It was Lance Roberts, a candidate for borough assembly, who said in 2012 that “Feminism was the big heresy of the early 20th Century, and it’s been wreaking havoc on our families ever since.”

“The passivity of men nowadays is why we’ve been losing the political battle also,” Roberts said.

Over the years, as I reported here the other day. Roberts has not been shy about sharing his beliefs about what he considers is the proper place in the world for women and men.

Roberts, who works as an engineer at GVEA, is running against Kristan Kelly. He carries a lot of excess baggage that voters should know about.

Elyse Guttenberg wrote a letter to the editor the other day accurately quoting Roberts about his opposition to feminism.

Now comes April Smith, a right-wing extremist on the school board, claiming in a letter in response that Roberts is not opposed to feminism, just modern feminism.

To be polite, this is complete hooey. “Feminism is by definition rebellion against God,” Roberts wrote a year ago.

“Feminism came about because of the sinfulness of men not fulfilling their God-given responsibilities,” he wrote five years ago.

Roberts has been spouting off this way for many years.

In 2006, he wrote: “I completely agree that the modern church & men have been emasculated. Satan always attempts to tear down God-given standards, like the differences and roles of the sexes.”

In 2008, when Gov. Sarah Palin was in office, he wrote in a comment online: “The Bible’s pretty clear that women are not to be in authority over men.” He was not just talking about church.

He went on to mention that Deborah, one of the great female leaders in the Bible, was elevated because men were too passive and Israel was in trouble. It was a low point for “Hebrew masculinity,” he once claimed.

“The case of Deborah would be similar to if Hillary Clinton won executive office or our own case in Alaska,” he said in 2008. “God will use whoever is in charge to execute his will, but there are many principles it violates when women are in charge. One point would be that now the husband is required to submit to the authority of his wife as the governmental head. This is confusion.”

“Two of the reasons that Deborah was in charge was a) Israel was under affliction (Is 3:12) and b) passive men not fulfilling their roles, causing women to have to take care of things. These are both problems that we have today.”

In response to Roberts’s comment about women leaders, another reader cautioned him: “Don’t know you personally Lance, but I’ve seen enough of it to want to raise the warning flag in response to your post. Take it for what it is worth. It is clear that a woman is not supposed to have political authority in the Church. It is equally clear that there is no problem at all with a woman having civil authority in society. It may happen less often in a normal Biblical society, but there is still nothing wrong with a woman taking such a calling.”

Roberts said that was wrong and he referred to 1 Timothy 2:12, which called on women to keep quiet.

“No, it is clear that women are not to be in authority over men,” Roberts wrote.

“If you use the liberal argument that the context of this verse only applies to the church, then you are saying that the modesty required in v. 9 only applies to the church.”

“You can also examine all the verses about the husband being the authority, and not the wife. This is way God established the order of things and we should submit to that structure.

“It is deniable that God ‘appointed’ her (Deborah) to her office, unless you use a very loose definition of appointment, that would apply to all leaders of all time, since there is no verse showing God appointing her.”

A decade later in 2018, Warhorn Media published an article headlined “The Christian Publishing Industry’s War on Men”, which claimed that “not teaching and honoring Biblical manhood has inevitably led to the church and her publishers opposing all things manly.”

Roberts wrote in an online comment about manhood: “That was a great article. I’ve also found the real battle of today is around masculinity and the feminized church.”

Five years ago, Roberts wrote that “one of the major sins is being effeminate.”

“To be feminine is not just an insult to men, it’s an accusation of sin. It’s one of the reasons why earrings for men is wrong,” he wrote.

He also wrote that God designed the female earlobe for earrings, but made no such provision in designing men.

He said those who get tattoos are “marring their bodies so that they can appear different, showing a dissatisfaction with the appearance God gave them.”

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