get thee behind me

Music: George Harrison: Songs for Patti (The Mastertape Version) In Fort Worth last Friday, Leonard Ray Owens, a 63 year old preacher and self-proclaimed prophet, was arrested for sexual assault after a woman filed charges that he raped her twice. According to the victim, Owens claimed that "she had a sex demon and a lesbian demon insider of her that needed to come out." The preacher forcefully raped her during a series of so-called exorcisms during which Owens shouted "lose her in the name of Jesus."

Of course, rape is often conducted in the name of Jesus, be it symbolic (e.g., the Middle East) or actual, and one needn't push devotion too far to reveal its underbelly of abject rage. For years when I lived in Minneapolis, I used to go see Bob Larson exorcize demons during his "Freedom Forums" and rallies. Larson, perhaps the largest and most visible devotee of the Deliverance movement, symbolically rapes women every weekend (and when he exorcizes demons from men—which is very rare—its like watching a bar fight). You can witness one of Larson's "exorcisms" on this website feed, no doubt inspired by the recent holiday on October 31. Note during the exorcism of the demon named "Hate," Larson makes the woman go to her "point of pain," which is the realization that her parents did not love her. Larson then becomes the absent father: both scolding and then loving, yelling at her, then embracing her with a calm voice.

Of course, this is how the violence of patriarchy works: discipline, then console. It's always about power, of course, but the great sleight of rhetoric is that Mr. Phallus always tries to "cover up" his transgressions, with Jesus or any other surrogate of righteousness: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support,” said Bush. “While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” They had a demon; they always had a demon, so we fucked 'em, and they secretly wanted it anyway.