Did Bob McDonnell Read 'The Handmaid's Tale'?

Three years before Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell submitted his now-famous thesis at Regent University, (in which he described working women as detrimental to the family, called for a "covenant view" of marriage, and said government should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals, and fornicators"), the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood published her novel "The Handmaid's Tale." The same principles that McDonnell puts forth in his thesis are imagined into action in the extreme.

(My colleagues Melinda, Emily, and Mary, have already weighed in on McDonnell's thesis, and while I normally prefer to focus on food politics, I could not stay away from this one.)

Atwood's dystopian (perhaps McDonnell would consider it utopian) novel is set in the early years following a bloody coup in which the U.S. president and the entire Congress have been gunned down and the government is now being run by a Taliban-like Puritanical theocracy, the Constitution suspended. (Atwood has written that the idea for the book came from a trip she took to Iran around the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution and by the rise of the religious right in the United States.)

The fearful public does little to protest as, in surprisingly short order, civil rights are yanked away and a new "normal" ensues: Women's financial assets are frozen; they lose the right to work and to go to school, the right to read and write; they are shipped off to re-education centers. Men don't fare much better; certain ones (political dissenters, doctors who at one time performed abortions, adulterers, homosexuals and the like) are rounded up, tortured, and hanged at public events called "salvagings" at which attendance is mandatory.

It is, apparently, a time of rampant infertility and low birth rates in which a woman's value is determined solely by her ability to bear children, and the regime's primary goal (besides oppression) is procreation.

Thus, women have been divided into castes: the pious (but sterile) Wives; the worker bee Econowives and Marthas; and the Handmaids -- healthy women of child-bearing age who are farmed out to the homes of Commanders and their Wives and whose primary function is to conceive and give birth (they are not allowed to keep or raise their children; that privilege goes to the Wives). No longer free to dress as they please, women of all castes must wear habit-like, long-sleeved gowns and headdresses that almost completely cover their features.

As a recent college graduate who had done my senior thesis analyzing the fiction and poetry of Margaret Atwood, I devoured the novel back in 1986. But in my (extreme) naiveté, I wondered why she had chosen such a seemingly outlandish cautionary tale. My rights were intact and no such future loomed as far as I could see (I did say I was naïve).

In the last few years, Atwood's fearsome fable has popped into my head more than a few times; certainly when I've read descriptions of the treatment of women in the Taliaban's Afghanistan, but not only then. I also thought of it back in 2002 following the kidnapping of Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart. Held captive for nine months by a religious zealot street preacher, Smart was clad in a white robe and veil that concealed all but her eyes when she was found.

And, the tale came to mind as I read through McDonnell's thesis and encountered gems such as this, on the subject of declining birth rates:

"There is a continuing trend of young adults either postponing marriage or opting to remain single . . . Those who do marry are having fewer or no children. The changing views of the utility of children, the economic burden of raising them, the self-centeredness of modern individualism, and the wide acceptance and convenience of birth control and abortion, have reduced birthrates below that which is required to replenish the current population."

And this, on good behavior:

"While no government can make people be good, policies should reward people when they are, and not subsidize them when they are not. For example, every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer."

And here are a few of McDonnell's specific family policy proposals:

"Make adherence to constitutional interpretivism, a covenant view of marriage and family, and a deep respect for parental authority, the first areas of scrutiny in the selection of federal and state judges."

"Fight any attempts to redefine family by allowing special rights for homosexuals or single-parent unwed mothers."

"Reverse the no-fault divorce law trend, by documenting for state legislators the pain for women and children when the covenant can be so easily discarded."

This last one is so utterly patronizing it makes my head spin.

But as worrisome as I find McDonnell's proposals (in spite of the fact that they are 20 years old), I am even more concerned about the likes of the Rev. Steven Anderson, the Arizona pastor whom Jeffrey Weiss wrote about here. Among other things, Anderson boasts that he has no college degree -- but he does have half the New Testament committed to memory. His church subscribes to a literal interpretation of the Bible, deplores "worldliness, modernism, formalism, and liberalism" and believes that "homosexuality is a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty."

Recently, a member of Anderson's congregation showed up at a speech given by President Obama in Phoenix toting an automatic rifle and a handgun (legally). The day before the president was scheduled to arrive in Arizona, Anderson told his congregation that he would "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell." Perhaps when he closes his eyes to pray, Anderson envisions some sort of coup, like the one Atwood describes in "The Handmaid's Tale."

For her part, Atwood has continued to write futuristic novels, including 2003's "Oryx and Crake," which takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which most of humanity has been wiped out -- except for a strain of bio-engineered green-eyed children. Though I haven't read it since it was first published, one small but vivid detail remains in my mind; oddly enough, the description of a laboratory in which headless chicken parts are grown to meet society's demand for nuggets. At a time when factory farms are producing chickens with breasts so large that they topple over when they try to walk (they're so crowded together they can't move anyway), I wonder how far we are from such a scenario.

Later this month, Atwood will publish a new dystopian novel, a sequel to "Oryx and Crake" titled "The Year of the Flood." I wonder what outlandish future she envisions for us this time.