DID HOUSER WANT TO KILL "JEZEBELS"?

On the subject of the Louisiana theater shooting, I think Garance Franke-Ruta is making an important point:

Why isn't it a hate crime when a man w anti-women views goes into a chick flick + kills women? http://t.co/9iEyrfepmE pic.twitter.com/xH6vxm4RWT

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) July 25, 2015

David Futrelle of the anti-misogyny blog We Hunted the Mammoth addresses this:

Angry misogynist murders women at showing of film by feminist comedian; police worry “we may not find a motive.”

Police in Lafayette, Louisiana are evidently struggling to understand why the outspokenly misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic John Russell “Rusty” Houser murdered two women and wounded 9 other moviegoers at a showing of “Trainwreck,” a film written by and starring Amy Schumer, a feminist comedian with a Jewish father, known for joking frankly about sex....

It seems to me that Houser’s likely motive is staring them in the face.

Because it turns out that Houser was pretty well-known, at least to regular viewers of one local TV talk show in Columbus, GA, as an angry right-wing fanatic who hated women.

... [He left] a long trail of hateful comments on assorted websites, many of them openly praising Hitler and talking ominously about the future of what he saw as a deeply “immoral” culture.”

... In Trainwreck, Amy Schumer plays a New York journalist “riding the cock carousel” -- as the odious men I regularly write about on this website like to put it -- who eventually falls in love.

It seems highly unlikely that Houser was someone “who just happened to be in this theater,” as the police superintendent put it.

It seems highly likely that a woman-hating neo-Nazi ended up in a theater showing Trainwreck on purpose.

Houser was obsessed with "morality." It's one of the things he thought was admirable about Iran:



Here's one particular way he expressed the opinion his distaste for "women having a say in anything:

The last thing someone posting as Rusty Houser posted on Facebook was in 2013, when he linked to an article called "A woman's place in the church and the weak church elder."

That would be this essay:

... This compromise in the church had come about mainly because the messenger had permitted a woman (symbolically called “Jezebel”) to influence the church in an evil, worldly way (v.20).

... The Lord never appointed a woman to be a prophetess. under the new covenant - the reason being that God never intended a woman to have authority over men.

... Paul gives us two reasons why God does not allow a woman to exercise any authority over men in the church: (i) She was created after man - to be his helper; (ii) She was deceived by Satan first (1 Tim.2:12-14).

A woman is more prone to deception by Satan than a man is....

In a home, if the man who should be the head of the house, is weak and effeminate, his wife will take over the leadership of the home. This will be true in a church too. When powerful women see that the elders in a church are weak, they will begin to assert themselves in the church.

God’s Word exhorts us to “act like MEN” (1 Cor.16:13). There is a great need for that exhortation, for many elders today have just about as much backbone as a jellyfish, when it comes to silencing powerful women! They are like King Ahab who was so scared of his wife Jezebel, that he allowed her to do whatever she liked in his kingdom...

(Emphasis in the original.)

I don't know how much Houser knew about Amy Schumer. I don't know if he knew that her father is Jewish. I don't know if he'd watched her on TV, or read much about her comedy.

Maybe he'd just seen the image used to advertise the movie. I say this because every day I see it on the way to work, and I think it's a great ad -- I admire the way it instantly gets across the nature of the character Schumer plays:



If you can imagine rooting for Schumer as she parties hard and screws up her life, then you know at a glance that this would be a great night at the movies. If, on the other hand, you think America has lost its moral way and its women have turned into Jezebels -- well, you might decide, especially if you're already estranged from your wife and daughter after subjecting them to domestic violence, that it's time to grab a gun and take a stand for morality.

I disagree somewhat with Franke-Ruta's tweet. My guess is that Houser wasn't angry merely because this was a "chick flick." I don't think a typical rom-com would have set him off. Instead we have a rare Hollywood movie with an assertive woman as the star. The ad image is Schumer chugging a brew while flashing a bit of cleavage. To Houser, I think that was a harbinger of the Apocalypse.