Vice President Mike Pence made waves a few months ago when word got around that, as a rule, he would not spend time alone with a woman who was not his wife. It was almost immediately coined “The Mike Pence Rule,” though it was actually “the Billy Graham rule” for the preceding few decades, and it has been a fairly common “rule” in the Christian community just as long.

As was pointed out several months ago, many in media and society strained to portray the “Pence rule” as a bad thing. Katelyn Beatynov wrote an OpEd at the NYTimes on “A Christian Case Against the Pence Rule,” essentially saying the rule was an admission that men were uncontrollable “beasts”:

The Pence rule arises from a broken view of the sexes: Men are lustful beasts that must be contained, while women are objects of desire that must be hidden away. Offering the Pence rule as a solution to male predation is like saying, “I can’t meet with you one on one, otherwise I might eventually assault you.”

Awkwardly, Beatynov is unable to square her takedown with her own comments in that same article saying “there’s wisdom” in the rule. David French did a more than adequate rebuttal of Beatynov’s Read more