ON RELIGION Life doesn't offer women any pain-free choices

For many mainstream ministers, it's a moment of humor and celebration, with a touch of world-weary irony.

It's the rite at the end of the white wedding, long after the symbolic handoff of the blushing bride from the father to the groom, the litany of modernized vows and the lifting of the bride's veil. That's when the minister gives the new husband permission, at last, to "kiss the bride."

"What patsies these poor clergy members must feel like," quips journalist Caitlin Flanagan, in her saucy yet poignant memoir "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife" (Little, Brown, 2006).

The typical minister must feel a flash of shame as he or she is "forced into the role of a sexual naif primly instructing a young man who has been living with his girlfriend for the past three years that he may 'kiss the bride.' Well, why not? He's been doing God knows what else to her since the night they met at the softball league happy hour."

Consider, she added, the bride-to-be who "spent down her sexual capital a little too early in the game." She once shared her dilemma in a bridal magazine: "I promised my fiance that once we were engaged, I'd do anything he wanted, sexually speaking. Now he's suggesting a threesome."

When it comes to trends in marriage and family life, Flanagan isn't laughing, and neither are her feminist critics.

But it's crucial to note that she is not a guerrilla warrior who secretly works for Concerned Women for America in addition to her high-profile gigs with The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. When it comes to politics, Flanagan is a liberal's liberal, repeatedly stressing that she is pro-gay, antiwar and pro-choice. She lives in Los Angeles, not Colorado Springs, and grew up in true-blue Berkeley, Calif.

However, Flanagan is married and -- with some paid help -- the stay-at-home mother of two boys. The family faithfully attends a congregation that is part of the liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), as opposed to some evangelical megachurch.

Nevertheless, anyone who reads the Flanagan haters will learn that there are two big reasons that her work draws howls of rage from her sisters on the left.

The first is linked to the old saying that "sacred cows make good hamburgers." Liberals are not used to being satirized in elite magazines.

"It's easy to figure that out," said Flanagan. "Humor is hip. Hip is liberal. So it's wrong to write humorous things that make liberals mad. Got it? ... Some people think that it's our patriotic duty to prevent people from being exposed to certain ideas. Some of the things I'm saying are things that people are not supposed to say, especially not where I get to say them."

This is why, noted Gina Piccalo in the Los Angeles Times, Flanagan has been called, in print, "the most repellent person in the world," "an Old-world elitist of the most lip-curling kind" and "a retrograde feminist hater." For many female writers, the "only thing more maddening than a happy housewife is a happy housewife who writes for The New Yorker."

More than anything else, said Flanagan, her critics are furious with her for admitting that "something is lost" when women leave their children at home and return to the office. Of course, Flanagan also emphasizes that women make real sacrifices and suffer highly personal losses when they stay at home.

In her book, she writes: "What few will admit -- because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities -- is that whatever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value."

This is a controversial statement, Flanagan told me, "not because it is wrong, but because it is true." When it comes to matters of marriage and family, there are no easy and pain-free choices in today's world. Flanagan dissects the choices made by other women, but she also has to second-guess her own decisions. The laughs hurt.

"I do believe that marriage changes everything. It requires us to grow up, and that means we're supposed to keep the promises that we make to our husbands and our children," she said. "So we're supposed to put God and our family first. We're supposed to behave ourselves, even though that isn't always easy."

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Terry Mattingly is director of the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and leads the GetReligion.org project to study religion and the news.