Catholic Fringe Group Founder Raylan Alleman: Don’t Send Your Daughters To College

At a time when even the pope is making attempts to lead the church in a more progressive direction, one Catholic organization from (where else?) the American South apparently hasn’t gotten the memo.

Fix the Family, a group run by Citadel Catholic Media in Thibodaux, La., believes, among other things, that parents should not send their daughters to college. Earlier this month, the group’s founder, Raylan Alleman, posted a listicle offering eight reasons not to do so, including sin, temptation, the risk of meeting the “wrong kinds of men” and an education that “doesn’t teach her how to be a wife and mother.”

From the blog:

“Nothing that is taught in a college curriculum is geared toward domestic homemaking. On the contrary, it is training in a very masculine role of a professional career. So there becomes a severe inner conflict in a woman when she starts trying to be a homemaker and juggle a career alongside it.”

As evidenced from the above passage, the post reads like satire, using phrases like “[our] positions are a threat to the trophies of the feminist agenda.” Sadly, however, a little digging into Alleman’s digital footprints reveals that the post is not a rejected submission from the Onion slush pile. In fact, he has quite a history of posting incendiary material that doesn’t belong in this century. In a YouTube video posted this past June, he describes homosexual acts as “intrinsically evil.” Following the re-election of President Barack Obama, he expressed disappointment that God didn’t answer his prayers, and just last week he called the pill an “abuse of women.”

His personal Facebook page is largely public, proudly displaying that he “likes” such groups as the Confederate Flag-waving Rebel Alliance, which describes itself as a community for “people who are tired of being told what to do.” Alleman uses the page largely to post stories about Pope Francis and other Catholic-related material. It’s a similar story on the Fix the Family Facebook page, which, disturbingly, has more than 1,300 fans.

By Alleman’s own admission, his assertion that women should choose homemaking and motherhood over a college degree has received the most blowback. That’s probably because it’s the most bizarre, in particular his untenable assertion that humanity suffers from a depopulation problem. Several bloggers have already called Alleman out on the listicle, using adjectives like “creepy,” “weird,” and the like. Websites like Jezebel, Huffington Post and others did the same.

On Wednesday, Emily Coccia, writing on the Feminists at Large blog, responded with an open letter in which she provided a sardonic, point-by-point rebuttal:

“Well, as wonderfully compelling as your logic has been, I have to remain adamant about being an ‘evil feminist.’ I just cannot bring myself to refute the value of a college degree in my life. Your rhetoric was compelling and your reasoning flawless, yet somehow, I remain staunch in my choice to attend college.”

The listicle in question appears to be taken from an online “sermon” Alleman posted in August 2012. The post is part of his “Feminist Lies” series. If you have the stomach for it, watch the full clip below. Or if you want a laugh, skip the video and jump right to the comments. Our favorite: “you are human garbage and your ideas are disgusting.”