Bible-Thumping Pastor Believes Women Shouldn’t Interfere With ‘God’s Will’ in Pregnancy—Except His Own Wife
The Pill is destroying America, making women into idle lazy tattlers and gossips, according to Arizona Baptist pastor Steven Anderson. His bottom line: Feminism, coupled with birth control, gives a woman the power to decide when to have children, allowing her to pursue other interests: “You know, my main goal is to go to college, and to graduate from college, and I’m going to be a lawyer and I’m going to be a doctor and I’m going to be a marine biologist.” Now, you may think that doesn’t sound idle or lazy at all. You may think it sounds good. But it’s actually bad, bad, bad. A woman who isn’t “busy about having children” gets into “sin!”
Anderson opened a recent sermon-length rant against contraception by quoting the book of Genesis: “Unto the woman he said I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” (Genesis 3:16) A father of seven, soon to be eight, Anderson thinks women should let God manage their family planning. He has preached for hours on the topic, because the Bible, in his words, makes God’s will perfectly clear. “It used to be a young woman, she gets married, she has children, and that’s her job.”
Male Christian leaders have been making this point for centuries. Why aren’t women listening? Martin Luther, patron saint of the Protestant Reformation, minced no words: “If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her only die from bearing; she is there to do it.”
