A fight over decals

One of my guiding principles in life is "Don't be a dick."

I don't mind taking on battles when I need to, or when I think the outcome is sufficiently important; but I truly don't understand people who do choose to do things solely to piss others off.  What are they getting out of this?  At the end of the day, I do not judge how good a day I had, or how happy I am, based on the number of total strangers whose cages I rattled.

But to me, that seems like the only possible reason for the recent rash of police and fire departments slapping decals with crosses and "In God We Trust" all over their vehicles.  It's happened in Baytown, Texas; Youngsville, Louisiana; Covington, Louisiana; Cedartown, Georgia; Bay County, Florida; and Stone County, Missouri.

And those are only the ones in the last couple of months.  It's spreading like wildfire, and has generated more than one lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the most recent in Brewster County, Texas.

Most of the arguments you hear against the practice are that the decals imply two things.  First, that the decals are a sly way of hinting that anyone who is an agnostic or atheist (or a practitioner of another faith; no one's in any doubt about which god the slogan's referring to) is liable not to receive the same police protection as Christians do.  The second is to ask how non-Christian police officers might feel about having to ride around in a squad car with a Christian religious slogan on the side.  These are government-owned vehicles, and therefore paid for by taxpayers, Christian and non-Christian alike.  The idea that these vehicles are emblazoned with a decal promoting religion -- worse, one particular religion -- is an unfortunate reminder about policies regarding inclusion, tolerance, and equality.

[image from the Hutchinson County, Texas Sheriff's Department Facebook page]

And I certainly agree with all of that.  But the question no one seems to ask is why these decals should be on the vehicles in the first place.  What is the argument for why they're necessary?  If you claim that without the decal, god wouldn't protect the cops in the car, then all I can say is that you have a pretty odd conception of how a benevolent deity might be expected to behave.  If it's patriotism, there are many other patriotic slogans you could choose.  So what purpose do they serve?

What purpose, in fact, does "one nation, under god" in the Pledge of Allegiance serve?  Or "In God We Trust" printed on our money?  No one's saying you can't paint bible quotes on the roof of your privately-owned house if you want.  Or, like a farmer who lives near me, post signs with cheerful slogans like "The Wages Of Sin Are Death" along the highway.  But these are government-sponsored, government-endorsed declarations of religion.  Why do the religious feel compelled to promote religion on the sides of police cars and fire engines -- and on our money?  Why is it moral to require students in every public school in America to recite a Pledge every morning that forces non-Christian students either to refuse to say it (sometimes at the cost of punishment and humiliation), or to lie publicly about their beliefs?

The only good answer I've been able to come up with to this question is: the Christian majority, i.e. the people who make the laws in this country, do it simply because they can.  If it pisses people off -- well, that's just too bad.  In fact, some of the most vocal proponents of the religious decals on police cars seem to be happy that they're making people mad.  Take, for example, Police Chief Adrian Garcia of Childress, Texas, who was told he risked a lawsuit from the FFRF for his decision to put big decals saying "In God We Trust" on the backs of his squad cars.

"They can go fly a kite," Garcia said.

So it boils down to people who really don't care if what they do excludes, devalues, or angers other American citizens, doing something because they're in a position of power so formidable that no one can stop them.  Further evidence that the much-talked-about-on-Fox-News "war on Christianity" in the United States is complete horseshit.

But it's a position I really don't get.  Like anything, political correctness can get out of hand, and there will always be people who will get their knickers in a twist over nothing.  But deliberately setting out to marginalize a significant percentage of Americans for no good reason, at the public expense?

That is called "being a dick."

Environmental witch hunt

Out of consideration for my readers, I try not to ring changes on the same topics too often, especially in rapid succession.  But today I have to write again about climate change, even though it was the topic of yesterday's post, because of a completely different idiotic thing that one of our elected officials is doing.

In this case, it's a Skeptophilia frequent flier Representative Lamar Smith of Texas.  Smith's virulently anti-science stance has been the topic of more than one post here, so it should come as no particular surprise that he's at it again.  This time, it's an expansion of his witch hunt against people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to locate and censure any employee who even mentions anthropogenic climate change.

Last year, Smith issued a subpoena for any internal documents that contained the words "global temperature," "climate study," "hiatus," and "haitus."  He presumably included the last one not only to catch accidental misspellings, but to catch people who deliberately misspelled words so as to avoid getting caught in his word search, a technique often used by people on social media to avoid obscenity filters, as in the phrase "Lamar Smith is kind of a dcik."  But this week, Smith apparently decided that he wasn't snaring enough malefactors, because he expanded his search parameters, as follows:

In addition to the search terms originally selected by NOAA, please include the following additional terms: "Karl," "buoy," "night marine air temperature," "temperature," "climate," "change," "Paris," "U.N.," "United Nations," "clean power plan," "regulations," "Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)," "President," "Obama," "White House," and "Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)."  In order to capture all documents responsive to the Committee's subpoena, please provide any documents responsive to these additional search terms from custodians that have previously been searched.

So you're going to take an agency that studies weather and climate, and subpoena every document that mentions "temperature" and "climate?"  Seems like Lamar is going to go from not catching enough evil climate change documents to catching everything.  I'd love to see what happens when his subpoena results in the capture of 139,452 documents, all of which his committee then has to go through.

("Karl," by the way, is a search parameter because Thomas Karl is one of the scientists whose climate research Smith and his cronies are targeting.)

How, precisely, can this be labeled as anything but harassment?  This smacks of Joseph McCarthy's sifting through people's correspondence looking for any hint of communism lurking therein.  Worse, actually; because communism isn't fact, it's an ideology, and there was justification for considering what the Soviets were doing as dangerous.  Here, we're talking about science, for cryin' in the sink.  And as I mentioned yesterday, nature doesn't really give a flying fuck what your political stance is.  You can't spin data.

What Smith et al. are doing amounts to suppressing hard evidence, akin to the spokespeople for Big Tobacco covering up evidence of the connection between smoking and lung cancer, which they did successfully for decades.  People like this have no respect for the truth; they only care about furthering their own agenda, whatever the cost.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What is most appalling is that in both the House and the Senate, the committees that oversee scientific research and the environment are run by anti-science ideologues of the worst sort -- not only Smith, but people like Dana Rohrabacher (who once called climate change "liberal claptrap") and James Inhofe (who brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate to prove that the world isn't warming up).

So their solution to having scientific findings that fly in the face of the way they'd like the world to work is to persecute the scientists.  Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work.  As we've established all too often, the universe doesn't care if you're happy or not.  Put a different way, we have the trenchant quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: "The nice thing about science is that it works whether you believe in it or not."

Ignoring Vesuvius

I'm sure I have my fair share of cognitive biases, but I have understood from a tender age that the universe is under no particular obligation to operate in such a way as to conform to my desires.

This is why the tendency of many politicians to claim that climate change isn't happening because it doesn't fit with their jurisdiction's economic goals strikes me as bizarre.  I can understand being dismayed to find out that fossil fuel use is screwing with the climate.  I can understand the no-win situation communities are in when their entire economic base depends on coal, oil, or gas.  I can even understand why an elected official would be reluctant to bring such bad news to his or her constituency.

What I cannot understand is what is to be gained by pretending that because it's bad news, it doesn't exist.

[image courtesy of NASA/NOAA]

This is a point that apparently has slipped right past policymakers in West Virginia, who voted last Friday to block new public school science standards because they require teaching the causes, effects, and predicted outcomes of anthropogenic climate change.

In a statement to the Charleston Gazette-Mail that should go down in the Annals of Bullshit, Delegate Jim Butler said, "In an energy-producing state, it’s a concern to me that we are teaching our kids potentially that we are doing immoral things here in order to make a living in our state."

I just have one question for you, Mr. Butler: why do you think that the universe gives a rat's ass about whether you live in an "energy-producing state?"  Neither hard data nor the laws of science (nor, for that matter, standards of ethics and morality) are obliged to conform to your state's economic needs.  But then Butler went on to add, "We need to make sure our science standards are actually teaching science and not pushing a political agenda."

I suppose that refusing to teach public-school students what the scientists are actually saying, because you live in an "energy-producing state," doesn't constitute "a political agenda."

Delegate Frank Deem, however, concurred with his colleague. "There’s nothing that upsets me more than the idea that it’s a proven fact that climate change is man made," he said.

Because apparently, science is only valid if it doesn't make Delegate Frank Deem upset.

The bill now goes to the West Virginia Senate, which evidently also believes that research should be ignored if it hurts Deem's and Butler's feelings.  The Senate Chair of the Education Committee, Dave Sypolt, said, "As it stands right now, I have no problems with it at all.  I’m going to work it and send it right through."

Look, I know that in a state like West Virginia, where the economy has long been based on coal production, the scientific findings are seriously bad news.  And it is entirely unclear what solutions could be found that won't leave whole communities without jobs or sources of income.  But what they're doing right now is tantamount to a guy in Pompeii in August of the year 79 C. E. saying, "Okay, yeah, I see that the volcano is smoking.  But you know, that could mean anything.  The scientists don't all agree that Mount Vesuvius is going to erupt.  We've been living here for decades and nothing has happened but some minor earthquakes and plumes of steam.  The idea of moving everyone just because of a possible threat is really upsetting to me.  Anyone who says so must have a political agenda to destroy Pompeii's economy."

And outside, the crazy weather continues.  Maryland has been repeatedly clobbered by snowstorms, while hundreds of miles north in upstate New York we basically had no winter -- we had a couple of quick cold spells, but I went running in shorts and a tank top several times in January.  The Arctic sea ice has never been this low at this time of year since measurements were first taken. Globally,  2015 was the hottest year on record, breaking the previous record that was set in 2014, which broke the previous record set in 2013, and so on and so forth.

As James Burke puts it, "You don't need a Ph.D."  But I shouldn't mention that, because it will probably would wound Delegate Frank Deem's feelings again.

So the bottom line is: the science is sound, whether or not you choose to teach public school students about it.  We can discuss what measures can and/or should be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change.  In order to be effective, such measures would have an undeniable human cost, and would undoubtedly cause economic havoc in many places.  But what is also certain is that sitting on our hands is going to cause havoc, too -- havoc of a much more devastating, global, and permanent kind than anything the West Virginia legislature can conceive.

The origins of moral outrage

Here in the United States, we're in the middle of an increasingly nasty presidential race, which means that besides political posturing, we're seeing a lot of another facet of human behavior:

Moral outrage.

We all tend to feel some level of disbelief that there are people who don't believe in the same standards of morality and ethics that we do.  As Kathryn Schulz points out, in her wonderful TED talk "On Being Wrong," "We walk around in a little bubble of feeling right about everything...  We all accept that we can be wrong in the abstract.  Of course we could be wrong.  But when we try to think of one single thing we're wrong about, here and now, we can't do it."

So what this does is to drive us to some really ugly assumptions about our fellow humans.  If they disagree with us, they must be (check all that apply): deluded, misguided, uninformed, ignorant, immoral, or plain old stupid.

[image courtesy of photographer Joost J. Bakker and the Wikimedia Commons]

But a recent paper in Nature shows that we have another, and darker, driver for moral outrage than our inability to conceive of the existence of people who disagree with us.  Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom, and David G. Rand, in a collaboration between the Departments of Psychology at Harvard and Yale, released the results of a fairly grim study in "Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness," in which we find out that those who call out (or otherwise punish) bad behavior or negative actions do so in part because afterwards, they are perceived as more trustworthy themselves.

In the words of the researchers:

Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection.  But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing?  We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of trustworthiness.  Our model is based on individual differences in the costs and/or benefits of being trustworthy.  We argue that individuals for whom trustworthiness is payoff-maximizing will find TPP to be less net costly (for example, because mechanisms that incentivize some individuals to be trustworthy also create benefits for deterring selfishness via TPP).  We show that because of this relationship, it can be advantageous for individuals to punish selfishness in order to signal that they are not selfish themselves... 

We show that TPP is indeed a signal of trustworthiness: third-party punishers are trusted more, and actually behave in a more trustworthy way, than non-punishers.  Furthermore, as predicted by our model, introducing a more informative signal—the opportunity to help directly—attenuates these signalling effects.  When potential punishers have the chance to help, they are less likely to punish, and punishment is perceived as, and actually is, a weaker signal of trustworthiness.  Costly helping, in contrast, is a strong and highly used signal even when TPP is also possible.  Together, our model and experiments provide a formal reputational account of TPP, and demonstrate how the costs of punishing may be recouped by the long-run benefits of signalling one’s trustworthiness.

Calling out people who transgress not only makes the transgression less likely to happen again; it also strengthens the position of the one who called out the transgressor.  It's unlikely that people do this consciously, but Jordan et al. have shown that punishing selfishness isn't necessarily selfless itself.

All of which makes the whole group dynamics thing a little scary.  As social primates, we have a strong innate vested interest in remaining part of the in-group, and this sometimes casts a veneer of high morality over actions that are actually far more complex.  As Philip Zimbardo showed in his infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment," we will do a great deal both to conform to the expectations of the group we belong to, and to exclude and vilify those in an opposing group.  And now the study by Jordan et al. has showed that we do this not only to eradicate behaviors we consider immoral, but to appear more moral to our fellow group members.

Which leaves me wondering how we can tease apart morality from the sketchier side of human behavior.  Probably we can't.  It will, however, make me a great deal more careful to be sure I'm on solid ground before I call someone else out on matters of belief.  I'm nowhere near sure enough of the purity of my own motives most of the time to be at all confident, much less self-righteous, about proclaiming to the world what I think is right and wrong.

A life of fear

One of the things that strikes me about religious extremism is the fact that it always seems to be predicated on fear.  The one commonality between all of the various kinds of extremism is a perception that you're constantly at risk.  From the evil members of other religions (not to mention the non-religious, who are evil by default).  From the forces of darkness, Satan and the demons and what-have you.  And not least from god himself, who (in that worldview) is always perceived as a vicious and spiteful micromanager, needing for you to slip only once in order to have a pretext for condemning you for eternity.

When I left religion, thirty-odd years ago, the first thing I noticed (after a brief period of fretting that I'd made a huge mistake) was that I was no longer perpetually terrified of making a mistake.  And far from the perception by many religious -- that once you take the strictures of religion away, you'd become a selfish, willful, amoral jerk -- I found that I was much more aware that I was responsible myself for my own behavior.  So the loss of religion, for me, not only dispelled the irrational fear of retribution by an invisible judge, it made me more aware that we all have to take care of each other, and make this life we're living as good as possible, because we're not going to some kind of eternal reward or punishment after we die.

It's all now.  Waste this, and it's gone.

And the fear that permeates the fringes of religion colors everything.  In that view, there is no action that is unimportant.  Anything you do can leave you open to censure -- or worse, being influenced by the Evil One.

And as an example of this, take this warning from a blogger who calls himself "The Last Hiker" about the dangers of adult coloring books.

Why coloring books, you might ask?  Because many of them contain mandalas, which in the opinion of "The Last Hiker," provide an ingress for Satan:

A mandala is used in tantric Buddhism as an aid to meditation. They meditate on the image until they are saturated by it. They believe that you can merge with the deity by meditating on the mandala... Focusing on mandalas is a spiritual practice where you merge with “deities”–this practice opens the door to demons.

No Christian would put one in their house and sit and stare at it for an hour, chanting the sacred word! 

But if the enemy can get a Christian to stare at a mandala because they are coloring it, he can have them absentmindedly focus their attention on the image and they will unknowingly open up their subconscious to this image in almost the same way.

So in his view, mandalas aren't just attractive geometric designs.  They're portals for evil.  Presumably, even if you just bought the coloring book because you thought it was pretty, it'd still work the same way.  Motivation and foreknowledge doesn't matter.  All that matters is that you're in danger.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

He goes on to lay out the problem clearly, and suggests a solution:

So my question when it comes to the whole adult coloring books is this– 

Is it really about coloring? 

Or is it about spiritual hosts of wickedness sneaking mandalas into our homes and into our subconscious minds? 

Is it really about recreation or is it New Age evangelism? 

I can color all I want. 

But if I do, I am going to get a big fat coloring book of Bible stories.

Well, for me, it would be about coloring and recreation, because I don't believe in New Age occultism any more than I believe in Christianity.   But I wouldn't expect him to see that.

Nor would I expect him to see that considering the bloodthirsty nature of a lot of bible stories, you'd need a great many scarlet crayons to color them accurately.  Personally, I like the mandalas a lot better.  They don't require you to smite unbelievers or stone people to death or believe stories about god sending bears to eat children because they'd teased a prophet about his bald head.

What impresses me most, though, is the deep-seated fear that people like "The Last Hiker" must walk around in.  There's an evil being who is waiting for any opportunity to weasel his way in and steal your soul.  Something as innocent as a coloring book could be enough.  And on the other side -- and it's doubtful whether the other side is any better -- is a deity who has a list of thousands of rules, the breaking of any one of which could doom you for eternity.

It's a wonder these people can face getting out of their beds in the morning.

I made the decision thirty years ago to take a chance on the free air of reason, and the knowledge that there's no Cosmic Good Guy who'll make things right in the end, nor a Cosmic Bad Guy for me to blame my bad behavior on.  We're all responsible, here and now, for what we do.

And I'll take that responsibility in trade for perpetual fear any day.

Aliens in Australia

A few days ago, I lamented that the United States has far more than its fair share of complete lunatics.  This prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link that indicates that Australia is also in the running.

The Land Down Under's candidate for International Wingnut of the Year is cricketer Shane Warne.  Warne is no slouch as an athlete; he's widely considered to be one of the best bowlers in the history of cricket.  However, as we've seen over and over again, being a brilliant actor or sports figure is no insurance against being a complete loon, and Warne makes this clear in an interview he did for the television show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, in which he tells us about his personal theory of evolution.

It's unorthodox, to say the least.

He starts out with a line that we science-types have heard all too many times before.

"If we’ve evolved from monkeys, then why haven’t those ones evolved?" he asks fellow guest Bonnie Lythgoe.

Lythgoe, taken a little aback, just said, "Yeah ..." in a dubious sort of way, instead of to ask some version of what I always do, which is "My ancestors came from France.  Why are there still French people?"

But Warne wasn't heading where anyone thought he was.  He continued, "I’m saying: Aliens.  We started from aliens."

And why, Mr. Warne, do you think this?

"Look at those pyramids... You couldn’t do ‘em.  You couldn’t pull those huge bits of brick and make it perfectly symmetrical ... couldn’t do it.  So who did it?"

The Egyptians.  With a shitload of slave labor.  Thanks for asking.

What is the most amusing about this is that Lythgoe, rather than saying, "Um, Shane?  You seemed a lot saner before you started talking," decided to take the low road and egg him on.  "Has to be from another world," she said.  "Has to be."

Cheered on by the fact that she wasn't guffawing directly into his face, Warne continued, "Whatever planet they’re on out there, they decided that they were gonna start some more life here on Earth and study us."

Only then did Lythgoe seem to have any reservations.  "Scientifically, we have so many similarities to monkeys," she said.  "So I don’t know ... yeah."

But Warne didn't get where he is by backing down in the face of uncertainty.  His voice full of the enthusiasm that is a characteristic of the cheerfully insane, he said, "Maybe they turned a few monkeys into humans and said 'Yeah, it works'!"

Well, I dunno.  Considering that Shane Warne is one of the outcomes, it didn't work all that well.  Maybe the aliens need to come back and do a little fine-tuning.

What always strikes me about these situations is twofold.  First, why does anyone think that being a good athlete qualifies you to weigh in on anything else?  Take, for example, Manny Pacquaio's comments about gays being "worse than animals."  He lost his Nike sponsorship for this -- entirely deserved, allow me to add.  But why are his comments even relevant beyond that?  He's a boxer, for crying out loud, not an ethicist, or even a politician.  The fact that he doesn't like gays carries as much weight as my opinions would about boxing strategy.

But second, why do we continue to listen to the ravings of people who obviously have a screw loose?  Why is this entertainment?  I have to admit to being in the minority of Americans who have absolutely no comprehension of why anyone would want to watch Duck Dynasty or Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo or Real Housewives of New Jersey.  I am not entertained by random people doing random stuff and then mugging for the camera as if they had just given an Oscar-worthy performance.

But there it is: and the reassuring thing, for me at least, is that the United States doesn't have the market cornered on wackos.  Good thing, because I needed the reassurance.  This year's presidential race is shaping into having to vote for the person who is the least insane, and it's nice to know that we're not the only ones in the world who face this problem.

The literal truth

One of the problems with biblical literalism is that the bible has some pretty awful and bloodthirsty bits.  It's been observed more than once that if anyone ever did try to live biblically, in the sense of following all of the biblical commands to the letter, he'd end up in jail.

The result, of course, is that people cherry-pick.  If you're up front about this -- if you admit that a lot of the biblical precepts were commands for another time and culture, and are irrelevant today -- I've got no quarrel with you whatsoever.  (Some people even go so far as to say that some of the rules in the early books of the bible, such as the penalty of death by stoning for collecting firewood on the Sabbath, were wrong even back then.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most alleged literalists, however, solve the problem by obeying to the letter the rules they like (such as the prohibitions against premarital sex and gay marriage), believing word-for-word the stories they like (such as the six-day creation of the universe and the story of the flood and Noah's ark), and pretty much ignoring everything else.  But every once in a while you run into someone who has decided that being a biblical literalist means that you really have to buy the whole thing, in toto, and that when the bible conflicts with one of the rules of civilized society, society is wrong.

Which brings me to Reverend Steven Anderson.

Anderson is the pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church, and has been in the news before for his vitriolic anti-gay message.  (He's the guy who said if his brother was gay, he'd support his execution.)  But now, he's been called upon to defend one of the most horrific practices condoned in the bible -- slavery.

This is one that makes even the anti-gay cohort squirm a little.  Not Anderson, though.  This is a direct quote from his sermon -- which, if you don't believe me, you can listen to here, if you can stomach it:

People will try to come at us — usually atheists or people like that — they’ll come at us and say, “Well, the Bible is wrong because the Bible condones of slavery.”  We’ve all heard that before, right? 

But here’s the thing about that, is that if the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery.  Because the Bible’s always right about every subject… and keep in mind that locking someone in prison is more inhumane than slavery.  Prison destroys people’s lives.

And, in Anderson's fantasy world, slavery apparently didn't.  The families torn apart when slaves were kidnapped from their homes, the brutal beatings and horrific living conditions, the attitude by the slave-owners that their slaves were worthy of no better because they weren't quite human -- all of that is evidently just fine in god's eyes, and therefore in Anderson's.

Is the Bible just pro-slavery?  No.  But are there certain situations where God did indicate slavery or for people to beat their servants?  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Of course!  But you know what?  It’s all right.  And I agree with all of it.  Why?  Because the Bible is God’s Word.  That’s why.

So that settles that, at least for Anderson.

Another awkward point for many Christians is the bible's recommendations for the treatment of women.  Dozens of bible verses mandate that women be treated like objects to be given away or sold, and once married, subjugated to their husbands.  In 1 Corinthians 14, we read the following:

The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says.  If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.

Which makes you wonder how outspoken evangelical women justify being in leadership roles.

Here too, most Christians just breeze past the dodgy bits.  But not all.  Over at the site Biblical Gender Roles, we find out in an article with the lovely title "How To Help Women Learn Their Place" that there are people who are determined to have this followed to the letter, too:

We have women saying things in the wrong place or in the wrong way.  Women showing no deference or respect toward men.  Daughters showing little to no respect for their fathers and wives showing little to no respect for their husbands.  Wives routinely shame their husbands in public not to mention in private.  Daughters disobey their fathers and wives routinely disobey their husbands with impunity.  Many women pursue selfish career ambitions instead of being ambitious for marriage, child bearing and homemaking.

If you can imagine.

Further along in the article -- once again, if you can stand to read it -- we find out that women should be cooks and house-cleaners and child-bearers, defer to their husbands in all matters, be ready for sex whenever the man wants it, be submissive, and dress modestly.  We then hear all about how the writer is training his own daughter in these ways, to be the "wife and mother that God wants her to be."

Is it just me, or is this close to emotional and psychological abuse?

You know, you have to admire these people for one thing; they aren't hypocrites.  They have decided on their precepts, and live them down to the last syllable.  The horrific part is that their precepts are entirely repugnant, and are based on the savage customs of Bronze-Age sheepherders that for some reason they still think are relevant and humane.

So however annoying the cherry-pickers are, at least they're not really trying to follow the bible to the letter, however much they claim that they are.  Which, after hearing about Reverend Anderson and the owner of Biblical Gender Roles, most of us will probably consider a fortunate thing.