Dr. Hager's Family Values & the Christian Right's War on Women
Ayelish McGarvey writes in The Nation:
For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and sexuality.
According to [Linda Carruth Davis, his former wife of thirty-two years], Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."
Why did Davis suddenly come forward? She kept silent for so long because she didn't want to cause trouble for her grown children with Hager, but once he started preaching about how he was opposed by Democrats because of his "faith" and because there is a war in America against "Christians," she felt so disgusted that she had to start speaking out. She knew, intimately, what Hager was really like and how he really treated women. She didn't want that information to remain hidden.
Did W. David Hager rape his wife? Rape is a serious accusation and should not be made lightly, but if Linda Davis' statements are true then it certainly sounds like "rape" would be the accurate label. What other term should be used to describe forced sex over the course of several years? What other term should be used to describe initiating sex with a woman suffering from narcolepsy and therefore unable to consent?
Many will see this as an example of hypocrisy — that Hager preached one thing publicly and practiced another — but I believe that this would be an error. Hager's private and public behavior strike me as completely consistent and it only seems hypocritical because people don't fully appreciate the horrible implications of his public positions.
[W]hile Hager doesn't advocate the substitution of conservative Christianity for medicine, his religious ideology underlies an all-encompassing paternalism in his approach to his women patients. "Even though I was trained as a medical specialist," Hager explained in the preface to As Jesus Cared for Women, "it wasn't until I began to see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor, should treat them."
As laid out in his writings, Hager's worldview is not informed by a sense of inherent equality between men and women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of his books, he refers to a man who raped his wife as "selfish" and "sinful.") But to model gender relations on the one Jesus had with his followers is to leave women dangerously exposed in the event that the men in their lives don't meet the high standard set by God Himself--trapped in a permanent state of dependence hoping to be treated well.
In Hager's world, women are to be subordinate to men. His opposition to contraception is part of his public stance on this — women who can control their reproductive processes can be independent of men. His treatment of his wife was a private expression of this — she, being the woman, was morally obliged to service him in whatever way he saw fit and when she refused, he apparently thought he had the authority to force her. Both the public and private expressions of this attitude are consistent with each other and they are the logical outgrowth of the Christian Right's attitude towards women.
As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. "I would be asleep," she recalls, "and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I would [confront] David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do that,' and I would say, 'No, I never asked for it.'"
Linda Davis (née Carruth) first met David Hager on the campus of Asbury College in 1967. "On the very first date he sat me down and told me he was going to marry me," Davis remembers. "I was so overwhelmed by this aggressive approach of 'I see you and I want you' that I was completely seduced by it. I don't think I was married even a full year before I realized that I had made a horrible mistake," Davis says. By her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional intimacy. "But," she says, "the people around me said, 'Well, you've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.'"
It even got to the point that Davis was selling sex to Hager (he controlled the finances and for a long time wouldn't even open a joint checking account). Why didn't she leave him sooner? For the same reason that women in this position have always stayed with their husbands: because they are kept in subordinate, inferior roles, they lack the education, work experience, and self-confidence to strike out on their own. That's part of the point of keeping women subservient. That's how abusers continue to work today.
Somehow (perhaps because of the abuse?) Davis developed narcolepsy and she says that Hager began to take advantage of that, forcing sex on her while she was asleep. Sometimes she struggled. Sometimes she just let it happen because it was easier. Each time, though, was potentially a felony. The very concept of "marital rape" was outsider her understanding, unfortunately. Forced sex or sex with a person who is incapacitated qualifies as rape in Kentucky, but for a long time those standards weren't applied to marriage because it was assumed that women consented to any and all sex simply by virtue of marrying a man. Perhaps that's what W. David Hager believed at the time.
Should people care? Absolutely:
[T]he public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis's charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women's health issues.
(Lest inappropriate analogies be drawn between the Hager accusations and the politics of personal destruction that nearly brought down the presidency of Bill Clinton, it ought to be remembered that President Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky was never alleged to be criminal and did not affect his ability to fulfill his obligations to the nation. This, of course, did not stop the religious right from calling for his head. "The topic of private vs. public behavior has emerged as perhaps the central moral issue raised by Bill Clinton's 'improper relationship,'" wrote evangelist and Hager ally Franklin Graham at the time. "But the God of the Bible says that what one does in private does matter. There needs to be no clash between personal conduct and public appearance.")
Hager was instrumental in getting the FDA to ban selling emergency contraception over the counter, without a prescription. The FDA panel voted 23-4 to allow it, but Hager worked behind the scenes to get the FDA to overrule the panel and thus ensured that it remains harder to obtain for millions of women. According to his wife, he sexually abused her for years; now, he is arguably abusing millions of other American women.
Alas writes:
I’m leery of politicizing Davis’ personal tragedy too much. But I’m struck by the fact that Linda Davis - who had never even heard of “marital rape” until recently, and who seems unlikely to know much about feminism - has described an abusive marriage that matches, in every detail, what feminists say about how abusers operate.
The abuser is controlling; the abuser can be charming; the abuser believes in the male right (and “duty”) of taking a leadership position within the household; the abuser has weird issues with prostitution and pornography; and the abuser knows how to get the community on his side. Fear of poverty, fear of disbelief, commitment to her family obligations and her marriage, and not having anyplace to go keeps the victim by her abuser’s side. Davis is probably no feminist, but the story she tells is exactly what feminists have been saying about abuse for decades.
This is what’s wrong with the idea of a male duty to head the household, in my view; no doubt some kind men take on that “duty” with kindness, but not all men are kind. An abuser and rapist like David Hager (and I know he hasn’t been and probably never will be convicted in a courtroom, but in my personal opinion Davis’ account is entirely believable) takes that message as a license to abuse and rape. And a community that believes in male headship will take his side and defend his “rights” until given genuinely extraordinary evidence of abuse.
Abuse of women (emotional, psychological, physical, sexual) goes hand-in-hand with with the attitude that women must be subordinate to men. How many male abusers of wives and girlfriends have truly believed that women were the equal of men? Any at all? I doubt it. The belief that women are inferior appears to be a prerequisite for abuse and that's one of the reasons why it must be fought.
Does the Christian Right realize that the attitudes about women which it promotes is a basis for the abuse of women? Do they even care?
Bitch. Ph.D. comments on this story:
Nearly every Christian friend they had, and nearly every doctor friend, sided with a man who had raped his wife. It will be interesting to see if, now that the story is out, those same Christians and medical experts continue to do so. If I were a woman in Lexington, KY, I would be feeling very uncomfortable with my obstetrician and my pastor right about now.
That's a very good question. Will conservative evangelicals defend an accused rapist because he has the "right" theological views or will they choose instead to defend women who are abused by husbands and boyfriends? What will they place first: basic morality or political advantage? This will tell us, at least a little bit, whether they care that their agenda on the social roles of women carries with it the seeds of abuse of women.
To summarize one of the lessons we should draw from this: Denying a women's right to say "no" to sex is entirely consistent with denying a women's right to say "no" to pregnancy or childbirth. Both stem from the attitude that women, women's bodies, and in particular women's sexuality, must be controlled by men rather than by women themselves. This is an attitude prevalent throughout the Christian Right and is thus one of the reasons why the Christian Right must be opposed as an enemy of morality, modernity, and civilization.
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