Vyckie Garrison was once a prominent member of the Quiverfull community, a rapidly growing Christian fundamentalist movement that bans birth control and encourages huge, "Biblical families" such as the Duggar Family of TLCs "19 and Counting" fame. Garrison edited and published a Christian "pro-life, pro-family" newspaper for 16+ years in northeast Nebraska while home-churching, home birthing, and home schooling seven children. She made waves when she left the Quiverfull movement, divorced her husband, and began speaking out against the lifestyle. Vyckie has appeared on The Joy Behar Show, The Secret Lives of Women, The Story with Dick Gordon, as well as numerous podcasts and radio programs including Thom Hartmann, Living After Faith and Godless Bitches. She is a well-respected adversary of Biblical patriarchy and the damages that it can inflict. She started the blog, "No Longer Quivering," to provide support to women and children who are escaping abusive religious movements, and to provide the public with accurate, compassionate information on the unique challenges faced by the spiritually abused.
Freedom of conscience” is code for “the right to enforce conformity amongst religious women.” Actual freedom is about having a choice. The Church and its supporters want to monopolize freedom and choice for themselves while taking those things away from their employees and congregations.
In most of the online discussion of how dangerous Michelle Duggar playing maternal Russian roulette actually is no one seemed to hit upon my first thought, how quickly would Jim Bob replace her with a newer, younger, prettier model?
Modesty taught me that my first priority needed to be making sure I wasn’t a “stumbling block” to men. Not being sexually attractive was the most important thing I had to consider when buying clothes, putting them on, maintaining my weight (can’t have things getting tight!), and moving around (can’t wiggle those hips, or let a little knee show). Modesty taught me that what I looked like was what mattered most of all. Not what I thought. Not how I felt. Not what I was capable of doing. Worrying about modesty, and being vigilantnotto be sexy, made me even more obsessed with my looks than the women in short shorts and spray tans I was taught to hate
In the same way that the fundamentalist Christian God allows people to exercise their free will by choosing between worshipping and serving Him or else burning in Hell forever – the Quiverfull woman must make the decision to trust God and perhaps die physically, or trust in the Pill and her own common sense and die spiritually for all eternity. That’s not a choice – it’s an ultimatum.
Jim Bob & Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 & Counting” fame announced on TODAY they are expecting baby #20 – due in April 2012. The flip side of the Quiverfull ideal of “trusting the Lord with our family planning” which Jim Bob Michelle embrace and promote through their TV Reality show, website, and is that Michelle also accepts the possibility of her own or her baby’s deaths, should such tragedy occur, as God’s will.
Trigger Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of infant and child abuse.
The death toll from parents following Michael and Debi Pearl’s teachings continues to mount. Another child is has been “biblically chastened” to death via corporal punishment, and Michael Pearl is defending his teachings in the mainstream media while promoting his new book.
Deep within America, beyond your typical evangelicals and run of the mill fundamentalists, nurtured within the homeschool movement and growing by the day, are the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. This is where I grew up.
Fundamentalist Christians are convinced that contemporary American society is the World’s Most Spectacular Display of hideously mutated, diseased and anomalous freaks. ”Step right up folks!” the preacher yells, “and witness a grotesque parade of ho-mo-sex-uals, lesbians, Wiccans, radical feminists, godless liberals, secular humanists, and … (congregation gasps) Muslim extremists!”
There’s one “little” detail in THE FAMiLY LEADER’s “Marriage Vow” that critics have overlooked – small, subtle, and yet glaringly obvious once you see it: Simply stated, women who are unwilling to subordinate and sacrifice themselves to populate America’s economic and political war machine are selfish with a capital “I” - s.e.l.f.I.s.h.
Sarah Jones conducts an interview with Vyckie Garrison about why she walked away from the biblical patriarchal Quiverfull movement and the impact she thinks the movement has on far-right politics.
