Who needs SNL when we have Jesse Lee Peterson on Youtube making outrageous claims about women for our entertainment?
In his sermon, “How Liberal Women are Building a Shameless Society,” Peterson castigates women for “evils” ranging from homosexuality and gay marriage, to abortion and gun control. According to him, irresponsible whores have been spreading evil as thick as cold butter on the scones of his tea party for quite some time now, and he’s got his pinky bent out of shape about it. The rant is worth a gander, primarily because you have to see it to believe it.
Among his more fallacious claims:
- “Women cannot handle power.”
- “Back in the good old days, men knew that women were crazy and they knew how to deal with them.”
- “You walk up to them with a [sic] issue, they freak out right away. They go nuts.”
- “They don’t have love.”
- And the real zinger: “I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote.”
I suppose now is when I should “go nuts.” Out of spite, however, I’m going to keep my cool. Jesse’s views represent a pathetic kind of manhood to me, one that defines masculinity through the subjugation of women. You can hear the pot calling out desperately to the kettle when he wrings his hands and accuses other men of being weak. Watching him fiddle nervously with his bible as he talks, expressing his longing for the “good old days” when “men were men,” I can’t help but see him as small and damaged.
Don’t worry. I still want to throw him under the bus.
Plenty of men manage to celebrate their masculinity while embracing gender equality. They arrive at their manhood independently, without making stepping stones out of the trampled rights of women along the way.
Jesse Peterson isn’t up to that task. Instead, he moralizes about femme-voters-gone-bad through his nonprofit, BOND—Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny—or I as prefer to call it Brotherhood Of Needy Dumbasses.
I won’t defend my voting rights to poor sniveling Jesse. Women’s suffrage is not open for debate. However, I also don’t think we should ignore him, because Jesse Peterson doesn’t act alone. Fox News has hosted him on numerous occasions. Sean Hannity sits on BOND’s advisory board, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank wielding a $176 million budget and 700,000 person member-list, endorses the Dumbasses on the BOND website. Jesse also appears to be cozy with the Tea Party, appearing on their main page during the last round of midterm elections.
Of course, these things make me wonder, “are they all Dumbasses?”
That’s the question. Who’s a Dumbass and who’s not? Jesse may have done us a favor by saying these things out loud. There’s nothing more difficult than fighting an invisible foe. A misogynist who claims to love women will cast sexist policies as pro-women initiatives (like painting a pre-abortion ultrasound as a measure intended to protect the rights of a woman). But a fool who proclaims his misogyny to the world bulldozes such semantic games.
Will his bulldozer divide the outwardly misogynistic men from the closeted women-hating boys?
Sean Hannity refused to rebuke Jesse on air last week, but rating-conscious Rupert Murdoch was quick to back down, tweeting that women’s suffrage is the “best thing in a hundred years.”
What about the Tea Party? At least half of them hail from the crazed, loveless, power-bungling gender Jesse despises so much. Will those women still want to share scones with him? Or will they dump him in the harbor?
It almost seems he was set upon us as a test case—a martyr, sent forth with the bomb of misogyny strapped explicitly to his chest. His mission: see how far he can walk with that thing in plain view before it explodes.
I have to say, it’s a fascinating experiment. Let’s maintain the pressure of public scrutiny so that we can see who scatters like roaches when the light’s turned on and who doesn’t. All the while, the bomb rhythmically tic-tics “dumb-ass, dumb-ass, dumb-ass…”
