Amanda Marcotte writes:

Even by the reality-TV chaos standards of our political moment, this one was a doozy: Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense, called out as an “abuser of women” by his own mother in the pages of the New York Times. To be fair, Penelope Hegseth’s 2018 email excoriating her son, who was then a Fox News contributor, was not intended for public consumption. But the email, which seems to have been passed around Hegseth’s social circle at the time, was leaked to the Times over the weekend. In it, Penelope Hegseth calls her son a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” Pete Hegseth, then 37 years old, was in the midst of his second divorce.

While Penelope Hegseth has since disavowed her 2018 declaration, those accusations were backed up by a New Yorker investigation showcasing years of complaints from colleagues that Hegseth ran his veterans organization in “a hostile and intimidating working environment,” where sexual harassment — and even attempted sexual assault — was blown off or blamed on victims. Hegseth himself was characterized as a heavy drinker who “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account — for partying, drinking, and using [the organization’s] events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.” This follows reports that Hegseth was accused of rape in 2017. Criminal charges were not filed, but Hegseth reportedly reached a financial settlement with the alleged victim in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.

In the years since, Hegseth — now on his third marriage — has claimed that he rediscovered Christ, saying “faith became real” to him in 2018. He became deeply involved with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), moving to Tennessee to enroll his children in a branch of this fundamentalist organization. He also joined the associated denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Both are led by Doug Wilson, an untrained and self-proclaimed pastor who advocates for Christian nationalism and has become famous for his trollish promotion of his far-right political views. At the center of Wilson’s philosophy is a misogyny so overt that it’s sometimes hard to believe he’s serious.

“Wilson holds the most extreme views of women’s submission found in any form of Christianity,” Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, told Salon. “Women are taught that submission to their husbands (and other male authorities) is submission to God. Independence of any kind is cast as sin.”

In one famous passage from his book on marriage, Wilson suggests that sexual violence is women’s fault for not being submissive enough. “[T]he sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” he writes. “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” The alleged failure of women to submit, he continues, leads men to “dream of being rapists,” deprived of the “erotic necessity” found in women’s submission. [Continue reading…]