<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.19019">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT size=2>
<H1><STRONG>
<DIV class="panelBox double"><IMG class=panelist-pic border=0 alt=""
src="http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/WashingtonPost/Content/Staff-Bio/Images/Panelists/paula-kirby_145x100.jpg"
width=145 height=100>
<DIV class=panelist-info><SPAN class=green-kicker>Consultant to Secular
Organizations</SPAN> <A
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/638929/12/08/ADmeN0B_page.html?type=panelist&blogId=on-faith&panelistId=paula_kirby">
<H2 class=panelist-author>Paula Kirby </H2></A></DIV></DIV></STRONG></H1>
<H1><EM><FONT size=5>The Washington Post</FONT></EM></H1>
<H1>Religion lies about women</H1>
<P><I>“The discrimination against women on a global basis is very often
attributable to the declaration by religious leaders in Christianity, Islam, and
other religions that women are inferior in the eyes of God,” former President
Jimmy Carter said last week. Many traditions teach that while both men and women
are equal in value, God has ordained specific roles for men and women. Those
distinct duties often keep women out of leadership positions in their religious
communities. What is religion’s role in gender discrimination?</I> </P>
<P>“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head
of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the
Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to
their husbands in everything.”</P>
<P>Here, in Ephesians 5, attributed to St Paul, we have in a nutshell the
church’s attitude to the respective positions of man and woman. The man’s role
is to be the head, the woman’s to submit to him. The meaning is crystal clear,
unmistakable; and yet, despite the fundamentalists who firmly believe such Iron
Age prejudices still apply today, there are many liberal Christians who have the
decency to cringe at the primitiveness of such instructions and who therefore
bend over backwards to pretend they’re not as bad as they quite patently are.
“Ah yes,” they say, “but Paul goes on to say that husbands must love their
wives. And not just love them, but love them as they love themselves. So clearly
this is a reciprocal arrangement, equal in value, imposing constraints of equal
weight on both man and wife. All is well with the world and we can continue to
pretend that Christianity is the friend of women.” But no. All is not well with
the world, and only the deluded or the disingenuous could claim to see equality
where there is only subservience. </P>
<P>It is interesting to note the context in which this infamous passage occurs:
immediately following the commandment to women to submit to their husbands we
find the commandment to children to obey their parents, and to slaves to obey
their owners. No amount of instruction to the husbands, parents and owners in
question not to ruthlessly exploit their positions of power can alter the fact
that women are classed with children and slaves when it comes to their social
standing, freedom and self-determination and, like them, are called on to
embrace their inferior status with cheerfulness and enthusiasm. In this same
sequence of instructions slave-owners are exhorted not to threaten their slaves.
Does this make slavery acceptable? Of course not. Only religion could attempt to
present such a loathsome idea as though it were not a blot on the dignity of
humankind, and the requirement for women always to submit to their menfolk is no
less repugnant. </P>
<P>The truth is that the Abrahamic religions fear women and therefore go to
extraordinary and sometimes brutal lengths to control them, constrain them, and
repress them in every way. Show me a non-religious society that feels so
threatened by the thought of female sexuality that it will slice off the
clitoris of a young girl to ensure she can never experience sexual pleasure.
Show me a non-religious society that feels the need to cloak women from head to
toe and force them to experience the outside world through a slit of a few
square inches. All three Abrahamic religions share the myth of Adam and Eve, the
myth that it was through woman that evil was let loose in the world. They share
the heritage of Leviticus, which declared a menstruating woman unclean, to be
set aside, untouched, a revulsion that remains even today among some orthodox
Jews, who will refuse to shake a woman’s hand for fear she may be menstruating.
What kind of lunacy is this? It is the lunacy of a Bronze Age mindset fossilized
by the reactionary forces of religion. </P>
<P>And perish the thought that these religions – in their alleged equal valuing
of women – should permit them actually to control their own bodies! Women exist
for the purposes of reproduction! So let them reproduce! Let them reproduce,
whether they wish it or not. Woe unto the woman who dares to engage in sex
without being willing to conceive as a result! Woe unto the woman who uses
contraception to control her fertility and manage the size of her family! And a
hundred times woe unto the woman who actually dares to terminate a pregnancy she
does not want! The question of abortion illustrates perfectly the role of women
so far as the church is concerned. A woman’s reproductive organs are not her
own, and she may not be permitted to decide what happens to them. The Catholic
Church would forbid abortion, even when the mother’s life is at risk if she
continues with the pregnancy. It would forbid it, even if she has been raped and
is carrying the child of her violator. How much clearer could it be that the
woman has value only as the carrier of a man’s child and has in herself no
intrinsic worth whatsoever? </P>
<P>In the eyes of the Abrahamic religions, the archetypal woman is Eve:
disobedient, unreliable, easily led astray, and a seductive temptress of man –
man being more noble, yet easy prey to the wiles and seductions of his weaker
mate. Woman is the source of danger, the one who corrupts him, the conduit for
all that is evil in the world. She is dangerous … yet irresistible; and this
very irresistibility makes her more dangerous still. But you will notice that
the dangers of sexual temptation are not to be faced equally by men and women:
no, religion demands that it is the woman who bears the burden. Solomon, we are
told, had 700 wives and 300 concubines, and David had a more modest yet still
energy-sapping five wives and 10 concubines, yet neither of these has become a
by-word for male insatiability. Jezebel, on the other hand, has become
synonymous with sexual excess, despite this not being among the vices attributed
to her in the bible story. Fundamentalist Islam, far from requiring its male
followers to control their lusts and take responsibility for them, conceals its
women in hideous, sexless sacks, depriving them of their beauty and their
individuality, literally even their ability to breathe freely – and still
permits polygamy, though only for men, of course. And have you ever stopped to
wonder what became of the male lover of the woman taken in adultery in the
Gospel of John? Why wasn’t he threatened with execution by stoning and hauled
before Jesus?</P>
<P>The New Testament is woefully short of significant female characters, and a
brief look at those who do make it to the hall of fame will suffice to tell us
exactly how they were perceived. On the one hand we have Mary Magdalene – the
prostitute. And on the other we have Mary the mother of Jesus – the virgin. To
paraphrase the late Dorothy Parker, the New Testament’s view of women runs the
full gamut from A to B. Prostitute or virgin: take your pick, ladies. The woman
who engages in sex with multiple men is held up as the epitome of fallenness,
brokenness, wickedness; as one so corrupt that Jesus’s willingness to forgive
her is seen as bordering on the miraculous. And at the same time we are offered
as our ideal, our aspiration, our role-model – the eternal virgin: sexless,
locked forever in a childlike state; devoid of sexual passion or sensuality;
obedient, self-sacrificing, selfless: a woman, in other words, from whom all
that would make her fully human, let alone fully woman, has been stripped. Here,
finally, is the woman that religion need not fear. This is the highest ideal to
which a Christian woman may aspire: a cardboard cut-out of womanhood, a mere
handmaid, silent, submissive, a vessel for the production of babies, passively
and gratefully accepting her fate.</P>
<P>Religion is one lie after another: the lie of original sin, the lie of
eternal life, the lie of hell, the lie of answered prayer, the lie that life can
have no meaning without religion, the lie that religion is the source of
morality, the lie of creationism, the lie of a spy-in-the-sky who hears your
every word and reads your every thought. And to this list we must add the lie
that it views men and women as equal. It has got away for so long with the kind
of lunatic word-games that allow death-by-torture to be presented as an act of
love, and eternal torment in the flames of hell to be seen as a necessary act of
justice, that we should perhaps not be surprised that it has also managed to
dupe its followers into seeing the systematic suppression and silencing of women
as an act of liberation and equality. Nevertheless, it is a lie, like all the
others: a cynical and wicked lie. It is time women everywhere woke up to it.</P>
<P class=posted>Paula Kirby | Apr 13, 2011 3:58
PM</P></FONT></DIV><FONT size=2>
<DIV>_____________________________________________<BR>Wayne A. Fox<BR>1009 Karen
Lane<BR>PO Box 9421<BR>Moscow, ID 83843</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><A href="mailto:waf@moscow.com">waf@moscow.com</A><BR>208
882-7975<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>