• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, March 12, 2024

I can’t get Senator Britt out of my mind, but perhaps it’s not fair to critique the kitchen part of her appearance.

Maybe it was her personal choice to anchor the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union from that household spot, inviting viewers into her home and hearth, so to speak.

But from the top, seeing her wedged in between a brownish counter and a 1970’s-looking table, I sensed some hypocrisy and doubted whether it was her actual kitchen.

She is a powerful 42-year-old senator after all, married to a former NFL player, with two school-aged children.

And the zomboid cooking zone behind her showed zero signs of life. 

Never mind a more probable marble island and expensive appliances, wouldn’t there be note on the fridge or a stray cup somewhere?  

Of course, I’m hardly her target audience. I’m old enough to associate Britt’s backdrop with the modest local builder’s kitchen donated to the “Home Ec” class I was forced to take in eighth grade. (Yes, and the boys took shop, which seemed like a lot more fun.)

I have pungent memories of that class. We had stove tops with electric coils, and as we learned, an unwatched pot really burns and stinks up the place.

Overall, the kitchen setting pretty much backfired, annoying both Democratic and Republican women. As a Gallup poll showed, 57% of American voters think the U.S. would be better off if more women were in elected office, and Britt was otherwise a highly regarded Republican up-and-comer.  Most commenters found the kitchen thing heavy-handed and confusing.

But even if we forget about the setting, there was a mystifying quality to the delivery and content of the speech, which ended up being easily parodied by Scarlett Johansson in the subsequent “Saturday Night Live” cold open.

Some commenters alluded to The Handmaid’s Tale” the Margaret Atwood book turned streaming series about a highly stratified, dystopian society where the Marthas, the infertile ones, are in green and cook and clean behind the scenes. Katie’s green blouse is fashionable and didn’t make sense in that context, but her golden cross hanging above it certainly did.

I’ve been reading blogs from women brought up in Southern Baptist Fundamentalist culture, home-schooled and bowing to the patriarchy, who have since left that community. One such outspoken woman, Jess Piper (JessPiper. Substack.com), recognized that the varied voice modulations and emotional swings in Britt’s speech were prime “Fundy baby voice.” 

The swings between sounding like a seductive baby, a sweet, submissive stay-at-home wife and mom, and occasionally letting the fury beneath all that sweet tea leak out (“Bless his heart”) is all part of it. And so were the demonic descriptions of sex.

Bringing up the 12-year-old Mexican rape victim whose abuse was supposedly allowed under the Joe Biden administration, and describing how “man after man” went into her tiny room to abuse her, presented a horrific tangent that no one was prepared for. It was later revealed that the abuse happened in Mexico, and during the presidency of George W. Bush. Even worse, the actual victim came forth to say that she’d never spoken to Britt.

Britt never apologized, also a hallmark of MAGA Republicans.

But viewing what seemed so alien to “normies” through the lens of a fundamentalist female, brought up to obey and revere the man in the household (or in this case, the man running for president) was an eye-opener. 

It was similar to when Rep. Mike Johnson announced that his wife “spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer” before he got the Speaker job. Johnson was performing the same kind of Fundamentalist code-switching, of having bits of the extreme Biblical bubble he grew up in, escape from time to time. His wife, Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, virulently defended him for what he said in that same breathy, high-pitched baby voice.

Even before the Trump Administration, fundy families were on the rise -- so much so that TLC  chose to do a reality show with the Duggars, Michelle and Jim Bob and their 19 children, for 10 years. Terrible secrets have come out of that family in the aftermath, with a son convicted of sexual abuse and using child porn, and still being defended by his wife, mom and some of his sisters.

Then Trump came along as the ultimate cruel father, a believer in strong men and male dominance -- which might explain why some of his true believers are so attracted to his deeply patriarchal candidacy,  and will never leave him. 

As Jess Piper wrote of the people she grew up with, “I know that they believe proximity to power, submitting to men in power, will save them and their families and keep them in the good grace of the men truly in power.”

Senator Britt had no idea she’d horrify so many viewers with the bizarre Fundy aspects of her speech.  As a Senator, her life is not about being sweet and obeying. And with so many female voters up in arms about increasingly losing their independence with the banning of abortion and messing with IVF and maybe even birth control, things are coming to a boil.

And she’d better get out of the kitchen.