Often the only question that seems to matter to me is "why"--but I tend to disbelieve the narrative on offer if there seems an evasion of the motivating spleen.
The more I read about our Puritan heritage the more I am struck by a severe and revealing continuity of motivation evident in our current White Xtian land.
Obviously the prior post dealing with HR3 and marriage (and women) are examples.
I've also brought attention here and there to the "manufacture" and slaughter of vast numbers of "lesser" beings (i.e., those not human): I have argued that there will be no end to this practice in this White Xtian land as all things are given to us by the Lord. We are the image and the elaboration of His Will and Word and how should our own Will be aborted if we are borne of Him.
In this way all of life is property.
Now note, as I've likely said before, Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark is a revelation and it is within this text we find a founding voice: Thomas Shepard.
Consider the following in the light of a personal God, mothers, and women as property.
We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth. And although we made no particular choice of Adam to stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself, made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for the good of man.
I have seen a God by reason and never been amazed at God. I have seen God himself and have been ravished to behold him. [In other words, your bright shining and terrible fancy has more truth than your reason. And it is this God I have created that I will say is goodness and wisdom itself. Note how this is not a "transferable" nor deniable knowledge. It's mine, it's from God, it's real.]
thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserved thee, that thou art still alive, & thy mother's woombe & the terrible seas have not been thy grave.
[In an autobiography Shephard says, eulogizing his wife who has died in childbirth, that she was "the eldest daughter of mr Hooker a blessed stock."]
This rhetoric of 1637--the year when Anne Hutchinson was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for, primarily being a woman speaking about the familiar voice of God she heard within her, absent the mediary of male ministerial hierarchy--is not markedly different from what we hear still in our Puritanical times.
There is one God and he only speaks to White Xtian men; women are to be as chattel and their bodies managed in kind.
You can see in Shepard's claiming that God protects and saves him EVEN as from his mother's dangerous woombe that this is a rhetorical transference of parentage, from the foul physical seas of the womb to the heavenly preservation of the Word. Borne of the mind of God not of the body of woman, mother.
Peace be with you, as I've heard some among us say.
The Birth-Mark
Thomas Shepard