Virgin Mary’s Purity Denounced as Hurtful to Rape Victims

The moonbats running the Washington Post have outdone themselves. Not even the New York Times could top the Christmastime publication of an essay by Presbyterian pastor Ruth Everhart denouncing the Virgin Mary for her purity:

Church culture tends to be fixated on sexual purity year-round, but during Advent, I’m tempted to blame it on the Virgin Mary. After all, she set an impossibly high bar. Now the rest of us are stuck trying to be both a virgin and a mother at the same time.

In her youth, Everhart was raped. She appears to believe this grants her license to inveigh against the concept of purity.

Of course, I was traumatized. But what was harder to describe — and more long-lasting — was how the crime became bound up in a sense of sexual shame. I wondered constantly: Did I somehow deserve to be raped? Had the rape ruined me irreparably? Both questions seemed inevitable. After all, what is the opposite of being sexually pure? Sustaining irremediable damage. Being ruined.

I’m not blaming my sense of ruin on the Virgin Mary, not entirely. … Church culture has overfocused on virginity and made it into an idol of sexual purity.

Rather than come to terms with having been made to feel unclean, she lashes out at moral hygiene:

[I]t might be helpful if you just checked in with your own body right now. Is your body feeling quiet and clean and pure at the moment? Or is it hungry or noisy or smelly? Does it have needs?

That’s what I suspected. Bodies are like that. Even bodies that don’t bleed or ovulate or lactate. Bodies have needs.

Allegedly, the Virgin Mary is used to “oppress women” by discouraging them from inappropriately indulging in these needs.

What exactly is purity, anyway? Some things are not intended to be sparkling white.

From there, she goes on to denounce purity rings and abstinence pledges taken by young people.

The Virgin Mary is an ideal. Ideals are goals that we can never reach. Yet they are absolutely crucial. When we abandon them, we dry up and die inside.

On tips from Steve A and Dragon’s Lair.