 days in Dilley Immigration Processing Center,' she wrote. 'Seen how people like me, immigrants are been treated changes my perspective about the U.S. My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live.'"

7. 5 things to know about the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security (February 14) "During two congressional hearings this week, the leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection told lawmakers their agencies would likely not see significant impact on their enforcement operations since both agencies received more than $70 billion from Congress last summer as part of the GOP's massive tax and spending bill."

8. DHS says immigration agents appear to have lied about shooting in Minnesota (February 13)

9. Pride flag raised again at Stonewall National Monument in NYC after removal by Trump administration (February 13)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. A third of kids want to be a YouTuber. Is that a problem? (November 10) "Except this whole thing is silly, because kids do not actually want to work these jobs more than other jobs."

2. How Online Privacy Has Been Championed by Dreamwidth (November 23, via) "In other words, the stated rationale for many of these laws as pro-privacy consumer safety laws is contradicted by Dreamwidth’s very existence."

3. Viola Ford Fletcher, oldest survivor of Tulsa Race Massacre, dies aged 111 (November 25) "Nobody was ever held accountable for the violence and deaths and efforts to rebuild the neighbourhood were stymied by city officials."

4. In a new book, Rep. Jim Clyburn highlights the Black politicians who paved the way for him (November 25) 

5. ‘Do You Want Help?’: Inside Orange County’s Bet on Voluntary Mental Health Care (July 17) "It could take 20, 30 or 40 visits before a client accepts a bottle of water, let alone a prescription for antipsychotic medication, but Orange County officials say this is the only way to build trust with a population that is paranoid and distrustful by nature, or has had very real traumatic experiences of being forcibly treated or hospitalized in the past."

6. Watch China's Shenzhou 22 rescue ship arrive at Tiangong space station (video) (November 25) "Shenzhou 22 is an unprecedented mission for China — an emergency flight mounted on a short timeline to help out three astronauts who have been "stuck" on Tiangong for the past 10 days."

I try to keep informed about any stranded astronaut news. If there's ever a stranded astronaut news story and I miss it, please send me a link.

7. NZ Right-Wing Government Bans Puberty Blockers: "Sacrificing A Generation Of Trans Youth" (November 20) "'By pinning the resumption of prescribing to a UK trial result expected in 2031, the Government has effectively sacrificed a generation of trans youth. They are demanding a level of evidence for trans healthcare that they do not demand for hundreds of other treatments routinely used in paediatrics,' said civil rights organization Rights Aotearoa in a press release." Hopefully this gets challenged in the courts.

8. You don't want to date multiple people who are monogamous with you (November 27) "Your four wives are constantly sabotaging each other to try to cement their positions as your favorite."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Judge's ruling on feds' use of force in Operation Midway Blitz accuses Border Patrol's Bovino of "outright lying" (November 21) "The judge wrote body-warn camera video showed agents 'shoot pepper balls and tear gas at them without any apparent justification,' in direct contradiction to an agent's report claiming 'protesters were becoming increasingly hostile.'"

2. The kingdom of heaven is like: As immigration enforcement surges in North Carolina, Chicagoans share advice, whistles (November 18) "Enriquez said his group met virtually with several dozen political and nonprofit leaders in North Carolina last week. On the agenda were the whistle campaign in Chicago and the “magic school bus,” a volunteer group that escorts children of parents who fear being detained during school pickups and drop-offs."

3. Judge tosses Comey, James cases after finding prosecutor unlawfully appointed (November 24)

And related to that: “Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.” (October 20) "When I received the 1:20 p.m. connection request on Signal—an encrypted messaging service that many journalists use to communicate with sources—my first reaction was that the user identified as “Lindsey Halligan” couldn’t actually be Halligan."

4. Pentagon investigates Sen. Mark Kelly for telling troops to refuse 'illegal orders' (November 24) ??? Not sure what there is to "investigate" here. 

5. Donald and the sexist, offensive, blatantly illegal, brazenly unpresidential week (November 22) "Those with the ability and power to push back on Trump’s crude authoritarianism make us all better off when they actually do so. It works."

6. Trump signs Epstein bill he once labored to kill (November 19) 

7. Green Card Interviews End in Handcuffs for Spouses of U.S. Citizens (November 26, via) "Their interview last week was going smoothly, he said, until three ICE agents walked in and informed them that Ms. Paul, who was holding her infant, was under arrest."

Okay as a US citizen married to a non-US citizen, I have some feelings about this.

They're just trying to deport as many people as they can. This has nothing to do with setting up an immigration policy which is actually fair and reasonable. 

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Big and Little Spoons (November 10) From xkcd.

2. Disney stopped being about romance and started being about trauma (November 10) "In short, these days, Disney/Pixar teaches that you become an adult when you come to terms with your shitty parents."

3. You Aren’t In The DSM (October, via) "Like the Danaids’ jars, diagnoses leak relevance and accuracy as they move across contexts. And yet — the task goes on, because clinicians still need a shared language, insurers still need billing codes, governments still need their statistics, and researchers still need clear descriptions of who to enroll in clinical trials."

This is a really good article about the history and purpose of the DSM, and how that's incompatible with the way that average people understand it. It's useful to have standardized definitions of psychological conditions, for sort of big-picture generalizations about what these conditions are and the guidelines that should be used for treatment- but patients are now viewing their mental health situation like they "have" a certain condition, like it's a thing inside them that's causing their symptoms. That's not what it is at all. These diagnoses are just ways of labelling a cluster of symptoms, and the labels can be used as keywords to find other people who have had similar experiences and what helped them- but that's all it is. Just the variations in the range of human experience, and we find it helpful to group them into categories and label them, but the label doesn't describe an actual *thing*.

4. Axios tried to shame Christian U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico—and ended up exposing itself (November 11) "That’s why the threat of a not-weird white Christian who can comfortably speak about his faith without using it as a weapon against the marginalized poses a real challenge to Republicans. They don’t know how to fight someone like him."

5. Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost (November 3, via) "In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s 'Open Library.'"

6. The Chinese College Student Who Took on Annoying Elevator Ads (November 12) !!! I too am annoyed by video screens in elevators playing ads. This is a thing here in Shanghai- is it a thing in other places? In the previous apartment that we lived in, the elevator had a tv screen that was always playing some little jingles and ads. I have, like, a moral objection to this, because you're stuck there in that small space and they want to force these ads on you. I've even been in elevators that have some kind of projector that projects the ads onto the elevator doors after they close. Not cool.

7. Does the news reflect what we die from? (October 6, via) "Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. US supreme court rejects call to overturn decision legalizing same-sex marriage (November 10, via) Good news.

2. “My Community Is Under Invasion from Our Own Federal Gov’t”: Evanston Mayor Decries ICE Raids in Illinois (November 6, via) "But I feel that our residents have been attacked by a lawless entity, and we can’t just stand by and pretend this is acceptable."

3. ‘A classic authoritarian tactic’: outrage over Trump’s pardons for friends and allies (November 11) "Donald Trump’s unprecedented pardoning spree for political and business friends since returning to the White House has prompted warnings from ex-prosecutors and legal scholars of “corrupt” pay-to-play schemes, conflicts of interest and blatant partisanship."

Trump pardons Giuliani and others accused of plot to overturn 2020 election (November 10)

4. My husband laughed so hard over the fact that the Supreme Court is trying to figure out if tariffs are taxes. He says, in Chinese 'tariff' is 关税 and 'tax' is 税. It's right there in the name. It is obvious to anyone who speaks Chinese. Why do you need the Supreme Court to tell you this.

No, I'm not harboring some kind of wish that my husband will become a Christian

Clip-art image of a bride and groom. Image source.

So JD Vance said that he hopes his wife Usha (who is Hindu) will become a Christian. Here's a link, from Hemant Mehta: JD Vance wants his Hindu wife to convert. It’s Christian Nationalism: Home Edition. 

When asked about this, Vance said a lot of things that sound nice, like how he loves his wife, they talk about this together and work out something that works for their family, he respects that people have free will and can believe what they believe. He's good at saying things that sound nice and reasonable but then when you look at the overall picture of what he's doing, the things he is actively supporting, it's the opposite of that. (JD Vance creeps me out for this reason.)

Anyway, he says they are raising their children as Christians, and that he hopes his wife will become a Christian eventually.

First of all, I want to say I don't find this surprising at all. In my experience with evangelicalism, of course we believed everyone is supposed to become a Christian. Vance is Catholic so there might be some differences between his view and the evangelical view, but yeah overall I get it. We believed that non-Christians are all going to hell. And that knowing Jesus makes our day-to-day lives so much better, and everybody else must be suffering so much, living without Jesus.

There's something kind of ... weird... about being in a marriage and believing that there's something fundamentally wrong with your spouse and they need to change. I'm not sure how to describe it. Disrespectful?

I was taught that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians- then you will be "unequally yoked" and the non-Christian will be a bad influence, causing the Christian to "water down" their faith. This is an extremely normal thing for evangelicals to say, but I find it really offensive. They use the analogy "what if you were standing on a chair, and you were trying to pull someone up- wouldn't it be much more likely that they would pull you down?" WTF, why are we framing this like Christians are higher, better, more moral than non-Christians. Like a non-Christian can only be a bad influence on you. 

I'm a Christian and my husband is not, and we've been together for a really long time and it just really isn't an issue? Because I don't believe he needs to change. Why would he need to change? What reason is there to think that it would be beneficial to him to convert to Christianity?

(A key part of this is that I don't believe in hell. Or, rather, the evangelical version of hell, where the criteria are one's beliefs about Jesus. But surely there has to be some kind of judgment for people who, for example, go around making up dehumanizing lies about immigrants.)

Sure, if someone is interested in becoming a Christian, then yeah it would be a good thing for them to do so. But if they have no interest in it, then ... why try to convince them? How would that help anything? Even if you make the argument "well it's true, and it's better for people to believe true things than false things"- okay, so if it's true that Jesus was raised from the dead, what are the implications of that? Christians have all sorts of different opinions on what it means for us, what it teaches us about the nature of the world, morality, etc- and some of these interpretations are harmful. It's not clear that the truth of the Resurrection is enough to say that it would be a good thing for people to convert to Christianity- what if they convert to one of the anti-human varieties of Christianity? (Like, for example, one that teaches that non-Christians are lower than us and are only going to pull you down.)

For our kids, my thinking is, I want them to be able to make an informed decision for themselves. I want to teach them enough about the bible and Jesus and Christianity that they can understand why I'm so excited about it, why I find it so amazing and life-giving, why I think about incarnation all the time. To know what I love about it, so then they can decide for themselves.

Sometimes I'm reading a book about Christianity with our son, and my husband walks by and makes some kind of snarky comment about the bible. I appreciate that; we need people who make snarky comments about the bible.

I also want to tell our kids about other religions, and atheism, and that people have all sorts of different beliefs about God, and we can't ever know for sure, BUT the important thing is, we should do good and help people. We can be sure about that.

So no, I'm not sitting here in my marriage, thinking about how I've waited so long and I just hope my husband will become a Christian- no, I don't think like that at all. If he doesn't want to, then why would I want that for him? It's not a matter of "well I want him to, but I'm polite enough to not say it out loud"- no, I genuinely don't believe it's true that everyone would be better off if they became Christians.

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Related:

My Marriage Is So Good, I Forgot "Unequally Yoked" Was Supposed To Be A Problem

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now

Because of James Dobson, Christians Believe that Christianity Means Judging and Excluding Queer People

In 2022, after the Club Q shooting, Focus on the Family Colorado was vandalized with graffiti that says "Their blood is on your hands. Five lives taken." Image source and news article here: Influential evangelical group that opposes LGBT+ rights vandalised after Colorado Springs mass shooting

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, has died.

When I think about Focus on the Family, I have a lot of anger and sadness. I grew up reading books written by Dobson, reading Brio magazine (Focus on the Family's magazine for teen girls), reading fundraising newsletters from Dobson. It was all about how, as Christians, we know the correct way to live, we know God's way to live, we know that if people don't follow God's rules, there will be bad results, and so we have to fight to make sure our culture doesn't normalize breaking God's rules.

I really believed all of it. 

And there's a lot I could say, but the areas where this has affected me the most are purity culture and queer acceptance. Yeah, the main source that taught me purity culture was Brio magazine. I totally believed it, totally believed all of it. Totally believed that "losing your virginity" would turn you into a completely different kind of person, unworthy of love, unable to ever have a good marriage. Totally believed that the best-case scenario was to never have physical contact with a guy, until marriage. Totally believed that it was an emergency every time I had a crush- I had to "guard my heart." Totally believed that all of this came straight from God's mouth. 

Purity culture has been such a huge thing in my life. I've blogged about it a lot... I don't really want to say too much in this blog post because it is such a huge thing. 

What I really want to talk about is queerness.

Long ago, when I was a teenager, before I had ever met any queer people, I was reading Focus on the Family's propaganda about them. It was about how being gay is so wrong, so disgusting, and isn't it just horrible that society is beginning to accept them? If there was ever a gay character on TV, Focus on the Family would raise the alarm about it, get all the conservative Christians outraged- how dare this TV show portray a gay person as a regular person that we can empathize with! Pushing the message that gay people exist and that's just fine- NO! The horror! It's not fine, it's against God's law, and everyone who is living "the gay lifestyle" is secretly miserable, and it's an outrage that the media is pushing this dangerous, false message that it's okay to be gay.

There were books that Focus on the Family promoted- which I read- "Marriage Under Fire" (by Dobson) and "The Homosexual Agenda", if you really want to know- which were about how we CANNOT legalize same-sex marriage. That would destroy society. People may ask "how, exactly, would it destroy society...? Seems like if you're not gay, it doesn't affect you?" Well, these books had an answer for that. You see, if same-sex marriage is legal, then people will think it's okay to marry a same-sex partner, which will totally change people's understanding of what marriage is, which will lead to polygamy and people marrying their dogs and pedophilia.

I believed all that. 

And... well, it's a long story, but I wanted to learn more about how to help those pathetic gay people who were trapped in "the gay lifestyle" and needed to know God's love and God's rules and how their lives would be so much better if they just try to stop doing gay things. As I learned more and more- specifically, reading blog posts from gay Christians- I realized that everything that Focus on the Family had said was bullshit.

The bullshit. The mind-boggling expansiveness of the bullshit. Day in and day out, writing about how those bad gay people are going to DESTROY MARRIAGE- and it was all lies. It's really quite astounding, when you recognize the full scope of it... What would cause someone to go out in public, again and again and again, and say nasty, dehumanizing, completely false things about a group of people? How are people doing that and claiming to be Christians, claiming to follow the bible? The bible says "do not bear false witness against your neighbor."

And claiming that we know the correct way to live because God told us, and if you disagree, you're disagreeing with God- the bible says "do not take the Lord's name in vain."

When I think about James Dobson, when I think about Focus on the Family, I think of the verse where Jesus said:

If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Because of the bullshit propaganda promoted by Focus on the Family and other nice Christian groups, people believe that an important part of being Christian is discriminating against queer people. Really. Seriously. So many Christians who, upon hearing about the some aspect of queer people's lives, have a knee-jerk reaction "that's bad, that's against God" rather than wanting to learn about it in order to care about people and "love your neighbor as yourself." So many non-Christians believe that Christianity is anti-LGBTQ. So many news articles with headlines about the fight between Christianity and queer rights, as if something that's good news for queer people is obviously bad news for Christians.

Dobson played a big role in this. Because of Dobson, people believe Christianity is about judging and excluding queer people. Because of Dobson, people believe that "morality" means making rules for other people's sex lives, rather than anything related to helping people. Because of Dobson, news articles say things like "people are voting based on their values" and we all understand it means being cruel to queer people.

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This article from Wonkette has about the right amount of respect towards Dobson: James Dobson Meets His Maker. (It Is The Devil.)

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See also, the Focus on the Family tag on my blog

"The Case for Loving" (kids' book about Loving vs Virginia)

Book cover for "The Case for Loving"

I got this book for my kids: The Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage by Selina Alko. It is a picture book which tells the story of the US Supreme Court case Loving vs Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage.

I'm really into this because I'm white and my husband is Chinese. We got legally married in China so I guess the specifics of US marriage law didn't directly affect us- but still, this is important history that is relevant to my life and my kids' lives, and I want to teach them about it.

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Turns out I really didn't know much about the Loving vs Virginia case

So, in history class in high school, I learned that Loving vs Virginia was the big important Supreme Court case where interracial marriage was officially legalized. But as I read this book to my son, I realized I didn't know any of these other details. I didn't really know anything about it at all.

Some fun facts which I learned from this book:

• Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter lived in Virginia, where they could not get legally married- but interracial marriage *was* legal in Washington DC, so they went there to get legally married. I did not know that different states had different laws about this.
• After they returned to Virginia, they were caught "cohabitating" and put in jail. They ended up moving back to Washington DC because of this. I did not know people were really getting put in jail for this back then.
• Richard Loving's statement that his lawyers read to the Supreme Court: "Tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia." Love this.

But I guess the biggest thing I learned from this book is that the arguments for banning interracial marriage were about "preserving the purity of the white race." I don't remember learning in high school that that was the reasoning behind these laws. In high school, when we learned about the Civil Rights Movement, I kind of got the impression that the reason white people didn't want black people to have equal rights was just some vague "racism" and not liking black people. Just ... as if white people back then were just mean for no reason, and I can't relate to them at all, and they were so obviously wrong. I think we do a big disservice when we portray history in this way, as if we don't have any of those problems now. In reality, white people who opposed the Civil Rights Movement weren't one-dimensional caricatures saying "let's be mean to black people for no reason." No, they made arguments that many people back then felt were convincing- for example, this argument about "preserving the purity of the white race." 

And there are right-wing people *now* saying things like "we have to preserve the purity of the white race." People talking about the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, talking about immigrants with "bad genes" coming into the US, etc. Banning abortion, to force white women to have more babies. We need to realize that the racism of the white people who opposed the Civil Rights Movement 60 years ago isn't really that different from racism we have today. We need to learn from this history, so we don't buy into the same racist arguments that they did 60 years ago.

(Okay, and one more cool thing about the book, on the last page it has a photo of the Loving family, which allowed me to tell my son "this is a true story from history.")

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I guess I talked to my son about race

So recently after I read this book to my son, we had this conversation:

me: I like this book because me and your dad are different races.

him: Why are you different races?

me: I'm white and your dad is Chinese. ... Did you notice that?

him: Yes

Oh good, he noticed that.

I always thought it was weird that parents feel awkward about talking to their kids about race, but now I get why it feels awkward: Because on one level, it's so obvious, everyone can see that I'm white and my husband is Chinese. But on another level, people's ideas about what it *means*, and the history of atrocities committed because of race- all of that is very complicated, how do you even begin to talk to kids about that? I think having books like this helps a lot, because you don't have to figure out what to say, you can just read the book.

But yeah, my son is living his life as a mixed-race person and I want him to be able to talk about it. I've noticed that when he's with me, and we're out and about in Shanghai, Chinese people always ask him, "Do you speak Chinese?" But when he's with my husband and I'm not there, they don't ask that, they just go ahead and talk to him in Chinese.

Oh, and also, the book mentioned slavery, and my son already knows what that is because he watches this Chinese cartoon from the 90's called 海尔兄弟 (Haier Brothers), which was sponsored by a real-life refrigerator company in China, it's about these 2 boys (who are the actual mascots of this fridge company) and they are brothers, but one of them is Chinese and the other one is German, and actually they are androids and not people, also they only wear underwear, and they travel around with 3 humans (who wear normal clothes)- an old man, a boy, and a girl, and the old man is not actually anyone's grandfather, I have no idea how he's related to any of the other characters, and they are all time travelers who travel to different places and times, to teach kids about science and history. This cartoon goes so hard, there are episodes about Africans being kidnapped and put on ships and sold into slavery. My husband has a lot of nostalgic feelings about this cartoon so that's why he wants our son to watch it. I don't quite get it and I wonder if the entire thing is an ad for a refrigerator somehow. It probably sounds bonkers from my description here, but it is a real thing, here is the theme song, enjoy.

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Conclusion

This is a good book for kids in an interracial family. Also good if you want your kids to learn more about US history and the Civil Rights Movement. 

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Related

Raising Mixed Race (a book for parents of mixed-race Asian kids)

"I Want a Popsicle" (a bilingual book for Asian children, about feelings) 

"America: A Patriotic Primer" (Kids' Book Review)

The Bible and Polygamy

Lego scene of Leah telling Jacob to have sex with her slave Zilpah. From the Brick Testament.

[content note: In the world where the bible was written, there wasn't really a concept that women should have a choice over whom they married and/or had sex with. A lot of what is discussed in this blog post is not really consensual- or rather, it's hard to say, because they didn't have the concept of consent.]

In my post The Bible and "Purity", I presented the idea that, contrary to what I had been taught in purity culture, it is *not* true that the bible teaches it's a sin to have sex outside of monogamous hetero marriage and that this rule is the same for both men and women. Instead, what we see in the Old Testament can be better explained like so:

Basically, it goes like this: A girl who's in a good family, with a father who can protect her and have high standards about whom she's going to marry- she is a pure girl. On the other hand, there are plenty of girls and women whom anyone can have sex with, and nobody cares. Slaves, sex workers, girls who don't have their father protecting them, prisoners of war, etc. 

So don't think of sex as being "1 man + 1 woman." It's either "1 man + 1 pure woman" or "1 man + 1 impure woman." 

If she's an impure woman, well, whatever, a man can have sex with as many impure woman as he wants, and why should anyone judge him for that? (Some people would say it's good and normal for a man to be sexually experienced in this way.) Even if he's married, he can still have sex with slaves and sex workers, whatever.

But if she's a pure woman, oh gosh, well a man might actually get in trouble for that- watch out for her father. That would actually be a serious thing, to have unmarried sex with a pure woman. But, still you can't judge the man as harshly as the woman because maybe it's just an honest mistake and he didn't know which kind she was.

In the ancient world portrayed in "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," women were treated better if they were in the "pure" group rather than the "impure" group, but most of the time they didn't have much control over that. Try as hard as you can to stay as one of the "pure" ones, because we all know it's totally fine for men to rape the "impure" ones, that's just the way it is.

Here's the follow-up post about polygamy.

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There's a lot of polygamy in the bible. A lot of male bible heroes who have multiple wives and "concubines."

The way I've always heard Christians talk about polygamy in the bible was like this: Yes, there is a lot of polygamy in the bible, but it's always portrayed as a bad thing. The bible always shows that it leads to problems, like a man unfairly favoring one wife over the others, the rival wives being jealous, all kinds of family drama. Yes, there is polygamy in the bible, but it's OBVIOUS that the bible is teaching us that God doesn't want it to be that way. In the beginning, God made Adam and Eve- marriage is supposed to be 1 man and 1 woman. Even though many many people in the bible did not follow God's plan for marriage, it's clear that the bible portrays that as a bad thing. It's clear that the bible is teaching that polygamy is a sin.

I disagree with this. I do NOT interpret the bible as consistently portraying polygamy as a bad thing. In ancient times, people viewed it as a positive thing for a man to have multiple wives- it was a sign that he was rich and successful. And some of the biblical writers also thought this way- there are bible passages about a man having multiple wives which make a lot more sense if you read them with the assumption that this was a sign of success rather than a sin. 

There are many many bible stories that show problems caused by polygamy. Even so, I don't read these as meaning that the biblical writers believed the entire concept of polygamy was always bad, and no one should ever do it. In some cases, the bible portrays the problems as not necessarily being caused by polygamy itself, but by other issues. And in other cases, there are aspects of the situation which are portrayed positively- I read this as saying that even though there are some common pitfalls you have to watch out for, it doesn't mean the whole thing is bad and wrong.

And, when the bible gives rules related to polygamy, it never comes right out and says "polygamy is a sin, don't do it." It gives rules for how a man should treat his wives fairly if he has multiple wives. And there are certain circumstances where the bible commands that a man should not have many wives- but this only applies to men in those circumstances, not all men.

Buckle up, I have receipts. We're going to look at polygamy in the bible, and we're going to see that it's NOT consistently portrayed as a bad thing.

I hope you woke up this morning and said, "I want to read 10,000 words about polygamy in the bible."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. In Praise of Links (March 10, via) Apparently there are large subsections of the internet where people just don't link to things, and/or the platform (Instagram, etc) doesn't support it? I am so boggled by this. Links are great. What is the internet without links?

2. AI Search Has A Citation Problem (March 6, via) "Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts."

This study gave AI chatbots quotes from news articles and asked them to find the original article (headline, publisher, date, and url). The chatbots did a pretty bad job of it- but also, this isn't really a normal use case for an AI chatbot/ LLM. Normally you use them to tell you about the general vibes about something, not really to get an exact correct answer.

3. Chinese City Offers Families $13,800 for More Kids (March 14) China's one-child policy ended in 2016. Since then, China has been trying to encourage people to have more kids, by making policies which given mothers more maternity leave, or even in some cities giving families money when they have 3 or more kids. 

Really, though, the issue is that after a whole generation under the one-child policy, the economics around having kids are like, you spend such a huge amount of your income on just 1 kid's education- so for most Chinese people, it's unthinkable to have more than 1 kid. I live in China and have 2 kids, and when the second kid was born, both me and my husband got comments from people asking "Why would you have 2 kids??? Kids are so expensive."

So, I think when some city governments give families money for having more kids, that will help increase the birth rate a little bit, but it doesn't really address the real reason the birth rate is so low.

Also from Sixth Tone: Married Chinese Women Are Buying Their Own Homes. Why? (March 18) An article about gendered expectations in marriage in China- the man is supposed to buy a home. This article is about how there's a trend where a wife's parents will buy an apartment, which will be in the wife's name, so that she has her own property, because the main home is in the husband's name (to clarify, this wouldn't be to live in, this would be for her to hold on to as an investment, and/or rent out). Btw, this is about people who have way more money than the average person.

4. What Even is Gender? (Book review) (March 16) "In place of gender identity, George & Briggs propose an alternate framework that they call “gender feels”. Gender feels are attitudes towards oneself having (or the possibility of having) certain gendered traits. They discuss three broad categories for gendered traits: sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories."

5. Harvard will be free for students whose families make $100,000 or less (March 17) This makes me very curious about the statistics on current students' families' incomes. $100,000 seems pretty high to me- does this mean that such a large proportion of the students come from families with much higher incomes than that, such that the school will still receive a decent amount of income from tuition even though it's free for this subset of students? Or is there some mysterious other source of money?

6. ‘I don’t have a sinful bone in my body’ (March 15) "White evangelicals don’t want to talk about the sin of racism, in part, because it challenges their inadequate, unreal, and unbiblical theology of sin."

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Bumper sticker that says "Pray for Trump / Psalm 109:8" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trans People are Under Attack and We Must Help Them (March 8) "Guess how many people in Germany were Jewish in January of 1933? Less than .8%. Half as many. Were their lives inconsequential? And did the Nazis stop with them?"

2. Columbia University Obeyed In Advance, Why Is That Not Working Out For Them??? (March 15) "This is what you would call a threat. Or, as the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia accurately interpreted it, 'We’ll destroy Columbia unless you destroy it first.'"

3. ICE Detention: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (March 10) 24-minute video

4. Where Is The Line? Democratic Budget Capitulation Foreshadows LGBTQ+ Fights To Come (March 16) "If protecting Medicaid and democracy isn’t their line, what does that mean for the issue I have dedicated my life to—reporting on efforts to protect LGBTQ+ people? If faced with a budget that guts transgender healthcare, bans gender-affirming care for youth, and strips funding from any organization or study that even mentions transgender people, would these same Democrats not offer the same excuse?"

Also from Erin in the Morning: Arkansas Bill Would Make “Contributing To Social Transitioning” Of Trans Youth Against The Law (March 18) "The ACLU also notes that any legal cases brought under this bill would be 'extremely unlikely to hold up in court,' calling the suits frivolous and warning that they could target anyone—from cashiers to teachers to hairdressers. 'The bill’s intent is to scare people into silence and deter them from providing respect, dignity, and care to LGBTQ youth,' they add."

5. Judge seeks sworn declaration from Justice Department in deportation case (March 17) "A federal judge Monday ordered the U.S. Justice Department to provide a sworn declaration by noon ET Tuesday with details on how planeloads of alleged members of Tren de Aragua were deported despite his order to turn the planes around."

And related to that: Trump invoking Alien Enemies Act to deport is 'a threat to everyone,' lawyer argues (March 17) "This is not normal and it's not OK."

Also from npr: Pentagon website removes, then restores, page honoring Black Medal of Honor recipient (March 17) Yeah what exactly is going on with this anti-DEI removal of web pages, etc? It's coming across like they think any time there's a person who's not a white man in a position of leadership, or receiving an award, it can't possibly be because that person is actually good at what they do- it must be because of DEI. This boggles my mind because it's just so blatantly racist/sexist- is that really the position that these MAGAs are taking? Really? I mean, I grew up hearing that we should be "colorblind" and affirmative action was bad because it gives certain groups an advantage, but we are all equal and should simply judge people on their actual merits. This "colorblindness" is its own kind of racism, but whatever's going on with this backlash to DEI is something different.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Facing up to the Price on Life (January 29) "I think it’s very important to appreciate that there is no such compulsion: you can acknowledge reality, do a bunch more good than almost anyone else, and still live an incredibly privileged—even self-indulgent—life."

Very excited to find this post- finally, someone is talking about something I've been worried about my entire life: If there are so many people in need in the world, and I have more money than I need, shouldn't I donate literally as much as I possibly can, causing huge hardship to myself? How can it be okay for me to have a savings account when there are people going through emergencies right now? And this writer comes to the same solution as I have: compartmentalize. Decide on a total amount to give- this should be pretty big, bigger than what the average person gives- and then use the rest of the money for myself and quit worrying about if I'm doing enough.

2. Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50,000 cash (March 5) "A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better." Yessssssss this is the exact kind of fact-checking content I am interested in.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. D.C.'s Black Lives Matter mural will be erased. Look back at the iconic street painting (March 8)

2. Trump DOJ's limits on FACE Act enforcement fuel concern from abortion providers (March 9) "The law prohibits threat of force, obstruction and property damage meant to interfere with reproductive health care services, including abortion."

3. DOD Will No Longer Prohibit Contractors from Running Segregated Facilities (March 6) I don't know what to make of this- I've seen commenters on the internet talking about this like it means the government wants to allow racial segregation, but I don't think we should interpret it that way. I mean, yes these people are really racist and are undoing laws that were put in place during the civil rights movement, but I don't think *this specific example* is about that. Let's be careful we don't misrepresent what's going on. I think this- getting rid of the policies that banned segregation in the military- is because those policies included protections for trans people.

4. “Absurd, nonsensical, and unimplementable”: Students react as D.C. U.S. Attorney takes aim at DEI and Georgetown Law (March 9) "'Their definition of DEI is hopelessly vague,' David Super, a GULC professor, said. 'They’re talking about some things that are completely unobjectionable, some things that are controversial, and some things that probably don’t exist at all, all under that one heading, which is irresponsible.'"

5. Hundreds protest Trump administration arrest of Columbia student leader Mahmoud Khalil (March 11) "Khalil's attorneys said he is a green card holder married to an American citizen, and are challenging the validity of the arrest and detention."

6. Trump Makes Supporting Trans People Ineligible For Public Service Loan Forgiveness Via EO (March 11) "Clearly, many organizations could be swept up in this attempt to remove Public Service Loan Forgiveness for those supporting transgender people." This is alarming. The MAGAs aren't just being mean to trans people- they're trying to require everyone else to be mean to trans people too.

Also from Erin in the Morning: "Have You No Decency?": Republican Calls Sarah McBride "Mister," Dems Erupt And End Hearing (March 12) 

7. Love Knows No Borders: Walls, Deportations, & Tariffs (February 7) "During COVID, you may have seen on the news that some couples found ways around border restrictions. One way was to visit each other at the border. Meaning that we found a Canadian road that ran east-west, parallel to a US road. The ditch between these two roads was the actual border."

God, Soul Mates, and International Marriage

Clipart image of a person with a bunch of complicated paths to choose from. Image source.

So here's a question: If "God has a plan for your life", is it possible that this plan involves marrying someone from a different country?

When I was evangelical, of course I believed "God has a plan for your life" and this plan includes 1 specific (opposite-sex) person you're supposed to marry. God has destined a soul-mate for you, supposedly. (This whole "God has a plan for your life" idea causes evangelicals an incredible amount of anxiety because they have to constantly worry about if they've made the wrong decision and accidentally gotten off track for the plan.)

But then, in college I dated a guy who was an international student from China. (I am American and went to college in the US.) Let's call him Xin. I was starting to rebel against purity culture, and I did something extremely naughty: I made the decision to start dating him even though God hadn't told me that I was supposed to. Yes, super naughty and rebellious, and I had a lot of guilt about it. Purity culture teaches that you can't date someone just because you want to- you should only date 1 person, ever, in your entire life, and it needs to be the person that God "planned" for you. You can't date someone just based on your own choices and feelings; no, you need to ask God. Because really, how are you going to know if it's the person you could marry, if you haven't even dated them yet? No way of gathering enough information to know that, without compromising your "purity"- therefore, the only way is to get God to tell you the answer. (Or, in some subcultures of purity ideology, your parents would do most of the work of deciding which potential partner is good enough to marry, before you date them.) And if you end up not marrying them- if you *gasp* break up- well that would be THE WORST THING EVER. You lose so much of your purity. Your God-picked spouse might not even want you anymore, after that.

So I was dating Xin, a guy from China, and one thing that worried me SO MUCH was that I felt this couldn't possibly be "God's plan." Imagine the incredible number of steps God would need to plan out in order to bring me and him together. First, Xin would need to decide he wanted to go abroad for college. Then he would need to choose where to go. After he chooses the US, just think about how many universities there are in the US. And all the factors that would go into picking 1 of them. And then, from my side, there were all the factors that went into me picking which college to go to. And then, once we're both there, God would have to arrange for us to meet. We met because I had suddenly taken an interest in studying Chinese, and I was going to meetups for international students.

It's just... A LOT of steps. Each step could have gone in SO MANY different ways, which would have led to us ending up THOUSANDS OF MILES apart, and never meeting each other.

So how could something like that really be planned?

It made more sense to me to imagine that "God's plan" would be something like, I marry a white guy with a pretty similar cultural background to me. Each step in that "plan" would be something that's fairly high probability- an American chooses to go to an American university, a white student has a friend group/ dating pool which is mostly white students, nobody suddenly develops an all-consuming desire to learn a foreign language, and so on.

Or rather, it depends how far you have to plan ahead. Is it like, God's making this "plan" when I'm already a college student, and the plan is that I should marry someone from China, and so God looks at the students from China who already exist at the same college as me, and then makes a plan from there? Or is it like... planned from birth?

At the church where I grew up, every year when students graduated from high school, the church had a ceremony where they would read all the graduates' names, and each one would tell what their plans were. And I always thought it was funny, roughly half of them would announce they were going to one local Christian college, and roughly half would announce they were going to the other local Christian college. I remember joking with my sister about it- every year we would tally up which college got more. (And then there would be the occasional 1 or 2 students who weren't going to either of those colleges- like me.) Like... being predictable. See, that's the kind of situation where God can easily plan way in advance, about who is supposed to marry whom. Or, say, 2 people both born to families who attend the same church- yeah, God can easily get them together.

But how can it really be "God's plan" to be with someone who was born on the other side of the world? Who for a significant fraction of their life wouldn't have even been able to talk to you, because you didn't speak any of the same languages?

The logistics of it are just a NIGHTMARE. The incredible number of tiny little decisions that need to go a certain way, in order to get these 2 people to meet each other. I just couldn't believe that anyone- not even God- could make a 20-ish-year-long plan that involved so many low-probability events, and have it actually go successfully.

Yeah if the plan is that I marry *a* Chinese person, that's one thing. That's doable. There are lots of Chinese people. But a *specific* one, picked years and years beforehand? No way, not even God could get that to work.

I remember talking to another Christian about this, back then, and she saw it totally opposite from how I did. She said, because all these little things needed to go exactly right in order for me to meet my boyfriend, doesn't that seem even MORE like it was God who had done it?

I didn't buy that, when she said it. We constantly have random encounters with people, caused by a long series of tiny decisions, each of which may have been high or low probability at the time that it happened. It's impossible to predict, but the overall statistics tell us that in general this is how it works. Probably every day I happen to meet people who are in this specific city partly because of some weird unusual event that affected the course of their life long ago. Low-probability events happen all the time, of course they do, but of course you don't know which ones they're going to be. Just like how you don't know what the winning lottery number will be, but you know it will be SOMETHING, likely something that looks like an unremarkable string of digits.

(And also, race is an aspect of this. I felt like... I'm specifically attracted to Chinese guys, is that like... bad? Is it bad to have a preference based on race? And what did God think about it? I had always imagined God to be like my white pastors and Sunday school teachers, viewing China as some faraway backwards place where they talk weird and eat weird food. My God was vaguely racist- I found it impossible to believe that this kind of God would make a plan for me to marry a Chinese guy.)

Way back then, it really had me questioning the whole idea of "God has a plan for your life." Dating a Chinese guy was so new and unexpected for me, and I just couldn't bring myself to believe that it could be something planned by God from the beginning of my life. I just couldn't.

Anyway, fast-forward a few years, and I moved to China, and started dating a different Chinese guy, and now we are married. When we got engaged, it was a very big deal to me that it was an actual choice I was making. It wasn't "God's plan" and I just passively go along with it- no, marriage is a big deal, and it was my decision to marry him. Marriage shouldn't be something that just kinda happens to you as you float through life on "God's plan"- it should be a real choice.

I don't believe in "God's plan" anymore- and I'm glad I don't. It raises way too many questions about how God could possibly make such an intricate plan work successfully, it means you have to constantly be stressed about whether any little decision you make is totally throwing you off track for "God's plan", and it means you're not allowed to make your own choices, but need to be constrained by whatever biases you imagine God has.

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Related:

In Purity Land, a First Date is a Bigger Decision Than Marriage

Is There Choice in the Kingdom of God? 

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now

On Marriage as an Immigrant in China

We're a lot better off if God has no plan

Motivated By Inerrancy Or Sexism?

Icon that says "Bible commentary." Image source.

[content note: rape]

A few days ago I published a post called David's Womanizing, which included quotes from the bible about David's 10 concubines who were raped by David's son Absalom. Here's a summary of that story: David was the king. His son, Absalom, started a rebellion and David had to flee from his palace- but he left 10 of his concubines there. Then Absalom's advisor told him it would be a good political strategy for him to have sex with David's concubines, so he did that. Later, Absalom is killed and the rebellion is over, and David comes back home. Here's what happened to the 10 concubines:

When David returned to his palace in Jerusalem, he took the ten concubines he had left to take care of the palace and put them in a house under guard. He provided for them but had no sexual relations with them. They were kept in confinement till the day of their death, living as widows.

After I published that post, I thought I'd do some googling to see if anyone else was as horrified by this bible story as I was. 

I found a few commentary websites- Precept Austin and Biblehub. Both of these contain excerpts from bible commentaries by many different writers. And... wow, I have feelings about this, I don't know why I have so many feelings, I've read plenty of commentaries before, and what I find on these sites is pretty standard commentary stuff... but... they all just read so heartless to me, and I'm shocked and saddened, wondering how these writers could be so heartless toward these 10 women.

Some commentaries put part of the blame on these women, saying they should have tried harder to resist being raped. Some commentaries say that these women could not be seen in public because it would remind people of Absalom's rebellion. Some commentaries say that they were "defiled" by Absalom and so they couldn't be sexual partners to David any more.

Here's one quote on that, but many of the other commentaries said similar things:

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Put them in ward; partly, because they had not vigorously opposed Absalom’s lustful desire, as they should have done, even with the hazard of their lives; and partly, lest the sight of them should renew the memory of Absalom’s filthiness, and of their own and David’s reproach, which it was fit to bury in-perpetual oblivion; and partly, because it might appear incestuous to have to do with those who had been defiled by his own son; and partly, because as David would not, so it was not now convenient that any other man should have any conjugal conversation with them.

I just... how can someone say something like this? Bible scholars sitting there and writing that these women couldn't be seen in public... like for them to even exist isn't proper because then people will have to think about Absalom. Like they can't be people any more, they can only be ugly reminders of what Absalom did.

(This reminds me of how Monica Lewinsky says people have advised her that she should change her name- because her name is also the name of the scandal. Like there's something wrong with her simply existing in public after what happened to her. She says she will not change her name, and asks why nobody ever says Bill Clinton should change his name.)

At the same time though, I don't know enough about what life was like for kings' concubines to know if this is actually a worse situation for them. Is it worse to be required to have sex with the king, or to not be allowed to have sex at all (or to go out in public, apparently)? Note that this meant they could not have children. Either way it's not great for them. It's not like they all had great marriages with David and then Absalom came along and so David suddenly ended his good healthy relationships with these women. Either way, their having sex or not having sex was full of political meaning, and was never about what they wanted. So, I actually don't know if this was a worse outcome for them or not.

But this story just made me think... what if you're a straight man, and your wife gets raped- would you say "well I'll do the bare minimum to provide for her financially, so no one can accuse me of being unfair to her, but we won't have much of a relationship any more, obviously"? How about, like, having some compassion for her? Why is the commentators' only concern about how it makes David look?

(I mean, I know that's not really a good comparison, because what the bible is talking about here is totally different from how we think of marriage today. I wish Christians would acknowledge that, instead of claiming there's some "biblical definition of marriage" which we supposedly still follow.)

So that's when it hit me- these commentary writers really don't care about women, do they? This is just blatant sexism. I mean... I've often heard feminists talk about how the bible is mainly focused on men, how a lot of famous theologians are men, etc, and I never really paid much attention to that, because there's nothing inherently wrong with talking about men, or learning from men. The issue is when women are explicitly being excluded, and typically you can't know for sure that's happening, you can just look at the relative numbers of men and women and feel a bit suspicious about how it ended up that way.

But... I don't know why, something about this just strikes me as "wow they explicitly don't care about women." To discuss rape victims in these kind of terms, like "well yeah then David couldn't have a relationship with them any more because it would look bad." 

But then I thought, maybe it's not sexism, maybe this heartlessness comes out of a belief in biblical inerrancy. You believe that everything in the bible is true, so then if you read something bad in the bible, you have to accept it and just keep reading without thinking too much. That's why the tone of these commentaries is like "well, here's what the logic would have been, in their society, to justify treating these women that way- okay keep it moving, keep it moving, next verse!"

But wait, no, inerrancy wouldn't apply in that way in this passage. Inerrancy would come into play for passages like Deuteronomy 20:16-18, where God commands his people to "completely destroy" all the people in the promised land. To commit genocide. If you believe in inerrancy, you have to believe that God really said this, and that since God said it, it must be right. You have to believe that genocide is right in this case.

This 2 Samuel passage about David is different. Even if you believe in inerrancy, you don't have to believe that David was right. You can say "yes, the bible is inerrantly recording something that really happened. But what David did here was wrong." See, this verse doesn't say anything about God's opinion. God can't be wrong, but other bible characters can be wrong. In fact, that's one of the go-to talking points that inerrantists use. Someone comes along and makes the argument "there's a lot of violence in the bible" and then the inerrantist answers "the bible isn't condoning that. These passages are descriptive, not prescriptive. People aren't perfect! A lot of these bible stories are about teaching us what NOT to do." Which holds up logically if it's something like this, something that the bible says David did but doesn't mention God approving of it. That argument doesn't work when the bible explicitly says it was God who told them to commit violence, for example.

And actually, there was a part of one of the commentaries that said David did wrong:

David came to his house at Jerusalem, and the king took the ten women, the concubines whom he had left to keep the house, and placed them under guard and provided them with sustenance, but did not go in to them - David seems to respond a bit in the flesh in this passage (in my opinion) especially since the act committed against these women was the consequence of David's sin! Oh, the ever widening circle of our secret sins! Beware! After all who had left the concubines in Jerusalem? David had. And who had heard and should have pondered the prophecy by Nathan about his wives (2Sa 12:11-12+). David had heard this prophecy, and theoretically should have taken the concubines (who were considered lesser wives) out of harm's way. Of course it was a prophecy from God and every prophecy is fulfilled perfectly. So one must propose that David had to leave them to fulfill the prophecy. I don't think he knowingly did that, but somehow was caused to forget Nathan's prophecy. In either event, David seems to react strongly against the 10 women who would have had no choice but to surrender to Absalom raping them! They are collateral damage of David's sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah!!!  

Our sins like David's can affect so many others in so many different ways!

This bit is good in that it says David "seems to respond a bit in the flesh"- this is Christianese for "his behavior is sinful and not what God would have wanted." Also it says "the 10 women who would have had no choice but to surrender to Absalom raping them"- good job not blaming the victims for being raped. Seems like that's a low bar to clear, but several of the other commentaries failed to clear it.

So this commentary writer has thought a bit about what it was like for these women, and how David did not treat them right. But the passage I pasted there only talks about that a little bit; its overall point is discussing how this fulfills the prophecy from 2 Samuel 12:11-12, and making a bland point about how our sin affects other people. 2 Samuel 12 is after David rapes Bathsheba and murders her husband Uriah, and the prophet Nathan comes to David and tells him that was wrong, and "Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight." So now, look at that, Absalom rapes David's wives, we've come full circle, the prophecy is fulfilled, score a point for inerrancy.

Heartless. 

Even though this commentary excerpt has some compassion for these women, it's mostly framed in the context of "did David do the right or wrong thing here?" 

Oh and then that web page moves into talking about "Was David Right to Take Concubines?" which is all about the laws that God gave about marriage, and contains nothing about how the concubines were actually treated. It's all about examining whether or not polygamy breaks God's laws. Nothing about how it affects actual people. That's the inerrancy mindset right there.

But then I thought, maybe there's a third explanation for why these commentaries come across so heartless toward these 10 concubines. It's not necessarily about sexism, or inerrancy- it's about the purpose of a commentary. Commentaries are intended to be resources that pastors can use when they write sermons. And sermons are about "how to be a good Christian" or "here are some things you should believe about God." Caring about these concubines doesn't really fit into that. So the commentaries spend very little time on it.

Oh.

So, my whole life, I've had the wrong idea about the purpose of a commentary.

Uh, let's back up, because I'm really deep in the weeds here. I read lots of commentaries when I was evangelical, but that's not really a normal thing that evangelicals do. Pastors do that. Bible study leaders do that. The average evangelical does not. 

The average evangelical talks a lot about how we're all supposed to read our bibles every day, and we feel guilty for not doing it enough. But no one's walking around in church saying "we should all read more commentaries." 

I took all that "read the bible every day" stuff really seriously. Evangelicals are always talking about how it's so important to read the bible and know the bible and memorize the bible and base your whole life on the bible, but very few actually follow through on that. I did. I did read the bible every day, back then, and I often encountered weird things in the bible, and I felt like "this is weird, I need help to understand it better" and so I would go look for commentaries to help.

Commentaries are useful in the sense that they do at least have some kind of comment on every single verse. It may not be that helpful, it may not acknowledge the WTFery of the verse in question, it may leave me with even more questions than I originally had, but at least it will say something. That's better than all the sermons and Sunday school lessons which totally ignore all the super-weird passages in the bible.

But now I'm suddenly realizing, if I want to "understand the bible better", commentaries are not really the right thing. Commentaries are for "I want to write a sermon based on this bible passage. I want to spin this such that it can teach us something about how to be a good Christian."

So... what I actually needed was not a commentary, but something more... academic? I seem to remember occasionally coming across academic papers about the historical context of something in the bible, and they weren't trying to make a point about "here's what this bible verse can teach us about how to live a good Christian life." They were just, you know, talking about a thing.

The awkward thing about an academic treatment of the bible, though, is that it won't be from a biblical-inerrancy perspective! So good evangelicals aren't really allowed to read that.

And what I need now is not really a commentary, but maybe something more along the lines of a feminist reading of the bible. That's why I'm enjoying the book "Womanist Midrash" so much.

But wait, back up, I seem to be saying here "when I was evangelical, I just wanted to understand the bible better, so I read commentaries, but that wasn't really the right thing, because commentaries are written from the perspective 'here's what this bible passage teaches us about how to be a good Christian.'" Uh, hello, when I was evangelical, I *did* believe that all bible passages had something to teach us about how to be a good Christian. I *did* have that mindset when I read the bible. 

Every day I did my daily bible reading, and I believed that I would read something that would inspire me and connect me with God. And when I felt depressed, or lonely, or had doubts, or other negative emotions, I would open the bible and expect that God would help me feel better through reading it.

And it all fell apart when I started to question evangelicalism... I would try to do my daily bible reading, and over and over I would get stuck on this or that weird thing. I would come into it thinking I'm gonna open the bible for 10 minutes and get some inspiring message from God, and instead all I could think about was how so many little things in the passage struck me as wrong. (I wrote about this in 2015: Why on Earth Did I Ever Expect the Bible to be Anything Other Than Incredibly Weird?)

It used to be, when I was feeling bad, I would take my bible and open it and read something- I had a few favorites that I would often read in situations like this- and it would help me feel better. And I took that as evidence that the bible truly is from God. But I'm ex-evangelical now; I don't think that way any more. 

I still have favorite bible passages. There are bible passages I love, that I find very inspiring. But I'm very aware that I picked them out of a sea of, well, everything. A sea of problematic stories and ancient misogynistic laws and violence and genocide. They don't serve as evidence that the bible is "God-breathed"- they just show that all throughout history, there have been at least some people who have had really profound and inspiring things to say about love and justice.

So. Wow this has become a long blog post- can we bring this back to David's concubines somehow? Why do the commentaries care so little about what life was like for them, and the injustice of David responding to their being raped by ending his relationships with them? Is it because of sexism- the commentators are men who just really don't care about women? Is it because of inerrancy- the commentators need to keep their belief that everything the bible condones is right? Is it because of the whole purpose behind writing commentaries in the first place- they're meant to help frame the bible in a way that lends itself to teaching us how to live our lives- and caring about David's concubines doesn't fit into that purpose at all?

I remember when I first began to encounter feminist readings of the bible, how my mind was blown by things that had been there the whole time- I knew these stories, I knew these characters, but I had just never thought of them in that way. I guess I had been held back by sexism, inerrancy, and the belief that the bible is meant to teach us lessons on how to live our lives.

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Related:

Womanist Midrash

David's Womanizing

The Worst Bible Story 

Why on Earth Did I Ever Expect the Bible to be Anything Other Than Incredibly Weird? 

"The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It"