They Called It Something Else

How Rape Is Being Rebranded Under America’s Rising Theocracy

“When churches become courthouses,

when judges quote scripture more than law,

when a girl’s future is determined not by her dreams but by her womb—

you are not in a democracy.”

These words are not poetic metaphor. They are a warning—and for many, a lived reality.

Across the United States, a dangerous convergence is happening: faith is being weaponized by the state, and violations once condemned are now being sanctified. Rape, abuse, coercion, and control—especially when the victims are women or children—are no longer just ignored. They are being renamed. Repackaged. Rebranded. They are being called something else.

Disguising of Violence

Let’s be clear: rape is the forced violation of one’s body and autonomy. But in America today, it’s being dressed in the language of “godliness,” “redemption,” or “traditional family values.”

• A 10-year-old girl in Ohio was forced to travel out of state for an abortion after being raped. Her trauma was not met with compassion, but with skepticism and outrage—not at the rapist, but at her right to end the pregnancy.
• Survivors of clergy abuse are still shamed into silence while churches shuffle predators from pulpit to pulpit.
• In courtrooms, a judge might lament the “bright future” of the accused while asking what the victim was wearing.
• In homes and churches, girls are taught to submit, to forgive, to carry shame that was never theirs.

And when these institutions are questioned, they don’t deny the trauma—they just rename it.

They call rape God’s will if it results in a child.

They call abuse discipline if it happens at the hands of a father.

They call a woman’s silence grace, and her suffering sacrifice.

They call her strength bitterness, and her resistance sin.

And they call themselves the moral majority.

Project 2025 and the Theocratic Blueprint

Enter Project 2025—an actual political blueprint developed by The Heritage Foundation and other far-right organizations to radically reshape the U.S. government. Its agenda includes:

• Centralizing presidential power under a theocratic, authoritarian model.
• Eliminating protections for civil servants to replace them with ideologically loyal operatives.
• Outlawing abortion nationwide, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
• Rolling back LGBTQ+ rights and embedding Christian nationalism in law.
• Rewriting educational content to align with biblical literalism.

This is not about faith. This is about control. About reshaping the country into a Christian authoritarian state where the rights of women, survivors, and anyone outside their narrow doctrine are erased.

They don’t need to outlaw freedom all at once. They just need to redefine it—piece by piece—until the language itself betrays the truth.

The Insurrection Act

If the people resist—if they rise up, if they protest, if they demand their bodies, their voices, their autonomy back—the government now holds another weapon: the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Normally reserved for rare domestic uprisings, the Act gives the president sweeping power to deploy military force within the United States. With whispers of plans to invoke it under Trump’s second term, and rumors of martial law circling around April 2025, the fear isn’t just of violence—it’s of sanctioned violence.

Imagine a protest for women’s rights met not with riot police, but with soldiers.

Imagine survivors being labeled terrorists for demanding justice.

Imagine a country where trauma is criminalized—and silence, enforced by law.

What They Called It, and What We Must

This is not the first time the powerful have tried to rename suffering.

Enslavement was once called divine order.

Genocide was called manifest destiny.

Rape was called marriage, if the victim was too young to run.

We must not inherit their cowardice. We must not use their names.

Rape is rape.

Silence is complicity.

Project 2025 is a slow coup.

Theocracy is not democracy.

And martial law is not security—it’s suppression.

Reckoning Is Ours

If we do not fight for the truth—if we allow them to keep calling it “something else”—the next generation may grow up without the words to name their pain.

And what is stolen but never spoken becomes a wound that festers across generations.

So we speak.

We name it.

We write it.

We fight it.

Because a story rewritten in lies becomes a prison.

But a truth told in courage becomes a reckoning.

And God knows—we are overdue.