An Arizona student, Dean Saxton, spent time on the streets shouting at women whom he deemed to be dressed too provocatively, "You deserve rape!" Interviewed by Vice, he doubled down on his hate speech and misogyny.
In an interview with Vice, University of Arizona student Dean Saxton, who preaches under the name Brother Dean Samuel, explained why he protested outside a documentary about 1998 Miss World Pageant winner and rape survivor Linor Abargil last month.
“She is a beauty pageant contestant and there’s a lot of provocative, you know, seductive pictures of her that she has put out of herself,” he said. “I believe that if she was at home, and if she had kept to her Orthodox Jewishness, that rape would really probably would not have happened.”
More hate speech below the fold.
“One street preacher said, you know, if you dress like it, you act like it, different things like that, you’re asking for it,” he opined to Vice. “Therefore, you deserve rape. And his last three words I felt like were nice, and I decided to put them on a sign, and go to the event.”
“I believe there are certain qualities that may be worthy of rape,” the street preacher added. “If a woman dresses proactively, gets blackout drunk, and is wearing really revealing clothing, then I would say that she is partially responsible for the rape.”
This is the same sort of misogyny that got Todd Akin beaten by such a big margin. The sad thing about Saxton's rhetoric is that it is not that far off from certain elements of the Republican Party.
Vice News broke the original story and TYT also covered it here:
Ana Kasparian makes the point that people like Saxton actually do a public service by a showing what the Bible literally says about rape. Under the Old Testament law, women were considered to be property, and rapists had to pay a fine to their fathers. If a woman was raped in the city and they did not cry out, they were to be put to death. Around the time of Jesus' birth, women could be thrown in the wells for having extramarital sex since the assumption was that she violated her family's honor by giving up her virginity.
Jesus changed that by declaring that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Since none of us are free from sin, none of us have the right to cast stones in such cases.
The whole problem with people like Saxton is that the very Bible he claims to stand on talks about a state of mind where people refuse to listen to reason and harden their hearts in the face of all evidence. The disturbing thing about that state of mind is that when you harden your heart to a certain point, then God takes over and hardens your heart to your own destruction. This is what happened to Pharaoh, for instance. Jesus believed that certain Scribes and Pharisees had gotten to that point even though they sat in Moses' seat and interpreted the law for the people to live by.
There is a constant conflict in the Bible between God's judgement and God's mercy throughout both the Old and New Testaments. But in the end, God's mercy always wins out over God's judgement. That is what certain people like Saxton don't understand.
The decline of church membership has been in the news a lot lately. People like Saxton are what turns people off of church and this, along with the child sexual abuse scandals and sexual and financial scandals of high-profile preachers are significantly contributing to the decline in church membership and activity. The proliferation of far-right activity within the church has gotten so great that even people like Pat Robertson are starting to ooze with concern trolling at the GOP over this, ignoring the fact that they are part of the problem.
Just like Boko Haram and Bin Laden's views are a blasphemy against Islam, Saxton's views are a blasphemy against Christianity. And this decline in church membership and damage to the church's credibility is likely to get worse. There is speculation that the UN could declare the sex abuse cases by pastors, priests, and other church leaders to be a form of torture, meaning that the statute of limitations to file a lawsuit would not apply. This could open up a Pandora's box of lawsuits against sexually abusive pastors as well as against entire denominations. Should the church continue to refuse to address these issues as well as people like Saxton, the church as we know it will end by 2100.