“A little child shall lead them.” – Matthew 18:1-6It was a day like many others. I sat in my home office watching pornography, taking copious notes, exchanging IMs with various friends and lovers, planning my next big event, singing along to streaming music, scouring the headlines, chuckling and deleting emails from the multitude of lists I’m subscribed to, and generally living the dulce vita as I see it.

And then the link appeared. The link that wanted me to change my life.

When I was a 15-year-old virgin I temporarily dabbled with ultra conservative religion; something that’s easy to dabble with when you’re a 15-year-old virgin. Shortly after I became a 16-year-old non-virgin beneath the stop sign next to my parents’ house, I had a few epiphanies on the issue of sexuality. When my parents, upon my entry into college, announced their profound displeasure with my selection of journalism as a major and informed me that I’d best learn a profitable trade like nursing or teaching or being a secretary since I’d never make it as a writer and no man would ever love me and thus marry and support me, I had a few epiphanies on the issue of relationships.

Fueled by these and other epiphanies, I have motored along the super highway (both information and otherwise) of my life; taking the paths that seem right for me, wandering down the occasional blind alley, strolling along the not-infrequently convoluted garden path, and generally making my way through life, sustaining some impressive nicks, cuts, bruises, scars, and open wounds along the way — but having a great time while doing so.

And somehow, in spite of the authoritative insights of others, I’ve managed to not only be married (and subsequently unmarried) twice but also become a self-supporting writer. Imagine that.

Instead of staying up late at night tending to sick children, I stay up late at night tending to ailing deadlines. Instead of monitoring the development of a growing fetus, I monitor the development of several growing literary, social, and arts fields. Instead of vowing lifelong fidelity to a human companion, I am the willing love slave to a sometimes insatiable craft. It’s not exactly white picket fences, PTA meetings, and SUVs, but I’m all right with that.

And then along came that link. That insidious, fingernail bent slightly backwards, impossible to ignore link. The link that introduced me to the creeping evil that is/was/may or may not be Jonathan Goode and his award winning creation science fair project, “Women Were Designed For Homemaking.”

Nestled between first place middle school award winner Patricia Lewis’ “Life Doesn’t Come From Non-Life,” (in which she proved that evolution is false by not being able to create life in a sealed glass jar – even after three whole weeks) and honorable mentions including sixth grade Anna Reed’s “Rocks Can’t Evolve, Where Did They Come From Mr. Darwin?” lurked the experiment that yanked my chain.

According to the esteemed Mr. Goode, who had a whopping 12 years of life experience at the time, “applied findings from many fields of science” support his claim that “God designed women for homemaking.” In the home schooled mind of Johnny B. Goode, the Divine saw many, many centuries into the future when it “created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker.” The unemployed and unemployable Eve and her descendents were, apparently, perfectly designed to function within a glorious future in which shopping malls, grocery stores, and Laundromats would carpet the earth and their wider hips would be mega handy for tasks impossible to men, such as “carrying groceries and laundry baskets.” God be praised, indeed. Too bad the Infinite didn’t pop a functional brain into little Johnny’s skull while he was filling out the descendents of Eve’s underwear anchors.

Is the ObjectiveMinistries.org site sincere? Is it a parody? Was there truly a Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair held in 2001? Was there truly a smarmy little fuck in grade seven named Jonathan Goode who thought he’d proved conclusively that “Women Were Designed for Homemaking?” Was the aforementioned smarmy little fuck actually rewarded by adults with a second place ribbon for this lunacy?

Does it matter?

Whether Jonathan Goody Two-Shoes Goode exists or not, there are plenty of Jonathan Goodes out there wearing different skins and bearing different names. They’re equally convinced that women make less money than “normal workers,” because women are – you know – not really supposed to be working, not really capable of lifting heavy things, standing for long periods of time, or thinking very hard. They’re supposed to be pregnant, do the laundry, shop for groceries, chase after children and then carry them for long periods of time, keep the house spic and span, and prepare all of the meals – all due to their “lower center of gravity than men,” no doubt.

Ignored are the inconvenient realities of actual women including Randice-Lisa Altschul (who invented the first disposable cell phone), Marie Curie (who discovered radium), Helen Free (who invented the home diabetes test), Bette Nesmith Graham (the inventor of White-Out), Grace Hopper (who developed COBOL), Ellen Roberts (MIT’s first female student – who was denied graduation due to her sex), Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (who identified the five stages of grief), the Grand Master chess players whom Rev. Pat Robertson has insisted don’t exist, the women who keep and have kept their countries’ infrastructures intact during times of war, and the billions of other women throughout history who have contributed to the betterment of their nations and their species.

All that matters to the Jonathan Goode’s of the world are the fearsome physical features of women that seem to strike fear in the hearts of insecure men and in women with no ambition: breasts that can produce milk and wombs that can sustain offspring; neither of which, of course, should experience any kind of sensual pleasure that isn’t directly tied to procreation within marriage and none of which should ever be allowed to provide a woman with an income or economic independence. To the Jonathan Goode’s of the world, every other physical or intellectual attribute or ability possessed by women is simply so much window dressing.

Ironically, the 2001 Fellowship Baptist Creation Fair attempted to prove how progressive it was by allowing two Muslim students from the Al-Jannah Islamic school to participate. Unsurprisingly, their projects were rejected – “due to a number of Biblical inconsistencies.” Flying in the face of observable and established scientific fact is apparently fine in the magical world of the creation scientist – but not lining up the myriad Biblical contradictions is cause for peer review and censor. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

The far right Reverend Richard Paley assured all of the students who didn’t take home ribbons that “when it comes to studying the works of the Lord, there are no losers!”

If the Fellowship Baptist Creation Fair is any kind of standard, I’m pretty sure he’s wrong.

Learn more at:
http://objectiveministries.org/creation/sciencefair.html