"The religious reasons Mike Pence won’t eat alone with women don’t add up," says the Washington Post in response to a brouhaha surrounding a quote emanating from an interview with Karen Pence.  In the piece, she says that the Vice President doesn't dine alone with women or attend events where alcohol is served without his wife present.

The whole situation brings to mind an incident involving Billy Graham, back in 1949 or 1950, when he came back from a gospel meeting to find a naked woman in bed, ready to seduce him. After this, Graham implemented what might seem like Draconian rules to prevent false accusations from ruining his career, life, and ministry. Many Christian leaders have implemented similar practices, but the Washington Post does not believe that Christian men who do this are doing it right. 

Laura Turner writes that this is "a good and honorable" goal, "to remain faithful to one’s spouse and to avoid the kind of behavior (or rumors of behavior) that have destroyed the careers of church leaders... But good intentions do not always produce helpful consequences. In this case, the Billy Graham Rule risks reducing women to sexual temptations, objects, things to be avoided. It perpetuates an old boys’ club mentality, excluding women from important work and career conversations simply by virtue of their sex."

She goes on:

There are good reasons for pastors not to meet behind closed doors with someone of the opposite sex. For the sake of transparency, it can be a wise decision to choose to meet, say, at a coffee shop or somewhere with an open-door policy. But for men to categorically refuse to meet one-on-one with women is often dehumanizing and denies the image of Christ that each person bears. As the philosopher Dallas Willard wrote in “The Spirit of the Disciplines,” “Alienation from them makes room for harmful lusts.” It also fuels the myth that loads of women are waiting around to falsely accuse powerful men of rape, a situation that has occurred, but is rare and often used to discount real sexual trauma.

The Billy Graham Rule also denies the reality of LGBT people. 

Of course, you knew this would come down to the fact that Mike Pence is somehow hurting gay people by protecting his own marriage using principles gleaned from his "evangelical Catholicism." The author writes that his sort of rule insinuates that gay people are “'out there,' not an essential part of the church."

Thank you, Washington Post, for your theological lesson of the day. Perhaps you could enlighten us about infant baptism?

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