Crazy People, Crazy Times

Posted on | July 28, 2014 | 24 Comments

OK, the “switch rape” thing was so crazy it had to be a hoax. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of genuine craziness out there.

Michelle Goldberg writes a long article in the New Yorker about the tranny vs. radfem craziness I’ve been covering here since January. And as I’m reading her very interesting article, I notice Goldberg refers to an open letter, signed by 37 radical feminists — some of them famous, like Katie Sarachild and Ti-Grace Atkinson — called “Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of ‘Gender’.” Curious, I Googled the title and found it at a blog called “Women’s Space.”

Hmmm. Who is this “Heart” person who runs the blog? She has written for the radical feminist journal off our backs (capitalization is patriarchy, or something) and she also published . . . a homeschooling magazine? What madness is this? Research, research . . .

Her name is Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, and she’s so notorious she’s got her own Encyclopedia Dramatica page. Which is not to say that this 61-year-old woman is undeserving of sympathy, however. She first became a mother in 1972 at age 19. By 1994, she was a mother of nine, and the publisher of a popular Christian homeschooling magazine called Gentle Spirit. Unfortunately, her marriage was falling apart. She claimed her husband, Claude Lindsey, was violently abusive. He left, then he came back, then he left again.

Cheryl Lindsey sought pastoral counseling. She also made the acquaintance of a fellow named Rick Seelhoff, whom she subsequently married. However, before she was divorced and during the time she was in pastoral counseling, her pastor and soon-to-be-ex-husband started telling people about Cheryl’s marital problem and her involvement with Rick Seelhoff. Among the people the pastor shared confidential information with was Sue Welch, publisher of a rival homeschooling magazine, The Teaching Home. What followed, as a subsequent federal lawsuit determined, was a conspiracy against Cheryl Lindsey by Welch and other Christian homeschooling leaders that amounted to a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Lindsey won more than $400,000.

Now, some 20 years after the collapse of her marriage to Claude Lindsey, the former Christian homeschooling mother — who had two more children with Rick Seelhoff — is a radical feminist, who attends radfem conferences with Lierre Keith and Cathy Brennan.

That, my friends, is 100% crazy.

Category: Feminism

Comments

24 Responses to “Crazy People, Crazy Times”

Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 28th, 2014 @ 11:40 pm

You are like the Mountain Men when it comes to exploring the undiscovered country of Feminism.
tomthomasrock
July 28th, 2014 @ 11:42 pm

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Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 28th, 2014 @ 11:44 pm

BBBBBBB Ban Hammer!
You call it #Switchrape, we call it BS… | Batshit Crazy News
July 29th, 2014 @ 12:00 am

[…] TOM: Crazy People, Crazy Times […]
Gal Gadot Rule 5 | Batshit Crazy News
July 29th, 2014 @ 12:19 am

[…] TOM: Crazy People, Crazy Times Legal Insurrection: Anti Semitism in the name of Anti Zionism (you just have to open your eyes to […]
Proof
July 29th, 2014 @ 2:14 am

I’d say something snarky, like maybe tom thought you could use the money, but…no.
Cailleach-bhàn
July 29th, 2014 @ 2:26 am

Oh you have stumbled on a goldmine of crazy. I was sure you already knew about “Heart” or I would have pointed you in her direction. I lost track of her old friend and feminist internet co-queen-bee “Lynne” (aka “RainSong” or “Renee”) who was the most venomous man-hater and very adamant about how it was impossible for transsexuals to truly change gender…who then turned out to be a transsexual, that is, actually a male. Lynne had figured a way to have it so “she” was really female, unlike all the other transgenders. The little biographical factoid that Lynne was born with a tallywacker was discovered at pajama time when the gals went to a conference together and shared a room. Oh it was fun to watch their heads spinning after that.
David R. Graham
July 29th, 2014 @ 2:46 am

My Oh My! Good recce. I was in WA in the late 80s and early 90s homeschooling when Lindsey was going about that. I did not know her, had not heard of her, but knew of several of the others in the legal drama at the time. Met personally only the Hegeners, once. Not impressed. Probably mutual. Some HS and personal stuff I cannot put here, but related to the Lindsey story from those years. Summary: HS leaders at the time were split over whether HS was about freedom or about HS leaders self-promoting (read: money). They would not put it in those terms, of course, but that is how I saw it and I rely on that evaluation. Confirmed by this Lindsey saga from those years. Going radfem? Not surprising. Little known but highly significant: the “Right Wing” “Christian” denominations/associations today — all terribly legalistic/self-righteous — descend from the LEFT wing of the Reformation. Anabaptists et al. Antinomians who reverse to legalists. It is the left wing who does these things such as Calvary Chapel congregations do in the ’90s Lindsey saga and still today. They are not conservative or “right wing,” they are left wing. Look closely and see the tracks. Academe/media calls them right wing for the same reason they call fascism right wing when it is really left wing. Too long a comment already, will leave it at that.
David Thompson
July 29th, 2014 @ 2:59 am

Robert,

Ms Seelhoff (or “Heart”) cropped up in this post a few years ago. She denounces the alleged misrepresentation of women’s studies – as being dogmatic, hyperbolical and factually unreliable – as a ploy to “oil the patriarchal machine.” Ms Seelhoff makes this claim while indulging in dogmatism, hyperbole
and a disregard for basic facts. Specifically, she wants us to believe that “the vast majority of American women are every bit as
hobbled by constrictions around dress, mobility and behaviour as women in developing countries.”

By which she means, the women reading your blog and the wives and daughters of other readers are “every bit as hobbled” as
women in Somalia who risk being stoned to death on the orders of the local Islamic court.
Ghost
July 29th, 2014 @ 3:09 am

I believe the word “batshit” applies here, no?
robertstacymccain
July 29th, 2014 @ 6:46 am

Thanks for that.
robertstacymccain
July 29th, 2014 @ 6:52 am

There seems to be a tendency of some conservative Protestant leaders to seek a cult-like following, and then you have situations like this where the various leaders gang up on somebody to exclude them from the “inner circle.”

As to whether these people are “Left” or “Right,” I get your point about the Anabaptists being “Left” in an important way, but the most serious leaders in homeschooling tend to be “Reformed” (Calvinist), which is a different thing altogether.
Quartermaster
July 29th, 2014 @ 7:55 am

One major problem with your post is the fact that John Calvin’s Geneva was filled with legalism. There is a reason that Calvin came to be known as the “Protestant Pope of Geneva.” He got it the old fashioned way. It wasn’t Anabaptists that killed people, but the other way around. The early Anabaptists were anything but antinomians, nor did they become legalists. The later Anabaptist movement became as aberrant as Calvinism, but that was no excuse to kill them as Calvinists did with joy and alacrity.
As for the rest, you are utterly ignorant about Calvary Chapel or Hal Lindsey. That you call them left wing in any sense simply demonstrates your grave ignorance.
RS
July 29th, 2014 @ 8:00 am

Not surprising. Little known but highly significant: the “Right Wing” “Christian” denominations/associations today — all terribly legalistic/self-righteous — descend from the LEFT wing of the Reformation. Anabaptists et al. Antinomians who reverse to legalists.

Quite the broad brush. While there are certainly various independent congregations which evince an inordinate number of rules and regulations and which use non-trademarked terms like “Baptist,” the majority of Evangelical denominations are certainly not as you describe. Indeed, over the years I’ve heard the terms “legalistic” and “self-righteous” used as epithets even though the user can articulate no meaningful definition of either term. Do Roman Catholics not have a lot of rules for their adherents? Do any number of denominations refuse to commune with those of other Christian denominations? The answers to those questions could evince what some might describe as “legalism” or “self-righteousness.”

Likewise, to use the term “Left,” a relatively modern political term in the context of the Reformation, is meaningless. What made the Anabaptists “Leftists?” The belief that infant baptism is not scriptural? The belief that the state had no business establishing an official denomination? And how do you reconcile a belief in scriptural authority as “antinomian?”

There’s no question that any Christian denomination has its loons. If one focuses on the loons and not Christ and God’s Word, one misses the point. That’s why we’re called to be discerning of those who purport to be preachers, teachers, pastors, prophets and the like and not outsource our faith to some individual or hierarchy.
Crazy People, Crazy Times | That Mr. G Guy's Blog
July 29th, 2014 @ 8:13 am

[…] Crazy People, Crazy Times. […]
Zohydro
July 29th, 2014 @ 9:05 am

Doug Phillips is going to have to become a homosexual HIV-infected gay-marriage advocate to top this!
Mm
July 29th, 2014 @ 12:23 pm

How much craziness like this is out there?
Escher's House
July 29th, 2014 @ 12:56 pm

The SS Andrea Dworkin sank in dense fog twelve miles off the coast of Nantucket, after being rammed by the MS Stockholm.
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July 29th, 2014 @ 1:06 pm

[…] TOM: Crazy People, Crazy Times […]
K-Bob
July 29th, 2014 @ 4:22 pm

Clicking over to Ace was unenlightening. I assume someone claimed something about trannies and rape, then?
K-Bob
July 29th, 2014 @ 4:27 pm

0.1% (i.e. one, out of one-thousand) of 7 billion is still 7 million people.

So of only one in a thousand people are crazy, that’s still a LOT of crazy on this planet.

The internet brought them all together, so they no longer feel isolated. “Hey, there’s thousands of us!” makes them think they are the new normal.
David R. Graham
July 29th, 2014 @ 7:51 pm

OK, @RS, @Quartermaster, @robertstacymccain:

The left wing of the Reformation — today’s USA “Christians,” “Evangelicals,” etc. — the ones media/profs love to sneer at — followed Abelard’s nominalism to where it really goes: they claimed a new revelation of the Holy Spirit — actually, several — which obsoleted all or at least most that went before in tradition, scripture and reason. This is the logical consequence of saying what is is only what I say is (nominalism). Existentially, however, that throws one into a void of stochastic structure, “out into the blue,” which, when felt, throws one into a panic and that causes one to go hyper-legalistic or hyper-cynical, as classical Greek Cynics (kunikos = dog) did with admirable (truly!) absence of hypocrisy. In Latin civilization (Rome, law, etc), the hyper-legalistic road is usually taken. The exception is when drugs are taken. Then the hyper-cynical road is taken but always with a patina at least of legalism inside the bubble: e.g.: “rules” for radicals.

Nominalism is proximately accurate and useful but not ultimately so. It works to a point then fails utterly to satisfy the existential yearning for reunion. Specifically, it exposes one to the void of intellectual and moral anarchy. Really, systemic anarchy, void, which everyone but the schizophrenic rushes to overcome — by inventing legalism or cynicism.

I am aware that very many homeschoolers consider themselves from the Reformed (Calvinist) aspect of the Reformation. I graduated from a school of theology that had been Presbyterian seminary and our text for the course in systematic theology was … Calvin’s Institutes. The whole thing, in English translation, of course.

My experience is that most today who think they are in the Reformed tradition actually are in the antinomian tradition (left wing of the Reformation: “we have new knowledge from the Holy Spirit and are deputed to deploy/enforce it to sweep away the old or at least ignore it as obsolete”) and do not know it. The same is true of the Lutheran aspect of the Reformation: they too have gone left wing: “we now know ….” And with their seething cadres of liberation theology, lay, clerical and monastic, so too with Roman Catholicism, even as the prelacy plays secular politics for fun and games for themselves.

In other words, all the churches of Latin Civilization are now left wing in their orientation. They all know better, they all know more, they all understand more than did their predecessors and that is because they have some new revelation of God’s Will that obsoletes the primitives, our forebears. That is a nominalistic stochastic structure of history speaking, not a Word of God. None of the churches can stand or wants to stand against the extreme nominalism/uber-legalism/anarchy of the secular authorities, especially the thieving class who call themselves scientists, the real descendants of Abelard. The churches claim new inspiration but the Holy Spirit is not in them.

So they alternately pamper and savage their members with novelty and legalisms. That is what I see in the Lindsey saga. A sign of the times. Legalism and antinomianism are two faces of the same demon.

Neither Luther nor Calvin claimed new revelation from the Holy Spirit. Both fought those who did, lethally. Their efforts were to re-form the churches according to original specifications. Laws were part of that, but laws are not legalism. Legalism is laws without law. Calvin said very, very clearly that there are no visible signs of either election or reprobation. He fought those who said they had new authority from the Holy Spirit. So did Luther. They were right.

I apologize for writing at such length and beg consideration that I have not gone off topic.
David R. Graham
July 29th, 2014 @ 10:08 pm

I read through Lindsey’s/Heart’s post and the comments at Women’s Space and found myself, as when I read through Lindsey’s work and interviews yesterday, sympathetic as well as impressed with her literary power to hold an audience’s attention. I commend the read. Stacy has done a service anthologizing the woman’s tracks through life. I also commented on/at that post, as follows:

FWIW, which is nothing, I agree with the “RadFem” outlook on the “trans” posturing on this matter. I would not accept to be told by a born women who says she’s a man what a man’s life is. A woman, as a woman, who tells me what a man’s life I would listen to. In fact, I do, daily.

I came here from Stacy McCain’s post yesterday referencing Lindsey. I commented there, thrice, mentioning my homeschooling experience in WA. Our elder son put the first homeschooling homepage on the web, in 1994. I maintain it as a basic curriculum re-formation and loading.

Further, FWIW, which again is nothing, I concur with the “RadFem” analysis of oppression of women by men as a structural phenomenon. My response to that phenomenon, however, is in the other direction: suck it up, baby, and don’t forget who is protecting you with his life, and spending that so you can have yours longer. And if you are not with that kind of guy, that is your fault: you do not trust yourself.

Anyone who produces nine children has to be honored.

Finally, if you guys are going to fight, and have strategies, when are you going to have a strategy to fight? I mean, war is war and it is hell, and when are you going to actually get to it? Talk will not budge the oppressor. Not even hectoring. If you are going to fight, fight, don’t talk. FWIW, which is nothing, that is my advice to you.
Donna Parsons
July 30th, 2014 @ 10:59 pm

Lawrence Hoff?