Conservative Women's Aunt Lydia Problem

on promiscuous politics and ideological identity

The Handmaid’s Tale has become a cliché.

Pro-abortion activists have been donning red robes and white visors and stalking the Capitol plaza in protest of the American Christian right since President Donald Trump’s first campaign. We’re all familiar with the sight, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t rolled my eyes at it in the (recent) past.

Their “hysteria,” as I’d seen it, was mostly based on a set of paranoid lies. If any religion in the world is guilty of enslaving women for the purposes of reproducing biomass, it’s Islam, not Christianity. Trump, for one, can hardly be classified as a religious rightist. 

But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t now see the legitimacy of some of these feminists’ fears – increasingly and especially on the right.