What My Abusive Husband Can Teach Canadians — and the Church

I didn’t know I was abused.  I had people telling me I was but I would always say “no he doesn’t hit me.” I would go on and on saying how my husband had a high-stress job, I wasn’t a good enough mother or wife. I couldn’t even blame him for his multiple affairs; the women must have taken advantage of him when I was sick last year, it was my fault for getting sick and needing him to help with the kids. I finally put myself in therapy when my marriage was falling apart.   Then one day, the therapist looked at me and said, “You know you're abused right?” I was forced to look at my life with a bit more focus. I left there thinking it was like the glass had just been shattered.

Lately, it seems I can’t look at the news or my social media and not see some something similar happening there. For most of my adult life, I have been distracted with my own life and raising my kids, so I naively sat back and ignored politics. I voted and tried to keep up with the latest news but truthfully, I never paid much attention. But then I slowly started to speak up with a comment here and there on social media. I was shocked at the response I got. When I suggested that rather than spending money telling women to go into construction, the federal government invest in career counseling to make sure everyone is in the career that suits them the best, I was called a “sexist disgrace to women.” People didn’t just disagree with my ideas, they had to attack my character. After that, I started to read more and more comments and discovered that if you dare have a conservative view, you will be attacked and called hateful names. This shook me.

The reality is that the progressives have become bullies, who accuse anyone who steps out of line or does not believe how they believe, as hateful abusive terms. Elementary school children are being taught that words like mailman or fireman are not inclusive and should not be used or you are being hateful; terms like pro-life have been swapped out for “anti-choice.” We’re even attacked for our language to the point that laws are being passed to jail people who do not use the right pronouns. They are attempting to gaslight us and rewrite history to force their agenda.

As a survivor of abuse who spent the past 5 ½ years recovering, I could not help but go back to those old feelings when I read the comments and the hateful names/accusations that conservatives and people of faith are called.

How was I abused? I was a strong independent woman; who just happened to live in constant fear. And I was too embarrassed to admit that something was wrong. I had to keep the house perfect at all times, once I even patched and painted a ding my son made in the wall and prayed no one bumped it before it dried or I would have been yelled at that I couldn’t parent the kids. I couldn’t even plan meals because if he didn’t like the roast beef dinner, he would leave the kids and I sitting silently at the table and make himself something different later, to prove he was hungry, but I screwed up supper. Nothing I could do was right.

When things would get really bad with my husband, I would hide in my closet and cry, afraid of what would happen if I dared share my true feelings. One time when he found me hiding and crying he attacked me and told me I was emotionally abusing him with my tears, as he stood over me yelling.

These same tactics are used to control Christians into staying silent and compromising our beliefs to avoid further abuse. As with any abusive relationship, we did not get here overnight; it was a slow process over the past 40 years. It started with jokes, then moved to insults and has gotten to the point last November that an Alberta NDP MLA stood up in the Legislative Assembly, read the bible and openly mocked it for almost 6 minutes. The attacks on our faith and our families are growing at an alarming pace. Alberta families are told that the government can cut parental rights out of sexual education because religious parents would beat the gay out of these kids.   No facts, no statistics just a lie that has been told so many times that it is believed. Oh and please ignore the pornographic and abusive content the government provided access to all Alberta school children; you are a hateful bigot for even questioning why the government does not want parental notification. If we dare say a man who leaves his family and chooses to live as a six-year-old girl needs help, or that there are only two genders, a scientific fact since the beginning of the human race, you are called transphobic and accused of being in the dark ages. Nothing we can do is right and we are forced to change our beliefs to “fix” ourselves because we believe that we are the problem.

The Supreme Court Trinity Western University ruling has made it clear that Christian beliefs are under attack. The accusations from the Supreme Court that the TWU’s law school would “harm the quality of legal services available to the public” “violates essential human dignity and freedom”, “lowers the competence of the bar” and is “a harmful learning environment” all because students willingly take a “community covenant” of faith. Now Christians are the ones hiding scared in that same closet I hid in. Progressives are ready to tell us how our beliefs are hurting them, as they stand over us and yell at us. But take it from me, this doesn’t work, and it never will. The more we compromise the farther it will go until there is no compromise left and we are forced to sit back and shut up.

It’s time for conservatives’ and people of faith to look at these attacks with more focus. We need to admit that what they are doing is abuse. It is time we stand up, acknowledge what’s happening and stop it. Education is key; we need to know what we are dealing with if we ever want to get our freedom back. Recovery is long and hard, but the only other option is death; death of our beliefs, our culture and our freedom. Please stand up. It’s the only way to stop the abuse.