Michele Bachmann, victim of sexism?

Here's an interesting story indicating that Michele Bachmann was undone by sexism.

I know what you're thinking: No, she was undone by her own nuttiness, and by the bad publicity generated by her insane statements. Yes (says the author of the aforelinked piece), she was indeed wacko, but the Republican voter of today wants wacko. Craziness is no longer considered a disqualifier -- in fact, crazy makes you popular.

Ownership of a vagina is, on the other hand, a genuine problem.

It’s tempting, then, to think that part of what finally defeated Bachmann was sexism. There have been plenty of hints that some on the right were uncomfortable with the notion of a female president. “I’ve noticed that when her name is mentioned sometimes that there’s a lot of men that wouldn’t vote for a woman,” one Iowa county GOP chair told the Associated Press on Monday. Patricia Murphy also quoted Iowans who liked Bachmann but wanted a male candidate. One woman told her she’d initially been for Bachmann, “But then I just started thinking about being presidential and I don’t know that we’re ready for a woman for president.” It’s not a stretch to imagine that the Christian right’s patriarchs, many of whom explicitly preach female submission, felt the same way.

Good lord. Have we really come to this? In the 1980s, Republicans could not praise Margaret Thatcher highly enough. Now, it seems that they want women to return to housecleaning.

There was a dust-up back in August when a journalist had the temerity to inquiry whether Bachmann's run for the presidency conflicted with fundamentalist teachings on female submission. At the time, the question was considered rude; now, it seems germane.

Here's what Julie Ingersoll said in August:

After all, in the conservative Christian world there is a spectrum of views on how these texts are to be read. Evangelical feminists argue that the Bible actually teaches mutual submission between men and women. But Reconstructionists, some of whom have influenced Bachmann, have suggested that, given the biblical order for families, women probably shouldn’t be voting. I wrote about Reconstructionist biblical patriarchy here.

While Christians traditionally hold that God is beyond gender (even while often using masculine language for God), in “The Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy,” Doug Phillips asserts that God is male, and explicitly not female; that the human male is the “image and glory of God in terms of authority, while the woman is the glory of man.” That is, men are in the image of God in terms of authority over their households; women are created in God’s image in a decidedly different way, sometimes called “reflected glory.”

And here's a view from a "Biblical" blogger:

Women should submit to their husbands. Michele Bachmann should submit to hers. Submissive wives probably won't get to be president.

The world mocks the Bible. It mocks God's design for the family. Heaven and earth will pass away, but God's Words will not pass away. The Bible will stand. God's design will stand. Submission does not demean women. Perversion of God's Word is not a better way. Whatever mess we're in is because we haven't paid attention to Him. And if we allow someone who says she is a Christian to get away with it, it's not going to make it better. It's going to get worse.

Bachmann, you may recall, once said that she became a tax lawyer -- a job she professed to loathe -- because her husband ordered her to do so.

Well. That's one good thing about being the bottom: You always have someone to blame. I believe that in the BDSM world, that's called Topping from below.