Posted by:
janeeliot
(
)
Date: July 17, 2014 03:47AM
MJ -- your slip is showing! You are the one hating women here. You have mocked them as "crazies" and sneered at them -- for I have no idea what! Not uniformly hating religions as you would have them do? As you do? How original of you -- a guy who gets angry when women insist on having their own responses, experiences, and opinions -- instead of yours. Too bad you never joined. (You never joined, right? We can take that to the bank?)
And your knowledge of the history of religion is somewhere between lacking and abysmal. You knowledge of women's studies on the other hand, is simply non-existent. The two are -- oddly enough -- not completely unrelated.
Quakers were the first feminist. Period. They encouraged women to speak in public, to write down their thoughts, and they published the first book of a woman's writing. This was -- oh -- over three hundred years ago. They also gave us Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul. If you have no idea who they are -- which would not surprise me -- please google them. I feel that I am indulging you plenty already. As I write this, the Quakers have set up an underground railroad in Africa to get endangered gays to safety. But you know that, of course, and respect it.
African American women's power also began in their churches. In their churches they had a voice and found their voices. They organized -- starting small perhaps with church picnics and meetings, but from such small seeds... Soon their churches were the origins of the committees they formed to petition the powers that be for everything from health care to education for their children. One cannot over-emphasize the role of African American churches in laying the foundation for the Civil Rights movement, and that included women of color. If you had read anyone relevant -- Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Nikki Giovani, Maya Angelou -- you might have some small clue about the role of religion in the LIBERATION of black women. I clipped this from Wiki on Their Eyes Were Watching God (please note title): "Today, it has come to be regarded as a seminal work in both African-American literature and women's literature.[2] TIME included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.[3]"
And for neither the first nor (huge sigh) the last time, I will explain that after she had formed NOW and become the first African American to get a J.S.D. at Yale, Pauli Murray followed her own dream to become an Episcopalian priest in 1973. Now was that before or after your flirtation with Mormonism? She is now considered a saint in that church -- not to suggest that the Episcopalians could possibly be more fashion-forward than you are.
Wherever on this planet do you think the (gross) stereotype of Tyler Perry's Church Woman came from? From the obvious fact that in their churches, women of color gained the outspoken power that has brought them so much gain -- as well as some grief.
Nor were African American women the only ones. As they took tentative steps out of woman's traditional role and the confinement of home, Anglo women often found the support of other women -- at church. These were the women they knew as friends, as community -- and churches -- really -- unknowingly or not -- acted as the first consciousness raising groups as women could talk about their experiences and concerns with other women in their churches. Churches were the logical starting places for the temperance and suffrage women groups that began to spring up in the 1900s.
In the history of abortion rights, mainline Protestant religions -- along with unorthodox Jews -- led the way. They offered abortion counseling, listened carefully, and came to understand why women seek abortions and were sympathetic. Please deal with it. Even the dour Lutherans submitted a very eloquent Friends of the Court brief during Roe. It is very good. You should read it. You might learn a thing or two about respecting women -- even those who dare to find their freedom in belief -- instead of kowtowing to you.
I daily come in contact with women inside religions who don't have the slightest trouble being powerful and expressing themselves -- Katie Breslin of Catholics for Choice now circulating petitions and organizing rallies to "take action right no[w] to ensure that women who work for for-profit businesses have access to contraception in their insurance plans." The women who daily join OW such as today's Patricia who posted "If the LDS ordination of women succeeds as it already has in so many other Christian denominations, I will celebrate, especially for all the little Mormon girls who will become truly equal in the eyes not only of God but their brothers and sisters in the Church. I believe women should be ordained."
None of this might fit your self-serving notion that women are uniformly oppressed by religions which are all misogynist and all women who participate in religions are "crazy," but those are the facts, ma'am, just the facts, the bare tip of the iceberg of facts that fly in the face of your theory.
Isn't it time to do a little less projecting and a little more owing?