“What Mom Really Wants: Equal Rights”

“What Mom Really Wants: Equal Rights”   May 10, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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NYT: Does Religion Oppress Women?

BY NICHOLAS KRISTOF

 DECEMBER 15, 2009 

At their most repugnant, the belief that women are inferior human beings in the eyes of God gives excuses to the brutal husband who beats his wife, the soldier who rapes a woman, the employer who has a lower pay scale for women employees, or parents who decide to abort a female embryo. It also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair and equal access to education, health care, employment, and influence within their own communities.

I’ve never been a fan of Mother’s Day sermons. While my mother was alive, I did the whole cards, flowers, and chocolates thing and visited when I could, but the solipsistic sermons always irritated me. In part because I have always known women who wanted to have kids who couldn’t, and women who had kids they didn’t plan and sometimes didn’t want, and the whole issue of family is such a mixed bag of guilt, manipulation, as well as sacrifice and celebration that I just never liked to try to speak to the issue of motherhood as if everyone experienced it the same way.

As I have grown old in the church, I have realized more and more that the issue is not about motherhood as much as it is about womanhood, and for me in particular, it is how religion has not consistently been a friend and an ally to the cause of women and of equal rights. 

Do you remember the powerful speech that Michelle Obama delivered in 2016 in which she commented on the painful irony of having lived for 8 years in the White House, knowing that the White House had been built by slaves? 

Sure, it was an important aspect of the progress made in America that a house once built by the forced labor of African slaves was then inhabited by decedents of slaves. The church I served in Kentucky when I was in grad school was also a building that was built by slaves. It was creepy and a bit haunting, but it was also buried in more than a hundred years of history. 

What took me another generation to realize is how the church was still enslaving women, setting the boundaries of who and what they could be. Still, I don’t want to be guilty of seeing women’s rights and the abuse of women purely from a western perspective. For those of us who grew up in the United States or Europe, it needs to be pointed out that the most common form of drudgery in the lives of women globally is that fact that most water in the world is still carried from a well or a natural water source and in almost every country in the world, the task of carrying water is still relegated, almost exclusively to women. 

I have seen it, in the Middle east, in northern Africa and in Central and South America. Carrying water and firewood, breaks down the skeletal structure of women and dramatically shortens their lives. Another topic that is difficult for us to hear is the practice of what they call “female circumcision” but which we more accurately call “female genital mutilation” in which young girls are made to suffer the painful, dangerous, and humiliating mutilation of their bodies so that they will derive no pleasure from sexual intercourse . . . another way of both controlling women and easing the fears many men have of the sexual potency of women. 

Globally, women are both feared and desired as sexual beings. Again, this is very difficult for us to allow ourselves to think about, and though it happens to young boys as well, the majority of people who are being trafficked around the world for sex, are young women. One of our listeners is a young mother with whom I correspond regularly who was trafficked and while she survived it, this is not something one recovers from quickly, if, in fact, recovery is possible. It happens in Asia, it happens in Africa, and, it happens in the United States, mostly in Florida, California, and Texas. The numbers are difficult to cite with certainty but in those three states, we can confidently say that there are more than 40,000 young girls being taken and trafficked in the sex trade.

I’m not going to be specific enough to get sued, but I can tell you that there are more than 10 Asian Spas here in Springfield that are covers for prostitution of trafficked Asian women, women who are moved around the country to truck stops and massage parlors where they are prevented from learning to speak English or to make friends so that they remain trapped in an abusive cycle from which they are not likely to escape with their lives. 

There was one right down the street from my home and I asked the business owners around the spa why they tolerated it on their block until they finally demanded a police raid. The spa was closed but no arrests were made. The trafficked women were moved to other locations, the male customers were just sent home . . . 2020, on the south side of Springfield, within walking distance of half million-dollar homes, a high school, and an elementary school, and a couple of our larger churches. I don’t say this to be shocking or to be offensive. I’m just stating a part of the reality of what it means to be a woman in the 21^st century.

Normally, when people like us get together to talk about women’s issues, we are talking about wage disparity, the glass ceiling, and the fact that no woman has yet been elected to the office of the president and even though we have women serving in the house and the senate, their numbers are nowhere near being representative of the 51% stake they have in the population. 

There are 100 members of the senate, only 26 of them are women. And, in spite of a number of additions of women to the congress in the 2018 mid-term elections, they still just make up 24% of the Congress. Sure, their numbers have grown dramatically over the past two generations from purely symbolic levels to a quarter of each house but when women are more than half of the population, can we call this success?

And yes, many other countries have elected women as heads of state, something we have never accomplished. But, and it pains me to say this, but while India had Indira Gandhi and Israel had Golda Meier, Pakistan had Benazir Bhutto, Argentina had Eva Peron, and there have been many more in recent years but can you name a major western nation that has had two, other than the United Kingdom and I am not the only person who is trying to forget about both of those? It takes a few hours for sound to cross the pond but if you listen hard you will hear some “amens” coming across the Atlantic in about five hours. 

And I am not here to tell you today that women being forced to carry fire wood and water, that female mutilation, sex trafficking, hiring discrimination, the wage gap, and election inequities are all the fault of organized religion but I am here to tell you that organized religion has fostered and helped to perpetuate this diminished role of women in the world from the dawn of time. 

The Catholic Church has, for centuries, venerated if not actually worshipped Mary, the mother of Jesus, but you know, “virgin” was not really Mary’s first name. She is venerated as the virgin mother and later tradition has it that she was a perpetual virgin . . . that is, the notion that she was holy and to be honored was tied to her having never had sex and if you can’t see that worshipping a woman because she was forever a virgin is not directly connected to the practice of female genital mutilation then let me submit that you just don’t want to acknowledge the obvious. Both are born of the male fear of the power of female sexuality. 

For centuries Catholics were encouraged to read daily devotions that were the lives of the saints and a huge portion of the female saints became sainted because they died defending their virginity. . . hence, the “virgin martyrs.” Imagine being a little girl and being taught by the church that the two most valuable things a woman can do in the world is to give birth to children and to die a virgin. 

It would seem that Greeks had a somewhat better lock on biology than the early church did. While Greek religions are full of heroes who were born of a divine and mortal union, they didn’t call them virgin births. . . it was, though they didn’t call it this, typically a one night stand with a god, which might have made for a better story to tell mom and dad than that the baby daddy is a local fireman you met at Crossfit. Still, for Greek and Roman demigods, sex was involved. 

Added to the paradoxical message that women are saved through childbirth but still expected to be perpetual virgins is the fact that for almost all of history, Christians have portrayed God as a man and then there is, of course, Jesus, and a history of male popes, patriarchs, priests, pastors and a decidedly male set of church officers, teachers and leaders and women have been made to feel like second class citizens in the world of religion which then applies to every other dimension of life. 

Jews and Muslims have avoided art that depicts either God or people but until very recently, female leadership or even influence has been rare. 

It may be stepping outside of my lane to criticize the treatment of women in Islam,

In fact, most Muslim women have been very clear about the fact that while they may criticize Islamic strictures within their own families and communities, they do not appreciate criticism from outside of their own community; in much the same way that gay people are getting tired of straight saviors, and black people are weary with white martyrs, and women in general may be tired of overly zealous male feminists. But, it is my job to deliver about 50 lectures on ethics every year and I cannot help doing that from the perspective of a white, male, heterosexual. 

And sermons about cisgen, white, male, hetero, American liberation are sort of in the wheelhouse of the KKK, so, I’m going to give myself some license here:

Forgive me, but I have a very hard time  seeing this as protecting and honoring women . . . this looks like the subjugation of women and robbing them of both sexuality and femininity . . . you don’t see Muslim men being compelled to cover themselves up in this way.

And though it was a style of dress specific to holy orders of women, it cannot be denied that there is a Christian precedent here as well. This still looks to me like a denial of sexuality and femininity but both traditional Catholics and traditional Muslims 

have pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of western capitalism and exploitation because, you can’t say that how we use women’s bodies in advertising and entertainment is not exploitative and, in much the same way, controlling. 

If I may beg your attention for just a few moments more . . . I do not want to fail to give plaudits to the women who both bore children and who loved and sacrificed for them. I want to honor those who nurtured the sick, tutored the struggling, encouraged the faint of heart, and counseled the troubled but I want to reject the notion that women gain notoriety either for being perpetual virgins or famous sex symbols. The path to being fully human does not have to involve the uterus though it certainly may.

Western religions have a long tradition of segregating and discriminating against women, and certainly not just in leadership but also even in the physical seating arrangements for worshippers. Christian churches had women on one side of the church and men on the other, with even different doors for entering and leaving the church. Jewish synagogues a century ago had a wall dividing a women’s seating area or balcony from the men, but in both Christian and Jewish tradition, such gender discrimination is now nearly non-existent but in Islam it is still the rule:

In fact, even here in religiously conservative Springfield, our local Muslim house of prayer is the only place I know of where women are required to sit behind men in services. 

Pulitzer prize winning authors, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn attempt to answer the question “Is Islam Misogynistic?” in their very important book: Half the Sky. They make the observation that when Muhammad founded Islam, it was an improvement in the condition of women in Arab culture, affording women rights and protections previously unknown in their culture. However, rather than ignoring some of the Quran’s more discriminatory passages and evolving towards greater female liberation, they have actually gone in the other direction. While female honor killings and genital mutilation are not unknown in Africa and the East among Christians, it is almost exclusively an Islamic problem. 

I have heard Americans justifying our occupation of Afghanistan as being a force for liberation for the women there but Kristof and WuDunn write about how a young girl who is just accused of not being a virgin may be sentenced to years in prison and a woman who shows even an inch of skin in the marketplace once would have been beaten but now is raped as punishment. Islam must experience a thoroughgoing reformation. There really is nothing else to say about it. 

The 19^th amendment in America gave women the right to vote in 1920. The passage of one hundred years has been a history of both progress and setbacks for women’s quest to become fully equal citizens in the United States. And, as you know, there are things that can become true in law that do not become true in practice until people change the way that they think, and though we pastors, priests, preachers, rabbis, and imams often feel ignored by our congregations, the truth of the matter is that over time, the pulpit has probably been afforded more influence than it deserved . . . present company excluded, of course. 

After a very expensive and exhausting primary season that saw many qualified men and women, people of color and people of varying sexual orientations, this fall we will come down, once again, to choose between one old white guy or the other old white guy. . . and neither one is even one of my favorite old white guys, but this is the mark of a system shaped by an ideology that leadership almost always comes down to this kind of sausage party, and speaking as an old white guy, I’m sick of it and we just can’t allow this to ever happen again. 

We have waited too long for a more colorful choice. It is said that the Buddha taught that there are three things that cannot remain hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. I’m here to tell you that the truth is that there is too much powerful, intelligent, insightful leadership in women of color for them to remain hidden from our society any longer. As sure as the sun will make itself known tomorrow morning, one of these women needs to move into the White House while I am still young enough to jump and shout.