The ultra-conservative Christian majority on the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the 50-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade by passing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion by allowing the states to set their own restrictions on reproductive care, which has resulted in several states totally outlawing the procedure.
Since Dobbs, many state legislatures have banned the safe and effective drugs used in medication abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol. The national drugstore chain, Walgreens, has become the first to ban the drugs even in states where abortion remains legal.
The full Oklahoma state Senate approved a measure prohibiting gender transition procedures for youth under the age of 18 by banning the use of any medications or surgical procedures for the purpose of gender transition. While other states are considering replicating this legislation, some states are looking into restricting gender-affirming care to adults as well.
The Tennessee state legislature passed, and Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill banning drag shows in public spaces. Other states across the country are proposing similar legislation.
Woke; adjective: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).
— Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
By his own admission, Governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to prevent residents, schools, and corporations in Florida from becoming actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) in his rhetoric and his support for the state’s so-called “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act.”
In addition to demonizing Latinx and black immigrants coming from the U.S. southern border and using their bodies as props to promote himself and his far-right agenda, conservative Republicans in the state legislature, along with the Governor’s absolute backing, passed the act to supposedly provide businesses, employees, children, and families the legal means of opposing alleged “woke indoctrination.”
The bill bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other discussions around the topic of the country’s racial history in the schools and diversity, inclusion, and equity training in corporations. The governor recently added to his list the banning of a nationally certified high school AP course on African American history.
DeSantis is not only criminalizing discussions of race and racism, but he is also preventing Florida residents from actively attending to important societal facts and issues of sexuality and gender as well.
Florida’s so-called “Parental Rights in Education” law, called by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, took effect July 1, 2022.
Passed primarily by Republicans in the Florida state legislature and signed into law by DeSantis, the new law reads in part:
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
Though Florida has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity, school contexts, as reproductions of the larger society, function on an overarching system of racism, heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression.
While the incidents of gun violence continue to take the lives of increasing numbers of people and mass shootings are getting to the point of being virtually too numerous to count, too many primarily Republican legislators on the national, state, and local levels refuse to pass comprehensive gun safety measures.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enlarged protections in voting for those previously disenfranchised, until the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), gutted the key provision of Section 5, the heart of the 1965 law that required preclearance for any new voting changes.
So, this supposed “unalienable” and “natural” right of enfranchisement in a “free democratic” system of government continues to face severe restrictions and regulations as state legislators persist in gerrymandering state districts, eliminating mail-in voting, reducing polling sites and drop-off boxes, demanding multiple forms of official pictured ID cards, and other restrictive policies.
Connecting Strands in the Right-Wing Republican Political Agenda
One misses the actual substance and consistency of the right-wing Republican political agenda without exploring the constituent ingredients that go into the entire mix. We must investigate U.S. society historically by following its recipe that combines racialized philosophies of white supremacy and add to the mixture patriarchal, Capitalist, and Christian imperatives that separate individuals into binary constructions of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and social class.
Within a patriarchal, Capitalist, Christian white supremacist system, cisgender heterosexual white non-disabled higher socioeconomic class Christian male bodies matter more, while “othered” bodies matter less. These “othered” bodies include the bodies of people of color, female and intersex bodies, and bodies that violate the “rules” for the reproduction and maintenance of the dominant system, such as trans, gender non-conforming, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual bodies, working class bodies, “foreign” bodies, and bodies with disabilities.
Also, within many Western societies, non-European-heritage bodies are regarded also as abject bodies – bodies that, to use Judith Butler’s phraseology, do not matter, or, at least, do not matter as much as “white” bodies.
Butler reminds us that the term “abjection” is taken from the Latin, ab-jicere, meaning to cast off, away, or out. On a societal level, abjection designates a degraded, stigmatized, or cast out status. In psychoanalytic parlance, this is the notion of Verwerfung (foreclosure).
Butler states that “we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right,” and similarly punish those who fail to do their “race” right. Doing one’s “race” right often depends on doing one’s socioeconomic class right.
The regulatory regimes of “sex,” “sexuality,” “gender,” “ability,” “race,” and “class” are mutually inimical, interconnected, and socially maintained.
Laws are built upon and reflect the society in which they are meant to affect. Patriarchal Capitalist Christian white supremacist individualistic societies oppress and inhibit women’s reproductive freedoms, encourages the inequities in salaries between men and women and white people from people of color, establish and maintain the massive development of wealth by a very few while encouraging the enormous financial disparities between the very rich and everyone else, and many other issues.
If a patriarchal Capitalist Christian white supremacist social and economic system of male domination can keep women pregnant and taking care of children following birth, they can restrict their entry, or at least their level and time of entry, into the workplace, and ensure women’s dependence upon men economically and emotionally.
As women produce more and more children, expanding numbers of little consumers emerge to contribute to the Capitalist system by ever increasing profits for owners of business and industry. The patriarchal system necessary to control women’s bodies amounts to imperatives to control women’s minds and life choices.
In addition, the family’s incessant reification and promotion of hegemonic binary gender categories is now (partially) what drives families in the U.S. to ex-communicate their LGBTQ children and provides fuel for the socially conservative capitalist class to spread sexism, cissexism, and heterosexism because of capitalists’ direct benefit from traditional gender roles rooted in the family-household system.
Trans people contest and disrupt the essentialized binary notion that what one is born with between one’s legs must determine one’s mandated course in life regarding gender expression, social roles, education, employment, reproduction, and other indicators.
And drag demonstrates the instability of patriarchal mandated gender expression, which assures the insecurity of the system itself.
Throughout history, examples abound of male domination over the rights and lives of women and girls. Men denied women the vote until women fought hard and demanded the rights of political enfranchisement, though women in some countries today still are restricted from voting.
Strictly enforced gender-based social roles mandated without choice that women’s only option was to remain in the home to undertake cleaning and childcare duties; women were and continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, physical assault, and rape by men; women were and remain locked out of many professions; rules once required that women teachers relinquish their jobs after marriage in the U.S. and remains so in some countries.
In fact, the institution of marriage itself was structured on a foundation of male domination with men serving as the so-called “head of the household” and taking on sole ownership of all property, thereby restricting these rights from women.
In other words, women have been constructed as second-class and even third-class citizens and have pushed back in becoming victims because through it all, women as a group have challenged the inequities and have resisted patriarchal constraints.
Regarding what some regard as the “God given right to bear arms,” toxic forms of hypermasculinity require the promotion and use of firearms to keep at bay the intensive psychosocial compulsive fear and dread of penetration from bullets, from homosexuals, from the female gaze since patriarchy promises males the right to the aggressive outward intrusive gaze, and from being penetrated and “replaced” by people of color and by “foreigners.”
White supremacy stands as a philosophy of racial(ized) Protestant Christian nationalism in which “race” is defined in relatively narrow binary terms of “white” versus racialized “others.”
The legacy of the effects of white supremacy from the time European colonial expansionists first stepped onto what today is commonly known as “the Americas” benefits not only those who fully embrace this racist philosophy, but clearly advantage those who fall into definitions of “whiteness” whether they perceive or accept their unearned privileges based solely on their socially constructed racial assignment.
Throughout U.S. history, rather than characterizing refugees and refugee issues in humanitarian terms, many conservative and nationalist propagandists use narratives representing refugees as invading hordes, as barbarians at the gates who, if allowed to enter, will destroy the glorious Western civilization we have established among the “lesser” nations of the Earth.
On a more basic and personal level, the rhetoric of invasion taps into psychological fears, or more accurately, terrors of infection: our country, our workplaces, and more basically, our private places in which “aliens” forcefully penetrate our bodies, into our orifices, and down to the smallest cellular level.
Modern day white supremacists/neo-Nazis believe that only white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual able-bodied people have been granted a soul by God. Everyone else they refer to as “mud people,” those without a soul and without meaning, value, or worth.
These binary imperatives also establish and maintain hierarchical borders of power and oppression by privileging groups and individuals constructed as “dominant” while marginalizing and disempowering groups and individuals constructed as “subordinate.”
Their borders establish to various degrees a polarity of exclusion on one side and a polarity of inclusion on the other. This structure is established and enforced on societal, institutional, and individual/interpersonal levels.
The most extreme and overt forms of oppression are directed against those who most challenge, confound, or contest these binary frames established within societal norms in their presentation of self and in their attempts to obliterate the very boundaries from which hierarchies of domination and subordination stem.
Those of us defined as “other” and even those positioned within this binary of exclusion and inclusion have a vested interest in obliterating this patriarchal Capitalist Christian white supremacist status quo!
***
You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
 Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often |
 Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It |
 The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex |
 ..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything |
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Log in if you wish to renew an existing subscription.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: iStock
The post Patriarchal Capitalist Christian White Supremacy as Connecting Strand in Right-wing Republican Political Agenda appeared first on The Good Men Project.
