My children gleefully learned about labeling women “witches” from the movie The Princess Bride. In an infamous scene, while attempting to heal the mostly dead Westley, Miracle Max is accosted by his wife, Valerie. He responds with, “Get back, witch!” She retorts, “I’m not a witch, I’m your wife!”
My kids adopted the phrase “she’s a witch!” at inopportune moments as I asked them to do an unwanted group activity, like family clean up time, I suspect with encouragement from my husband and a little inspiration from Monty Python.
Julia Goldie Day
I do not remember if I played the part chasing them around threatening to cook them up in a witch’s brew with my broom or said, “I’m not a witch, I’m your mother!”
While the parody of such scenes might make us chuckle, women have been deemed witches or an alternative derogatory term to garner authority for men and the powerful. It is a timeless power grab. The terms vary with our vernacular but have a similar agenda: We women are the witches, demons, bitches, troublemakers, jezebels, seductresses, adulteresses, whores, sinners, and therefore the guilty.
May we not forget witch hunts were hunting women.
Women were burned alive or hanged in the 16th and 17th centuries when found guilty of being witches. Tens of thousands of women were killed as the consequence of witch hunts.
The contemporary witch hunt has evolved into a blame shifting tool of the powerful playing the victim of persecution. The script has flipped. Mostly men and the powerful claim they are being wrongly targeted like the women in historical witch hunts. Irony does not cover it.
Donald Trump often has utilized the phrase “it’s a witch hunt” excuse as he navigates the many cases in which he is a defendant. The most recent hush-money trial is no exception.
The Biden administration is out to get me, claims Trump. The judge is biased. The jury is from New York and not MAGA or GOP enough. The 12 jurors could not make a fair-minded unbiased decision based on the law. The guilty result is rigged!
So how were reasonable people convinced women were witches that should be burned at the stake? Fear.
According to Trump, our country is being taken over by demons; immigrants and terrorists will bewitch our country and destroy us. Even women and Democrats are against us. It is therefore necessary to ignore the rule of law to Make America Great Again.
In other words, you cannot believe what you are hearing with your own ears, Donald J. Trump is convicted, found guilty of 34 felony counts but this cannot be trusted, cannot be valid because this is a witch hunt.
“A witch hunt serves to convince reasonable people that the testimony of women cannot be trusted.”
A witch hunt serves to convince reasonable people that the testimony of women cannot be trusted. Women must inherently be flawed!
Look at Eve, leading her husband astray in the garden. From Genesis, in the beginning the first woman could not be trusted. She listened to the devil, leading the man astray. Her sin taints us all.
She’s a witch!
Look at Stormy Daniels. She is not a woman we would typically expect to be trusted. She is an adult film star. Daniels was interacting with the former president with her own agenda in mind as she has said, to advance her career. I can imagine she has been called names much worse than “witch,” none of which I condone. It cannot have been easy to have her life and choices on display under oath.
Whatever you think of Stormy Daniels, her behavior was lawful, and the guilty verdict for Trump was not directly related to this woman. Having adulterous sex with Daniels was not the crime; falsifying financial business records following the payoff for her silence was.
But the witches, the Stormy Daniels, the women, anyone but Donald Trump himself must be responsible.
It has been pointed out that we have been taught, conditioned even, to fear the so-called witches and not those who burned them alive.
What if instead we fear the ones who are burning people alive? Burning our country alive? Committing the crimes?
What if we trust that women are people created in the image of God? God trusts women and we should do likewise. I am uncertain if a witch even exists, I am certain I am not a witch but a wife, a mother, a woman of valor (thanks, Rachel Held Evans), a person who can reason and conclude that a convicted felon found guilty is just that: guilty.
“When we are found guilty, we are tasked to take responsibility for our actions, to work to repent, to turn our faces back to God.”
It is conceivable that any of us can cause great harm. However, when we are found guilty, we are tasked to take responsibility for our actions, to work to repent, to turn our faces back to God.
What we must do is allow the blame to sit on the shoulders of the ones responsible. Donald Trump is guilty and must be held to account by our system of justice.
But we are guilty as well. Guilty of allowing women to be scapegoats, witches, all while upholding the power of the few instead of the many, undermining the rule of law. We are guilty as Christians of excusing behavior that throws women under the bus, such as the Hollywood Access “grab-them-by-the-pussy” bus.
Do you remember what Valerie says to Miracle Max in The Princess Bride to illicit “Get back, witch!”? She repeatedly yells, pointing at him saying, “LIAR!”
The imagery of justice is often a blindfolded woman holding a scale. If justice is a woman, she has given Trump a jury result of guilty.
Why will we not believe her when she repeatedly says, “Liar!”
We must repent of our own witch hunting. Then and only then can restoration begin.
My prayer is for the collective guilt of Americans as we have participated in the demonizing and blame shifting of witch hunting to be redeemed.
May it be so.
Julia Goldie Day is an ordained minister within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and lives in Memphis, Tenn. She is a painter and proud mother to Jasper, Barak and Jillian. Learn more at her website or follow her on socials @JuliaGoldieDay.
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