Courtesy of google.com
Recently, U. S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he plans to create a Religious Liberty Task Force intended to insert faith-based protections into the political agenda. In doing so, he misuses his public office. His is a bald-faced attempt to extend the reach of conservative Christians into everyday life. Worse, what he posits as freedom represents the opposite. Most particularly, it means the degradation of women.
Take the myth of Adam and Eve, for example. None but ultra conservatives believe the story is literal truth. Imagine the absurdity. We are asked to believe god created a garden, put an evil snake in is midst, then charged his “children,” Adam and Eve, not to partake of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Being all-knowing, he is aware these two innocents will disobey him. Nonetheless, he sets a trap that will condemn the human race for eternity and blames women for this evil, rather than himself. For her crime, Eve and her descendants will suffer the pain of childbirth.
The idea that birth pain is a godly punishment took such a hold over Christian minds, that as late as the 19th century, when chloroform and ether became available as anesthetics, members of the American and English clergy railed against doctors who offered it during deliveries. To do so, was a sin. Apparently, these holy men were convinced god took pleasure in hearing a woman’s screams.
Females have long been cursed through their biology. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, “Every woman is birth-defective, an imperfect male…lower than a slave [and} wholly in subjection to her husband.” St. Peter avows women are not worthy of life. Bishop John Aylmer (pg 133.) describes females as the “dregs of the devil’s dung hill.” And during the Inquisition, to rid the world of sin, “…over nine million women were slaughtered on false convictions of witchcraft. (“Subjugation of women entirely based on religion,” by Barbara G. Walker, FFR, Sept. 2018 pg. 5)*
Simply put, Christian religious argument reflects a chauvinistic bias against women, one which is determined to prevent females from being treated as wholly human. Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, American suffragist and political activists, sums up feminist history as follows: The church has done more to degrade women than all other adverse influences together. Out of the doctrine of original sin grew crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft, women becoming the helpless victims of all the delusions in the brain of man…”
Jeff Session uses the word freedom in a way that perverts its meaning. A majority of today’s woman won’t easily be gulled, and I suspect this righteous man will find he has a fight on his hands. I sincerely hope so.
(*I am unable to verify the 9 million figure through a second source. Wikipedia provides these statistics.)
