JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 22

22. RACHEL FACES THE PATRIOT BOARD

“I am proud to call Rachel my friend. She has always been a very devout Beloved. To be precise, she has taught a total of three Sunday schools every week for the last seven years.”

Eve had sat through all the evidence against Rachel, including a deposition from her former boyfriend. He’d signed an affidavit that said Rachel had told him she was safe. She’d fallen pregnant against his wishes -- behind his back, so to speak. Simon was an evangelist and a man, so nobody believed Rachel when she told the Patriot Board that Simon had refused to wear a condom even though she’d asked him.

It didn’t look like the portraits hanging on the walls believed Rachel either: stern visuals of Presidents Reagan and Bush, and evangelists Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and the Reverend Dobson. Even the Ten Commandments seemed to frown on her, displayed as a scroll and a tapestry, and carved into a huge block of granite at the entrance.

Eve turned red in the face. She was uncomfortable taking this risk to testify as a character witness, and highly awed: the Chairman of the Patriot Board was a man she knew very well by reputation, since he’d invented the therapy she used in her clinic. He was Doctor Proctor, a professor and Dean at Columbia University, known as Doc Proc. He looked at her sternly, little knowing that she was a fervid practitioner of his theory.

“We don’t see how her devoutness excuses what she did,” he said. “The facts can hardly be clearer.”

“Surely the quality and duration of her devotion to our Lord deserves some focus regarding the proceedings here, doesn’t it?”

“Are you trying to tell a Patriot Board its duties? Are you forgetting that you’re a Female? Where’s your proper feminine respect? Mind you don’t get into trouble yourself.”

She saw Rachel wince on her behalf, and felt guilty for causing Rachel extra anguish.

How easy it was to accept a law as just and righteous -- until it came down on someone you knew. She saw Rachel gather herself into a mask of strength behind which heaven knew what suffering racked her.

Eve felt a familiar female fear and helplessness gnaw at her, but she didn’t want to experience the submission it meant to accomplish; didn’t want to admit to powerlessness.

What if she were sitting on a Patriot Board instead of those hard-faced men and that smug Professor? She felt something in her stiffen. She was not going to take this lying down. Even if Rachel got reclassified, the story did not end there. She’d make it her business to change Rachel’s status back to Beloved.

That morning, at that Patriot Board hearing, a seed of ambition spiked in Eve. Her ambition was watered by the tone of Doc Proc’s reclassification.

“You will lose all your privileges as a Beloved. All your health benefits, all your food purchase benefits, all your education and career benefits. You will be taken away from here to prison where you will cut and embroider six A’s for yourself to wear. You will be walked through the prison on your Tour of Shame, hissed at by the prisoners, to appreciate where you may be sent next for the slightest intransigence. From prison you will be escorted home and observed sewing the A’s on your clothes, after which you will wear an A at all times in your new life as a Scarlet. You will lose all rights to socialize with any Beloveds. You will be shunned by the Beloved community for the rest of your days. You will live under the threat not only of prison, but also of being reclassified to V-doll status for any reason deemed appropriate by your Patriot Board. May God have mercy on your soul.”

Doc Proc: another typical representative of the male gender. He may be a Columbia professor who invented Sex Aversion Therapy, but he was nevertheless a man who took pleasure in oppressing females.

She’d show him and all others like him. One day she’d be more than equal to men. She’d be one of those women who broke through the glass ceiling because they worked twice as hard as any man. She’d be a ruler of men. A dictator. A queen. She felt her ambition grow thick inside her, a taste on her tongue, a stirring in her marrow, a hungry plant covering a castle full of soldiers so densely, the men were trapped inside.

She looked at Rachel. Her best friend had clamped that expressionless mask over her features. Eve’s face was equally expressionless, as she swore to herself that she would not let this decision -- this odious unfairness to her friend -- stand.