Recognizing The Culture Behind Roy Moore's Abuse
Obviously, we are and will be consumed by sexual harassment and assault accusations for the foreseeable future, and rightly so. And, again quite obviously, the media is focusing on the sexual assault on a 14 year old by Roy Moore, especially in light of the other revelations about sexual predators in Hollywood, the media, and politics. But the issues with Roy Moore’s preoccupation with underage girls is also reflective of a problem in certain theocratic, fundamentalist communities like the one Moore inhabits.
One of the people who stood alongside Roy Moore at a rally earlier this week is a prominent preacher, Flip Benham, who had this to say about Moore’s situation, “Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam and then came back and was in law school. All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere. So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies. By the way, the lady he’s married to now, Ms. Kayla, was a younger woman. He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that.”
Benham’s statement is a perfect encapsulation of a widely held belief in many conservative evangelical communities. Essentially, it is OK for an older man to date or even marry underage women because they are “pure” and those girls can then be molded into the wife that will serve that man’s needs as perfectly as possible. One of the 17 year old girls that Moore wanted to “date” in fact asked her mother what she thought about that possibility to which her mother responded, “I’d say you were the luckiest girl in the world.”
According to one woman who grew up in a fundamentalist environment, “there is a segment of evangelicalism and home-school culture where the only thing Roy Moore did wrong was initiating sexual contact outside of marriage. 14 year old girls courting adult men isn’t entirely uncommon.” Another woman with a similar background said, “A woman’s role is to be a wife, a homemaker and someone who births children. The man’s role is generally to be established and someone who provides the full income. It may take longer for a man to reach stability. While a woman of 15 or 16, if she’s been trained for a long time looking after her younger siblings, in their eyes she might be ready for marriage.” Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson put it more bluntly when he said, “You got to marry these girls when they are about 15 or 16.” In fact, Moore himself admits he first noticed his wife at a dance recital when she was 15 years old and eventually married her eight years later.
It is this culture that allows many of Moore’s supporters to discount all the allegations about dating teenage girls and even hanging around the mall. And that just really leaves the two accusations of inappropriate behavior which are also shrugged off by simply not believing the accusers. As an evangelical minister says, “It’s been so many, so many years. People’s recollections are different. You don’t know if somebody’s embellishing. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and say let’s see what the truth is.”
Virtually all sexual harassment and assault is more about control and power than actual sex. And these highly patriarchal communities where the roles for girls and women is to be subservient and support a man in the way that please him most are especially susceptible to these kinds of inappropriate and illegal behavior. In fact, the women themselves are often blamed for the sins of the men. As one woman said, “When you’re taught that if you don’t dress modestly enough, that a man could lust after you and fall into sexual sin, then if a man has an abusive sexual relationship toward you, you could believe that it was what you were wearing or what you said or how you walked that caused him.” It is the ultimate “she was asking for it” mindset. And it’s compounded by the search for “purity” that men are looking for in a wife in these communities.
Obviously, this is a legacy of the agrarian economy where young girls were merely considered an extra mouth to feed and needed to be unloaded as soon as possible. That legacy was then entrenched in a religious and cultural tradition, in a similar way to polygamy in the Mormon community. But, just as the idea of Southern heritage can be used a s cover for hatred and racism, this religious tradition can and is used and perverted for sexual assault and abuse.
While the rest of us our confounded by the support for Moore, especially in the evangelical community, portions of that community look at the condemnation of Moore as part and parcel of the elites condescendingly criticizing their “culture”, the very same feelings that Trump taps into every day. This is what is distinctly different about the sexual abuse charges against Roy Moore as opposed to the charges against, say, Franken and Conyers. Yes, their is a certain cultural aspect to all abuse, but only in Moore’s case does the culture allow for what is essentially child predation. It is important to recognize that distinction.
