I stood in Planned Parenthood across the street from City Market, where the train tracks crossed the Animas River. It was the spring of 1989 and I was 21 years old, suspicious I might be pregnant.1
In lieu of a college degree I had a two-year old and a husband. A husband who backhanded me, broke my glasses, slammed me up against walls, screamed in my face with fists cocked and balled. A husband who smashed heirlooms from my dead mother, threw an ironing board near my crawling baby, and punched glass out of clocks leaving blood splattered on walls. A husband with a porn addiction who never changed a diaper and made me a single parent long before I took the children and left.
In lieu of an education or career, I had a two-year old and a husband. A sweet, beautiful two-year old with an outgoing personality and insatiable curiosity. Who memorized entire books by the time he was four and watched his father abuse his mother. Now an adult, his body keeps the score.2
The test was positive and my heart sank. I didn’t want to be pregnant again. I could barely handle the needs of my first child, the one I already had, let alone another one. I could barely protect myself and my first child from that church and this man: how on earth would I protect a second one? I was planning my escape from “The Message”, a right-wing cult founded by William Branham, a misogynist who once said women weren’t “worth a good clean bullet to kill them with”. I’d started going to the church when I was 15 and a second child could potentially keep me bound and dependent forever.
The opinion of women is a common element in Branham's sermons. [H]e also frequently describes all women as instruments of Satan, sent to Earth only to tempt and deceive man.
– How a dead U.S. evangelist inspires London's reviled street preachers
But I was standing there. In Planned Parenthood. I could have them do the procedure right then. Right there. I thought about it. Dead serious for a few minutes until the patriarchal voices in my head started looping, getting louder and stronger. You’ll go to hell. I heard the pastor say. Eternal fire and damnation. I heard my husband say. How will I pay for it? I heard myself say. A woman’s place is in the home. I heard all the men say. Your husband is your head. I heard all the church women say. God wants you to obey him. I nearly cowered in the corner and looked up to the sky, hyperventilating, waiting for the wrath of God to strike me at any moment for merely entertaining such thoughts. Strike me like a bolt of lightning strikes a tree that sticks up too high, lighting it on fire, burning it to the ground.
Notice, there is nothing designed to stoop so low, or be filthy, but a woman. A dog can't do it, a hog can't do it, a bird can't do it. No animal is immoral, nor it can be, for it is not designed so it can be. A female hog can't be immoral, a female dog can't be immoral, a female bird can't be immoral. A woman is the only thing can do it. Now you see where Satan went?
– Sermon excerpts via William Branham Historical Research: Women
Then I left, baby still in utero, a different woman than when I walked in. I would soon have a beautiful daughter, sweet and calm who sat quietly sorting hair ribbons. Who played dress up with tea towels in a hundred different ways and watched her father abuse her mother. Now an adult, her body keeps the score.
Over a period of nine years, from the ages of 15 to 26, during crucial stages of adolescent brain development, I listened to hours and hours of William Branham’s sermons on tape, absorbing and internalizing his vitriol and vile toward women. My son and daughter listened to that, too, hatred absorbed through the walls of my womb, subconsciously shaping their baby brains and future world views. I lived with a man and among Christian men who accepted Branham’s ideologies without question, actively saying nothing, doing nothing to challenge this misogynistic world view.3 I had a pastor tell me, after I’d discovered my living room smashed to pieces by my husband overcome with rage because I hadn’t arrived home when he expected me to, that I just needed to go home and love him. “He is your head, Callie. God wants you to love him.”
Excuse this, young ladies. She is nothing but a human garbage can, a sex exposal [sic]. That's all she is, an immoral woman, is a human sexual garbage can, a pollution, where filthy, dirty, ornery, low-down filth is disposed by her. What is she made this way for? For deception. Every sin that ever was on the earth was caused by a woman. And an analyst just from Chicago, a—a woman wrote this article, the police force; that they chased down, in United States, metropolitan United States, that "Ninety-eight percent of every crime that was ever did in any form, in the United States, there was either a woman in it or behind it.
– Sermon excerpts via William Branham Historical Research: Women
Excuse this, men. I left him instead of loved him.4 I rejected god and the church and never had that abortion (or any abortions at all). But in 1989 I had a federally mandated right to choose5 and I will fight for that right as long as I live.
Things That Nourished My Writing: June 1-29
FOOD
U-Pick Strawberries near Carnation, Washington.
Bottega Italiana Gelato near Pike Place Market (Panna Cotta + Grapefruit -!!)
LITERARY
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
White Girls by Hilton Als
MUSIC
PLACES
The 15-minute walk along Seattle’s waterfront between Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market.
The boathouse. I’ve been rowing a lot lately, assistant coaching Learn To Row.
What a mind fuck last week was. Celebrating 50 years of Title IX one day, crushed by the fall of an almost 50-year old Roe the next. Which made me think of my mother. Born May 12, 1928, she was a competitive swimmer as a teenager. But what did that mean for a girl before Title IX? Later in life, in the early 70s, she had to go before a morals board at the college she was attending in order to get permission to go on birth control. And people wonder why we hate White men.
He asked me recently why there is currently so much animosity directed toward White men. Which is what prompted this post. Let me remind him of the abuse he suffered starting in my womb. Let me count my own reasons, which seem endless.
And I eventually made my way into the tech sector. Which, incidentally, harbors these same attitudes toward women: a Google search for “women in tech misogyny” yields 2,100,000 results. Whether in church or corporate America, all misogyny is on the same continuum.
Rendered a mute point, however, due to the psychological manipulation and coercion I suffered at the hands of the church.