STOKING FIRE: The Chastity-Prolife Connection

Eleanor Bader writes a monthly column for RH Reality Check.

Generation Life, a national Catholic youth group founded in 1999 by ultra-right winger Brandi Swindell, sees its raison d’être as pushing “the chastity-prolife connection."

The West Chester, Pennsylvania-headquartered group “sidewalk counsels” outside the Philadelphia Women’s Center at least once a month. It’s the usual taunts and vitriol, say clinic staff and volunteers, but with a twist--a message that can only be described as befuddling: “Chastity is for lovers.”

“They lecture us when they picket, saying, ‘God doesn’t want sex outside of marriage. He gave us sex to propagate. Be chaste,’ ” Escort Co-coordinator Chris Hill says. They also target particular demographics with messages that they hope will resonate. African Americans patients, for example, are warned that they might be murdering the next Barack Obama. Similarly, men who accompany their girlfriends or wives to the facility are hit with machismo: “Real men step up. They don’t kill their babies.”

And that’s the crux of Generation Life’s mission, the preaching of an ossified formula of gendered behavior that is both intensely rigid and rooted in fantasy. Their website, www.generationlife.org, lays out the basics. In a section for young women, the instructions read like a roadmap for submission. “A lady is modest, pure, and chaste, understands chastity, values her sexuality, appreciates her fertility…Knows her body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit…She loves babies and nurtures her family. She is the heart of her home, finds strength in her husband, understands sacrificial love, and is happy and content.“ In short, the message is simple: Suck it up, girls, and remember the hierarchy.  Women obey men and men obey God.

But that’s not all. In The World According to Generation Life, “Dressing modestly is the frontline to chastity. It isn’t fair to say one thing to a guy with verbal language and another with your body or clothes language. If you make a commitment to living chastity, wearing skimpy, tight, or revealing clothes will make it hard for you to attract the right kind of guys to date.”

You can almost see Generation Life’s theoreticians shrugging their shoulders and grinning impishly, as if to say, “boys will be boys,” penile-driven creatures unable to resist the lust that has bedeviled red-blooded [read straight] males, from peasants to presidents, since time immemorial.

“Guys are stimulated differently than girls,” the website adds. “Open mouth kissing will lead a guy to become sexually aroused but a girl will simply feel more affection toward him…Guys have a higher sex drive and girls have a higher love drive.”  This dichotomy, Generation Life reports, requires “real” men to not only be chaste, but to be chivalrous. “Girls don’t want to be the ones to initiate. They want a guy who will initiate.”

It’s like a fairy tale, with Knights in Shining Armor protecting needy damsels from external threats. The trick, of course, is having a quiver full of children and opposing abortion and family planning.

It’s worth underscoring that opposition to abortion is a key tool in Generation Life’s ideological toolbox. Indeed, it’s the hook used to snare kids into paying attention to the group’s larger political messages—opposition to gender equality and sexual freedom.  In fact, in the workshops they offer in 7th and 8th grade parochial school classrooms across the country, gory pictures of allegedly aborted fetuses are used to gross out students. It’s then a short leap from revulsion—after all, few of us relish looking at pictures of bloody body parts—to the promotion of celibacy until marriage. Of course, 12 and 13 year olds who don’t know better are predictably receptive to black-and-white rules about “chaste living,” dating, and sexual propriety.

Furthermore, few middle schoolers question the behavioral tenets that Generation Life puts forward, all of them enforced and controlled by girls and women.  Among them: necklines should not be lower than four fingers below the collarbone; garments should not be sheer, or made of thin material or spandex; snappy backs, halters, and backless dresses or blouses should be avoided; tank tops should be covered by a jacket or sweater; shirts should not be shorter than four fingers above the knees; and pants should not be tight or form-fitting. If there are controls on acceptable male apparel, they’re not listed on Generation Life’s roster of don’ts.

It’s one of the few areas in which the group’s behavioral restrictions are in any way opaque. According to Amanda Kitterly, Director of Clinic Affairs at the Philadelphia Women’s Center, Gen Life protesters not only impose restrictions on how members are supposed to dress, the leadership views the world as a place where hard-and-fast principles can be applied to relationships, as if right and wrong are as clear-cut as day and night, straight and crooked.  “They try to make good women feel bad by standing outside the clinic and saying things like, ‘We can tell you what’s right for your life. You’re wrong to have an abortion,’ “ Kitterly says. “If you ask them what they hope to accomplish by protesting at the clinic, they’ll tell you that they’re there to preach God’s love. But it’s so clear to me that this is not about either God or love. It’s about owning women and governing what women do. It’s about judgment and hatred.” 

Lastly, please note that Generation Life is not anomalous. Instead, it’s one of several “pro-chastity-prolife” groups, among them, True Love Waits, The Abstinence Clearinghouse, and lovematters.com.