Kathryn Joyce is working on a book about conservative Christian women's movements, to be published by Beacon Press.

Between 1985 and 1990, three books were published by small, independent Christian presses that would have come to have a profound impact on Christian Right thinking on family planning, feminism and birth control. Charles Provan's The Bible and Birth Control, Mary Pride's The Way Home: Away from Feminism and Back to Reality, and Rick and Jan Hess's A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. Together, these three books laid a comprehensive framework for the pro-natalist, anti-birth control movement today known as Quiverfull, wherein believers eschew all forms of birth control, natural and hormonal, and argue that Christian families should leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God.

The diary below was originally posted in my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal on Sunday, August 20th.

It was autumn 1992 and I was out of college for a year. Like many undergraduates from liberal art schools I was well educated but didn't possess any skills for the "real world." So I telemarketed for a hideous company that sold overpriced latex gloves to nursing homes while living in the East Village.

The market value for these gloves was approximately $30 per case (10 boxes per case) and we sold them for $400. I earned either $8 an hour or 5% per sale if commissions exceeded my base salary. The company provided us with names of nursing homes nationwide on index cards and we read from a script.

I think we should thank Mel Gibson for offering us this opportunity to discuss bigotry in America. Unfortunately, discussions of bigotry rarely erupt here on a national level unless some atrocious event has kindled our wavering national attention.

Truly, bigotry, and race relations in particular, has been a topic largely lost on our government in recent years unless forced upon them by such unfortunate circumstances as those involving the abolishment of Affirmative Action or the outrageous abandonment of New Orleans post-Katrina.

Sadly, such a dialogue may yet be a difficult proposition given that those in charge are bigots -- that's right, BIGOTS! -- and that includes our down-home, folksy dork-in-chief, George W. Bush.

Hear me out and then decide for yourself.

There's a scene in the last of the three Lord of the Rings movies in which valiant hobbit Sam rescues his captive friend Frodo from a tower in the heart of an evil stronghold.  In the process, he kills a good number of orcs.

Did you cry for them?  Did you worry about any orcish widows left waiting by the window?  Little orclings wondering when papa was coming home?

Of course not.  You cheered Sam's courage and didn't give a second thought to the orcs.  Why?  Because... they're orcs.  They're ugly, vile, evil.  The very definition of other.  

Now, wherever I wrote the word "orc," imagine that it said "liberal."