Billy & Johnny & Secretaries & Software Engineers

Wherein our hero drags an innocent co-worker into Baptist brainwashing...

My guess is that many of you reading this will be familiar with The Billy Graham rule.

For those that aren’t, Billy was rather famous for refusing to eat alone with women who weren’t his wife. Funny enough, Hillary Clinton famously convinced him to bend the rule and sup with her in a publlc dining room, a fact Graham corroborated in his autobiography.

Those of you familiar with this rule may have first encountered it during the 2016 Presidential campaign season, when then VP candidate Mike Pence spoke openly about his practice of this rule.

Billy Graham (By Warren K. Leffler)

This is not when I first encountered it.

In fact, if memory serves me, it was former Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt that introduced me to the rule during a Men’s Conference at Bellevue Baptist Church, sometime during the late 2000’s.

Johnny took us one step further. I can actually hear him speaking inside my head as I type this:

If you’re interviewing a woman to be your secretary, ask yourself, if you were single, would you date her?

If the answer is yes, you can’t hire her.

Johnny Hunt (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Reading these words now honestly brings bile to the back of my throat. Nevermind that this violates every sexual discrimination in hiring law on the books. It’s bascially code for:

If you’re interviewing a woman to be your secretary, and you’d fuck her, you can’t hire her.

It’s just too risky.

Nevermind the irony that Hunt was accused earlier this year of sexual misconduct that occurred not long after the aforementioned men’s conference (2010), an accusation that was considered credible enough to be picked up by multiple major news outlets, including the Washington Post.

(BTW…I’m not citing any of my sources. This is a memoir. All of this stuff is easily Google-able.)

Let’s move to the crux of this story, shall we?

At the time I was attending Bellevue Men’s Conferences and hearing about how to avoid fucking your secretary, I was deep in the Baptist brainwashing. Not only that, but my now ex-wife had made it very clear the violence she would do to me should I fuck up, and I was absolutely terrified of her. And of her walking away (but that’s a story for another post).

So when my boss asked me to take an early career female-idenfying software engineer under my wing and mentor her on our next major project, I very nearly collapsed into a major panic attack. At least internally.

What am I going to do?

I can’t be spending time working side-by-side with a woman as a pair on a project!

But even I realized it wasn’t acceptable for me to say no, that I can only mentor men.

So I invoked another piece of “wisdom” that I recall picking up from…well, I think it was my Adult Sunday School Teacher at the time, but since I’m not sure, I’m not going to attribute it. But what a zinger. He said that when he got in a similar situation, he invited the woman over to have a meal with him and his wife. This way his wife would know the person and not be threatened by her, and them having a relationship would drastically decrease the chances of an affair.

Ludicrous, right?

But I told you. I was brainwashed. It sounded like a brilliant idea.

And my now ex-wife readily agreed.

When I invited my coworker, you could tell she thought it was weird (NARRATOR: It was). It went something like this:

Hey, since we’re going to be working really closely for the next few weeks, I thought it would be great if you could come over for lunch with me and my wife this weekend and get to know each other better. You can bring your husband too!

BTW - I really hope I didn’t say anything that cringey. But I probably did.

Fast forward to Saturday. My co-worker and her husband arrive, and I invite them in. We sit down at our tiny kitchen table to eat one of our early marriage staples, “five ingredient baked ziti.”

To add awkward insult to injury, I started the meal with: “We usually pray before we eat. Do you mind praying with us?”

Nevermind that she and her husband weren’t Christians. As far as I know, they were atheists, but I honestly can’t remember for sure. At any rate, I shudder to think of how uncomfortable I must have made them. It’s one thing to suffer through a prayer in a large group in public. It’s another to suffer through it at a Christian’s table.

At any rate, they were very gracious, and we survived the lunch. And my coworker and I never had an affair. But that’s not why.

Thankfully we continued to have a good relationship as colleagues, and I eventually became her manager for a few years as well. But I still to this day regret inflicting the Billy Graham rule on her. She’ll almost certainly never read this post, but consider this my public apology.