Whether they are Islamic, Christian or Scientologists, religious fundamentalists are truly an evil people. How else to explain the “Girls dressing provocatively are just asking to be raped” leaflet being handed out to girls in Bristol, Va.:

“You may have been given this leaflet because of the way you are dressed,” it begins. “Have you thought about standing before the true and living God to be judged?”

It continues with one essential theme: The sins of men are, in part, the fault of women, specifically women in tight-fitting clothing. Yates was annoyed. Then she got to a section on page two:

“Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin,” the leaflet states. “By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?”

The hand-out is signed “anonymous.”

Sandra G. Rasnake, the sexual assault program director at Bristol’s Crisis Center, pointed out the hatefulness of the leaflet and the damage it does to rape victims:

[Rasnake] had one eyebrow cocked as she read through the leaflet Thursday morning.

She cocked the other as she read aloud: “some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly.”

“Wow,” she said. “This idea that men don’t have enough self control – and evidently they shouldn’t have to – plays into all the old myths that we’ve tried for years to overcome: Rape happens to 2-year-olds and 92-year-olds, not just attractive young women. How about we hold the person doing the action accountable, whoever it is going against the will and consent of somebody else?”

Rasnake said she confronts similar ideas, although not generally printed and distributed in mass, from the women she talks with daily. Victim blaming, she said, is the most prominent reason rapes are so rarely reported and even more rarely taken to trial. Sexual assaults, she said, come in second for the country’s worst conviction rates.

Christian Fundamentalists will cry foul when they are compared to their Islamic Fundamentalists cohorts. But as this leaflet shows, they – like Islamic Fundamentalists – will subjugate all women if they could.

There’s just no other way to read it. Religious fundamentalism, in all its guises, is evil.

–WKW

Crossposted at William K. Wolfrum Chronicles