hard right xtian sex culture

This from "Anthropotek", and worth quoting in full:

Re-virgin-ization breaking into news again:

Across the country, "revirginization" appears to be gaining steam. Spiritual efforts to reclaim virginity emerged back in the early 1990s and now, prompted by abstinence-only school courses taught to thousands of girls nationwide, and by religious teachers, there are reports of more and more young women like Watts attempting a sexual do-over. Other women are opting for a more radical route to reclaim their virginity: surgical replacement of the hymen, the small membrane that stretches from the walls of the vagina and that typically breaks when a woman first has intercourse — or for many other reasons, from tampon use to vigorous exercise.

In the last few years, say doctors who perform the surgery, a steady stream of patients, many motivated by the conflict between mores in this country versus their country of birth, or the country of their parents' birth, are interested. "The rate of inquiries is increasing," says Dr. Denise Baker, a Bradenton, Fla., surgeon who performs the procedure on about 100 women a year.

[via MSNBC]

Amazing -- the right traditionally eschews 'feel good' and relativistic 'feels good to me' theology for hardline fundamentalist, literalist readings of the Good Book. But here we have grown women, many times deflowered, claiming that they're prayer makes them "feel" like virgins again. And the megachurches are buying it wholesale... which opens the way for repairing the once-opened hymen with surgical technology.

Is that cosmetic surgery? Would be morbidly curious to see a meme map showing connections and overlays between this technologically accomplished (but thoroughly prayer-powered) re-writing of biological history & that most gruesome, disempowering (and also religiously motivated) act in sub-Saharan Africa -- female "circumcision".

Go read some Alice Walker, please.

Is there some bridge here between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam -- where the religion has to hit women where we live? Megachurches as germination beds for a reactionary theocratic right-wing-evangelical-southern-baptist-taleban?

Sophia, save us.