level is virtually absolute. Bryant described the degree of Green’s
control in
He w illingly handles all the business in m y life— even to including
the Lord’s business. Despite our sometimes violent scraps, I love
him for it. ” 14 Bryant never specifies how violent the violent scraps
were, though Green insists they were not violent. Green himself,
in
room, and it’s not so I can play him a piece on the piano. We play
a piece on the seat of his pants! ” 15 Some degree of physical violence, then, was adm ittedly an accepted part of domestic life.
Bryant’s unselfconscious narrative makes clear that over a period of
years, long before her antihomosexual crusade was a glint in Bob
Green’s eye, she was badgered into giving public religious testimonies that deeply distressed her: Bob has a w ay of getting my dander up and backing me up
against a wall. He gets me so terrifically mad at him that I hate
him for pushing me into a corner. He did that now.
“You’re a hypocrite, ” Bob said. “You profess to have Christ
in your life, but you won’t profess Him in public, which
Christ tells you to do. ”
Because I know he’s right, and hate him for making me feel
so bad about it, I end up doing what I’m so scared to d o . 16
Conforming to the will of her husband was clearly a difficult
struggle for Bryant. She writes candidly of her near constant re
bellion. Green’s demands—from increasing her public presence as
religious witness to doing all the child care for four children without help while pursuing the career she genuinely loves—were endurable only because Bryant, like Stapleton and Morgan, took Jesus as her real husband:
Only as I practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as
the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband.
Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord. 17
In Bryant’s case, the “loving leadership” of her husband, this
time in league with her pastor, enshrined her as the token spokeswoman of antihomosexual bigotry. Once again Bryant was reluctant to testify, this time before Dade County’s Metropolitan Commission in hearings on a homosexual-rights ordinance. Bryant
spent several nights in tears and prayer, presumably because, as
she told
Once again, a desire to do Christ’s will brought her into conformity with the expressed will of her husband. One could speculate that some of the compensation in this conformity came from having the burdens of domestic work and child care lessened in the
interest of serving the greater cause. Conformity to the will of
Christ and Green, synonymous in this instance as so often before,
also offered an answer to the haunting question of her life: how to
be a public leader of significance— in her terminology, a “star”—
and at the same time an obedient wife acting to protect her children. A singing career, especially a secular one, could never resolve this raging conflict.
Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a “good” woman.
Bryant, like all the rest of us, is desperate and dangerous, to herself
and to others, because “good” women live and die in silent selfless
ness and real women cannot. Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time. *
Phyllis Schlafly, the Right’s not-born-again philosopher of the
absurd, is apparently not having a hard time. She seems possessed
by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The
Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological
persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as
she claims to be one of the girls. Unlike most other right-wing
women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart. In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is
best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal
Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women’s movement, big government, and
