This is sad and frightening on so many levels.  If Faithful Word Baptist Church doesn’t ring a bell for you, they’re an SPLC-certified hate group in Arizona which became infamous a while back when the strange, uneducated sermons of its pastor Steven Anderson started to go viral.  He has said that gay people should be killed, and he also has a big, big problem with men who pee sitting down, even if they are tired.  He’s also one of those loons who has been praying for the death of the President.

What you may not know is that his wife, Zsuszanna, also has a widely read blog where she shares, alternately, stories of raising their many, many children [even though they can’t afford them], and her bizarre views on politics and religion, which were likely implanted in her by her husband.  So I was reading Jesus’ General last night, as I am wont to do, and found that he’s sent Zsuszanna one of his famous letters in response to her statements on spousal abuse.  Get ready, because this is some sick, sick stuff they’re teaching, but it’s relevant because it’s the natural, perverse extension of extreme anti-gay views.  I’ve said many times that anti-choice sentiment, misogyny and hatred of gay people are all tied together with one big bow, and this is just more evidence of that. What does Zsuszanna believe an abused wife should do?

First of all, chances are that the “victim” in this situation made their own bed, i.e. married that person out of their own free will. I’m not trying to play a blame game here, but choosing the right spouse is our own responsibility. It is not the duty of the spouse to live up to our fairytale expectations of them. My mother always taught me to marry someone I loved the way they were, because they were not going to change as a result of marriage – what you see is what you get. I think women especially have a tendency to feel pity for some loser of a guy and marry him in hopes of reforming him. It’s a lost cause – people are who they are. Disillusioned, these women then despise that same man, when they would easily be able to overlook those same faults in others.

If he beats you after you’re married, it’s your own damn fault for marrying him.

Just hypothetically, let’s assume that a sweet, godly lady marries a nice godly guy. After they are married, completely out of the blue, he changes personalities and turns out to be a complete jerk. What should she do? Does she have any “recourse”?

Based on the Bible, I believe that divorce is always wrong, whether or not the wife is able to survive on her own financially, whether or not there are children involved, etc.

Uh huh, go on…

The only Biblical recourse for a horrible marriage, or any marriage for that matter, is death. If your husband is an abusive, mean, hateful, fill-in-the-blank jerk in spite of you doing your best as a wife, God can kill him whenever He wants to. If he is still alive, God must want you to still be married to him. A wife could pray and fast for her husband/marriage, and for the kids to turn out right in spite of marital problems. If nothing else, it will be a great lesson for the kids, who hopefully will grow up and make wiser and more careful choices regarding their future spouse, rather than learning that marriage can be dissolved at a whim.

These people should not have children.  To be so brainwashed by a bizarre religious system that you could possibly believe that children who grow up watching Daddy beat the shit out of Mommy every night would be a “great lesson” is absolutely sick, and is just more evidence of the utterly dehumanizing influence of fundamentalist religion.

But as I said at the beginning, it’s also sad, because this is a woman writing this, a woman who has obviously been so torn down as a human being that she writes this and believes that is healthy and good.  Keep this woman in your thoughts and prayers, please.

UPDATE: Now Zsuszanna is in her comments section advocating the death penalty for gays.  Again, what a sick, sad woman.