The Real Ryan

Bush and McCain adviser Mark McKinnon on the Todd Akin crisis:

Hear that sound, GOP? That’s women running for the exits—and the big tent collapsing.

Mitt Romney, who owed the right absolutely nothing (as Richard Nixon would've told him two months ago in a ten-page memo), nonetheless pulled the big tent down around him when he let the tea party dictate a divisive VP pick. Rep. Paul Ryan's likeability temporarily kept casual observers and some pundits from appreciating that he's one of the most conservative figures in national politics. The dislikeability of his abortion and "forcible rape" policy partner is helping reveal the real Ryan, proving yet again that the gods of politics have a heart for justice and a sense of humor.

While I don't agree with Akin on much of anything, his authenticity is refreshing compared to a presidential candidate who abandoned the humane pragmatism of his gubernatorial years and a deficit-hawk running mate whose Bush-era votes helped add hundreds of billions to the national debt. If they lose in November, Republicans may one day identify Todd Akin as the unlikely prophet who helped them grasp what they had become.

What Rush Didn't Say Was No Fluke

On Rush Limbaugh's radio program this morning, a caller accused Rep. Todd Akin of having been paid off for torpedoing the GOP's chances to win back the U.S. Senate and perhaps even the presidency. Referring to Akin's theories about rape and abortion, the caller said, "Nobody believes that." Limbaugh replied, "I'm not sure nobody believes it" -- and then stopped. He said he had to go to a top-of-the-hour break and mumbled that it was probably better that he was being interrupted.

According to news reports, Limbaugh calls Akin's comments stupid and says that he hopes the congressman will do the right thing and quit his Senate race against the Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill (D-MO). I didn't listen to any more of his show today -- while driving I sometimes flip around among talk shows on KFI, KRLA, and KPCC -- so I don't know if he finished his thought about the prevalence of Akin's views.

One can't help wondering what he might have said. Mitt Romney, for instance, has accepted the support of an anti-abortion activist who believes, just as Akin does, that women's bodies have the power to terminate pregnancies that result from what Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, and others call "forcible rape" (Akin's term was "legitimate rape"). Akin, Ryan, the GOP platform committee, and 20% of the American people want to make all abortion illegal without exceptions for rape or incest. They fear that in the pre-1920 conditions they envision for American women, those wanting or needing an abortion would lie and claim to have been raped.

So Limbaugh's right: Some people do believe as Akin does, and they're pretty powerful. Expressing the rest of whatever had bubbled to his lips might well have contributed to what Akin's critics seem to fear most: Voters realizing he's not an outlier. As an opponent of women's reproductive rights, Akin actually stands neck-deep in the mainstream of his party's thinking.

It's not a debate the GOP wants to have before the election, since when it comes to women's rights, its mainstream doesn't conjoin with the national mainstream. They're not even in the same time zone. Many conservatives still have trouble understanding that women (and a considerable number of men) won't let government dictate to them about abortion. The hard work of reducing the number of abortions instead requires the broad availability of sex education and birth control, gently encouraging women (think tax breaks and free college tuition) to carry unwanted babies to term and give them up for adoption, and better teaching and preaching about sex's sanctity and awe-inspiring generative power. But as long as Republicans insist that the way to battle abortion is to put women back in chains (thanks for that image, Joe Biden), Todd Akin is the poster boy they deserve.

Holy Toledo

Rt. Rev. Leonard Blair, the Roman Catholic bishop of Toledo, is the man whom the Vatican assigned to quiet the Leadership Council of Women Religious (which represents most U.S. nuns) because of its members' views on contraception, the sacramental status of gay and lesbian people, and women's ordination. During a proper grilling this week by Terry Gross on her program, "Fresh Air," Bishop Blair paused to gloat about reflect on another troubled denomination:

You know, it's very interesting. In the New York Times earlier this month, there was an article, "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" And, you know, the author - and I don't mean to pick on Episcopalians, because I'm just quoting what this writer said in the New York Times, but he said today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict suddenly adopted everything urged on the Vatican by, you know, liberal theologians and thinkers and people who dissent. But he said instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded group, he said the church is really experiencing a tremendous drop in its - in practice. And I mean Catholicism is too having its share of problems. But, you know, this is - just becoming like the world and just accepting the secular culture's answer to all these things is not really a solution for people of faith.

The photo below of our bishops suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles, Mary Douglas Glasspool and Diane Jardine Bruce, shows exactly how our church looks. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters should be so blessed. But the Vatican's only solution is that the nuns and everyone else must continue to obey celibate male priests and bishops:

[W]hen it comes to the priesthood, and I don't know that on a program like this we're able to explore the theology of it, because it is a theological one; it's not political. It's not sociological. It's theological. About what the sacraments are and what it means for a man to stand at the altar and act in the very person of Christ as a priest.

I mean, St. Paul talks about Christ being the groom and the church being his bride. That symbolism, theologically, is very much a part of our understanding of the Mass and the priesthood. And that's, I think, also why Christians who maintain their faith in a priesthood - namely, the Catholics and the Orthodox - do not have a female priest.

But churches such as in Protestantism, that speak only about ministry rather than priesthood, for them it's much easier to have women do that because it's a very different kind of faith about the meaning of these things.

The church doesn't say that the ordination of women is not possible because somehow women are unfit to carry out the functions of the priest, but because on the level of sacramental signs, it's not the choice that our Lord made when it comes to those who act in his very person, as the church's bridegroom.

Most of Jesus's followers and apostles were male. It could hardy have been otherwise in first-century Palestine, where women and children were devalued. The Son of Man taught in terms that men and women of his time could understand. Bishop Blair believes that the 21st century church must be governed according to these relatively primitive human standards, redolent with injustice and sin.

Not all Christians agree. The bishop's brief summary of Protestantism notwithstanding, in the 1970s and 1980s the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States decided that women should and must be priests and bishops. With the guidance of the Holy Spirit -- and having recovered, through careful study of the Bible and the church's early history, an understanding of Jesus's and St. Paul's high and highly counter-cultural regard for women as leaders in the church -- we have concluded that the Savior of all humanity is just as fittingly represented at the altar by a woman as a man. Roman Catholic scholarship helped make this leap of faith possible.

When The Episcopal Church shed 2,000-year-old Mediterranean gender norms, the harder debate about gay and lesbian people awaited. For making a place for all people as God made them, critics accuse us of moral relativism and abandonment of the authority of scripture. I can only speak for myself, an orthodox Christian who believes in the saving power of Christ's life, suffering, death, and bodily Resurrection as revealed in the New Testament and the creeds and traditions of the church. I'm skeptical only about the few passages that seem to command us to discriminate against woman and gay people -- friends, relatives, and colleagues living gracious, generous, faithful lives.

Perhaps because they've seen how gender and identity debates have roiled our and the other mainline denominations, Bishop Blair and his colleagues don't want any of it. That's why he doesn't quite hear what his sisters in the Leadership Council of Women Religious mean when they plead for open dialogue. He tells Gross:

[I]f by dialogue they mean that the doctrines of the church are negotiable and that the bishops represent one position and the LCWR presents another position, and somehow we find a middle ground about basic church teaching on faith and morals, then no. That's - I don't think that's the kind of dialogue that the Holy See would envision.

But if it's a dialogue about how to have the LCWR really educate and help the sisters to appreciate and accept church teaching and to implement it in their discussions and try to heal some of the questions or concerns they have about these issues, then that would be the dialogue.

I think that the fundamental faith of the Catholic Church is that there are objective truths and there are teachings of the faith that really do come from revelation and that are interpreted authentically through the teaching office of the church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and that are expected to be believed with the obedience of faith.

And those are things that are not negotiable.

Many Catholics have left the negotiating table and their church. Some have even turned up at the Lord's table in our parishes. After alluding to declining membership in the Episcopal Church, Bishop Blair seemed to bring himself up short. He may have remembered the statistics that have crossed his desk about Catholics' declining attendance at mass. Gross, his interviewer, had also reminded him about clergy abuse scandals and Catholic women's disregard for the Vatican's teachings about birth control. "Catholicism is too having its share of problems," he admitted. Indeed: A spirit-killing, extra-biblical insistence on priestly celibacy. A penchant for secrecy and coverup. And a continued insistence on the diminishment of women.

Yes, the Episcopalians are struggling because our reforms are pressing the outside of the envelope. The Roman Catholics are struggling because, for the current Vatican leadership, reform is a dead letter. I know what page I'd rather be on.

Sally Forth

Sally Ride's sister, Bear, described Sally's partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy, as a member of the family and added:

The pancreatic cancer community is going to be absolutely thrilled that there's now this advocate that they didn't know about. And I hope the GLBT community feels the same. I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them.

Andrew Sullivan thinks the astronaut, who was fiercely protective of her privacy, should've spoken up sooner:

Her achievements as a woman and as a scientist and as an astronaut and as a brilliant, principled investigator of NASA's screw-ups will always stand, and vastly outshine any flaws. But the truth remains: she had a chance to expand people's horizons and young lesbians' hope and self-esteem, and she chose not to.

In fairness to Dr. Ride, she also kept her illness secret from family and friends for 17 months. But she made no secret of one of the focal points of her life after NASA, the empowerment of young women. From her New York Times obit this morning:

In 2003, Dr. Ride told The Times that stereotypes still persisted about girls and science and math — for example the idea that girls had less ability or interest in those subjects, or would be unpopular if they excelled in them. She thought peer pressure, especially in middle school, began driving girls away from the sciences, so she continued to set up science programs all over the country meant to appeal to girls — science festivals, science camps, science clubs — to help them find mentors, role models and one another.

Times reporter Denise Grady put her reference to Ride's partner near the end of the story, where survivors' names usually go. One assumes it was her and O'Shaughnessy's wish to come out that way, elegantly, simply, as though it were no big deal, which, someday soon, it won't be. Could she have done more to spotlight being a pioneer for lesbians as well as women? Reading her obit, I felt this great American had done enough for her country. Godspeed, Sally Ride!

W. D. J. Really Think?

The Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls, former bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, now serves as CEO of The Episcopal Church. In a letter published today in the Wall Street Journal rebutting a column by a disgruntled New York layman, Bishop Sauls writes:

The church has been captive to the dominant culture, which has rewarded it with power, privilege and prestige for a long, long time. The Episcopal Church is now liberating itself from that, and as the author correctly notes, paying the price. I hardly see paying the price as what ails us. I see it as what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Many years ago when I was a parish priest in Savannah, a local politician and disaffected Episcopalian began a conversation with me. In that case the subject was homosexuality. It could have been any of the things mentioned last week as our ailments. "I just think the church should not be governed by the culture," he said. I replied that I agreed with him, but that "I just hadn't noticed that the culture was all that hospitable toward gay people." He stammered. "Well, maybe not here in Georgia."

The Episcopal Church is on record as standing by those the culture marginalizes whether that be nonwhite people, female people or gay people. The author calls that political correctness hostile to tradition.

I call it profoundly countercultural but hardly untraditional. In fact, it is deeply true to the tradition of Jesus, Jesus who offended the "traditionalists" of his own day, Jesus who was known to associate with the less than desirable, Jesus who told his followers to seek him among the poor.

The bishop's argument is eloquent but a little off point. Back in Georgia, he delicately maneuvered his friend into admitting that their state was hostile to gays and lesbians. Since then, the U.S. public, led by our young people, has grown far more accepting. Americans' support for gay marriage appears to increase month to month. The elite culture, especially opinion leaders in the media and popular culture, is militantly hostile to homophobia, and rightly so. And though we haven't fully lived into the democratic imperative of honoring the dignity of each individual and offering opportunity to all, it's also an exaggeration to say that our society marginalizes ethnic minorities and women.

Anyway, in our common struggle for human dignity, it's hard to say who's governing whom. Church people have been part of all our great civil rights movements, as have the unchurched. In formalizing equity in law and canon, sometimes secular society has led the way, other times the church. Today, TEC and what Bishop Sauls calls the dominant culture (especially its judges, DAs, and civil rights divisions) are essentially synchronizing.

So with apologies to the bishop, we actually haven't liberated ourselves from the culture. We have, however, pretty much liberated ourselves from members of our own covenant. He appears to be putting the best possible face on what amounts to us Christians' failure to remain in dialogue and community -- left and right, progressive and conservative, gay- and women-friendly and not. One may assign the blame for our separations and schisms however one wishes. But a failure is a failure. Alienation is alienation. While we honor Christ by welcoming all into his body, there are members of the body we don't much care for. The left hand is often appalled by what the right hand is doing, and vice versa. Christianity is a divided house, and we may remember what our LORD said on that subject.

We're all hopeful that the mainline church's center of gravity is shifting to a place where it will attract those who would never have worshiped with us 30 years ago. But will the secular-minded elites who in all sincerity applaud our enlightenment on identity and gender actually come on Sunday morning to participate in our communities, in the sacraments, in practices and disciplines that call everyone, even the exceptionally enlightened, to humility, repentance, and amendment of life? We may say that it's all up to God. But unless they do come, we will also have also liberated ourselves from the imperative of evangelism.

The Episcopal Church is doing better than its critics claim. Many of our parishes and missions are thriving as inclusive, loving, service-driven communities. And yet I fear our secular political partners on a whole array of issues view us progressive Christian soldiers as objects of curiosity and sympathy as much as sources of inspiration. From a secular perspective, Christ's whole church appears to be diffuse in its core message, even dying, in large part as a result of its failure to transcend its internal tensions and contradictions and keep both left and right wings under the mighty shadow of our Creator and the abiding hope of the Resurrection. In the end, Jesus -- who loves unity as well as justice -- might not be quite as pleased with any of us as we may think.

Don't Douthat

Everyone seems to be on about The Episcopal Church's recent General Convention in Indianapolis (where it adopted a provisional rite for the blessing of same-gender unions and banned discrimination against transgender people in Holy Orders) and Ross Douthat's reflections on the decline of what he calls liberal Christianity, which concludes:

The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.

Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

By equating religious with political liberalism, Douthat misses or avoids what really ails the body of Christ. Profoundly varying ideas about Imago Dei account for our greatest divisions. In the churches which Douthat doesn't think are on the verge of extinction, there are God, the angels, males, and the rest of creation. Almost all growing or stable churches ban women from the pulpit or ordained ministry. These include most megachurches, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches -- as a matter of fact, pretty much everybody. Look at it this way. There are a little over two billion Christians in the world. About two billion worship according to authorities, doctrines, and creeds that marginalize or silence women when it comes to leadership and ordained ministry.

For reasons known best to them, many, maybe even most, of the women in these denominations seem to be okay with being second-class ecclesiasticitizens. Only in a few isolated corners of Christendom -- the mainline denominations in the increasingly secular industrialized world -- have women insisted on the inerrancy of Holy Scripture insofar as Gen. 1:27b is concerned: "In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

Let's say for purposes of argument that, worldwide, 50 million Christians participate in non-gender oppressive church structures. That's probably optimistic. Even if it's true, then Douthat's liberal Christians comprise less than three percent of the faith. I suppose someone could write an op-ed demanding that churches overseeing the faith lives of the remaining 97% of the world's Christians should (to borrow Douthat's language) change or die. If they were excluding blacks, Latinos, or any ethnic group from leadership and ordained ministry, such a critic would probably get a ready hearing, while pious orations about the true faith coming from those in the oppressor churches would not be especially in vogue.

It does seem to be less of a scandal, compared to other forms of bias and discrimination, that almost every church in the world keeps women down. As it is, most critics of the so-called liberals rarely mention gender. You may think it's because they don't want to call attention to their greatest vulnerability, but they probably don't see it that way. They have scripture and tradition on their side, or so it may appear. Where's the gender equity in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the 12 disciples, or certain Pauline restrictions on the role of women in church?

There are satisfactory answers to all these questions. The narratives and doctrines of orthodox Christianity come from the first five centuries of the first millennium, whereas women's equality (in human eyes as opposed to God's and Christ's) is a modern concept. Fears and misunderstandings about women run deep in human culture. Even the land of the free and home of the brave practiced gender apartheid until 1920, when women got the vote. Oppressive church structures have proved far more resilient.

Christianity's real crisis is whether a wholly Christian sense of a creating, saving, supernatural divinity can transcend the global church's prevailing medievalism. The Episcopal Church took a giant step in that direction in the 1970s, when it began ordaining women as priests. It stands out among other mainline denominations which have taken the same step because it has taken the perilous next step of venturing a modern conception of how gay, lesbian, and transgender people fit into the Imago Dei. Radio talk show hosts will always yuck it up and take cheap shots about gay bishops and priests in drag. But it's exceedingly ironic to spend your Sunday morning in the pew next to women who are banned from the priesthood (not to mention girls who would make great priests when they grow up) and then write articles criticizing The Episcopal Church for its differing application of equality under God.

Again ironically, most of these critics are now on the political right. Laurie Goldstein reported last week that the church's choices about same-sex unions and transgender people meant it was moving further to the left. It's conservatives' shame that affording dignity to individuals in all their God-endowed diversity is now construed as leftist.

This is not to say that Douthat doesn't make some good points. We can make the pursuit of equality for ourselves and the groups of which we're members an end in itself. We justice-obsessed church people can all too easily adopt the language and cynical tactics of the politicians. Even worse, we may be tempted to abandon the language and even essence of orthodoxy.

Many have abandoned the church completely because they can't abide or forgive its legacy of prejudice. Perhaps it's just my own privileged background that enables me to believe we can strip away prejudice while still proclaiming the forgiveness, salvation, and hope obtained for all people by the death and bodily resurrection of the Son of God. As long as Douthat's wondering what will save the church in the 21st century, I'd say it's an inclusive, muscular neoorthodoxy that is less concerned with gender and sexual identity and interfaith alignment, that unapologetically proclaims the unique teaching and saving power of the Incarnation and Resurrection.

And yet what's worse: Soft-pedaling orthodoxy to make the church more attractive to the skeptical, abused, and marginalized, or failing even to admit the unbridgeable contradiction between God's heart for justice and the unjust oppression of women and others still being practiced throughout his global church? Liberal Christianity's critics enjoy comparing attendance numbers and the size of the Sunday collection. And yet I seem to remember our LORD saying something about money and rendering unto Caesar. TEC's struggles are emblematic of a quest for an understanding of the mind of God and his transcendent love for all his people that most of Christ's church in all its prosperity refuses even to contemplate, much less venture. Its authorities and officials, including Benedict XVI, aren't even stuck in the 20th century. They're stuck in the post-Constantinian fourth -- because, frankly, once you let the women back into leadership, God knows what happens next.

My Sunday sermon on these subjects is here. Since people like to say that Anglicans and Episcopalians owe their churches to Henry VIII's divorce, it's important to remember that Jesus's public ministry was ignited by the killing of John the Baptist, which occurred because of Herod Antipas's divorce and marriage to his niece Herodias. That first-century Galilean homewrecker is shown above in Paul Delaroche's conception. Sometimes the church really does seem to be all about sex -- or at least the complexity of human relationship in contrast to the unity to which God calls all his people in Christ.

Friedman's Pyramid Scheme

Thomas Friedman acknowledges the Muslim Brotherhood's toxic anti-western, anti-women (he says "anti-feminist," but let's be real) views. But he is vaguely (guardedly is too strong a word) optimistic about its new president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, when it comes to his relations with the west and Israel, not because of anything notable about Morsi but because Egypt, which doesn't have significant oil reserves, needs tourist dollars:

So Morsi is going to be under enormous pressure to follow the path of Turkey, not the Taliban. Will he? I have no idea. He should understand, though, that he holds a powerful card — one Israelis would greatly value: real peace with a Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, which could mean peace with the Muslim world and a true end to the conflict. Of course, that’s the longest of long shots. Would Morsi ever dangle that under certain terms? Again, I don’t know.

The "Patriarchal Bargain"

When it comes to women's rights in Arab and Muslim societies, Max Fisher argues that Mona Eltahawy paints with too broad a brush:

If that misogyny is so innately Arab, why is there such wide variance between Arab societies? Why did Egypt's hateful "they" elect only 2 percent women to its post-revolutionary legislature, while Tunisia's hateful "they" elected 27 percent, far short of half but still significantly more than America's 17 percent? Why are so many misogynist Arab practices as or more common in the non-Arab societies of sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia? After all, nearly every society in history has struggled with sexism, and maybe still is. Just in the U.S., for example, women could not vote until 1920; even today, their access to basic reproductive health care is backsliding. We don't think about this as an issue of American men, white men, or Christian men innately and irreducibly hating women. Why, then, should we be so ready to believe it about Arab Muslims?

And this:

Some of the most important architects of institutionalized Arab misogyny weren't actually Arab. They were Turkish -- or, as they called themselves at the time, Ottoman -- British, and French. These foreigners ruled Arabs for centuries, twisting the cultures to accommodate their dominance. One of their favorite tricks was to buy the submission of men by offering them absolute power over women. The foreign overlords ruled the public sphere, local men ruled the private sphere, and women got nothing; academic Deniz Kandiyoti called this the "patriarchal bargain." Colonial powers employed it in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Asia, promoting misogynist ideas and misogynist men who might have otherwise stayed on the margins, slowly but surely ingraining these ideas into the societies.

And finally:

The fact that feminism is broadly (and wrongly) considered a Western idea has made it tougher for proponents. After centuries of Western colonialism, bombings, invasions, and occupation, Arab men can dismiss the calls for gender equality as just another form of imposition, insisting that Arab culture does it differently. The louder our calls for gender equality get, the easier they are to wave away. 

So Arab men, like men everywhere, prefer being in charge. They justify their behavior by means of the literal dictates of medieval Islam and the traditions they learned from colonial oppressors. If western critics are too aggressive about pointing out that it is wrong to keep women down, the men will complain that an imperialistic foreigner is trying to dictate to them, giving them further warrant to dictate to women.

The problem with this kind of cultural and historical argument is that an oppressive class often comes to power for complex reasons and then offers equally elaborate justifications for maintaining the status quo. When the outside world begins to raise the issue and the ante, the oppressor can get away with playing the victim of the foreign interloper for a while, but not forever. No arguments such as Fisher's are considered acceptable anymore when it comes to justifying or defending, for instance, slavery in the American south or South Africa apartheid.

Fisher also objects to the use of the word "hate" to describe centuries of misogyny. Did white South Africans and U.S. southerners hate blacks? What do you call generations of relentless abuse? "Hate" came naturally enough to those opposing California's Prop. 8, which banned gay marriage. But when it comes to the oppression of women, Fisher claims, we still have to walk on eggshells. He's right that misogyny is part of being human. Like its near relation, homophobia, it seems to come from a darker recess of our nature than racism does. But eventually, even Arab women -- women everywhere -- will say, "No more."

Arab Nations' "Hatred Of Women"

From Mona Eltahawy's searing article in Foreign Policy on what amounts to region-wide gender apartheid:

How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. The only concession to the horror was that girls' education was quietly taken away by then-Crown Prince Abdullah from the Salafi zealots, who have nonetheless managed to retain their vise-like grip on the kingdom's education system writ large.

This, however, is no mere Saudi phenomenon, no hateful curiosity in the rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region -- now more than ever.

Buff And Holy

The Rev. Dr. Amy Richter, bodybuilder and Episcopal priest, reflects on the learning-edge issue of women's ordination from the perspective of spirit, head, and body:

[S]omehow, despite our belief that both sexes can serve the church, it seems there’s still something unnerving about a priest who is a woman. It has to do with having a woman’s body.

A parishioner told me that he thought I was a great priest, but that if I became pregnant, it would be too weird for him to see me at the altar. Merely holding hands with my husband, even when I am not in clerical clothes, has elicited the comment “Can you do that? I mean, in public?” Another parishioner told me I was too petite to be a priest. I’m 5-10. I have never been called “petite.” I think he meant “female.”

What about when a priest wears a bikini? What if she complicates the picture by having sizable biceps or well-defined lats? Can “buff” and “holy” go together? “Ripped” and “reverend”? If the “reverend” is a woman?

Hat tip to Tom Tierney

All About Sex After All

Ed Kilgore believes evangelical Christians prefer Mormon to mainline:

[A]ny evangelical distrust of Mormon theology pales beside the evangelical distrust of mainstream Protestantism—which happens to be the strand of Christianity that Barack Obama belongs to. This attitude can be seen in Rick Santorum’s dismissal of mainline U.S. Protestants as “gone from the world of Christianity”—a comment from 2008 that came to light during the heat of this year’s primary season. While Santorum’s statement was widely criticized, it’s a broadly held, even axiomatic, view for many conservative evangelicals and Catholics. Indeed, conservative minorities in the mainline denominations (most notably Episcopalians) have become accustomed to accusing mainline leaders of heresy and apostasy.

Sure, conservative Christians would have preferred a candidate with a less complicated and controversial belief system than Mitt Romney’s. But...their doubts about Romney probably owe more to the conservative anxiety about his slipperiness than to any particular concerns about the LDS. And in the end...the only religious test that matters is whether you support the “Biblical values” of hostility to feminists, gays, and liberal Protestants like the president.

Conservative Christians have frequently insisted that their primary worry is not the mainline church's policies toward women, gays, and lesbians but its undependable orthodoxy when it comes to such matters as the creeds, Biblical inerrancy, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. If you believe, as I do, that Jesus rose from dead without beaming down in north America (as the LDS teaches he did) and yet that the church needn't be confined by first-century social mores as expressed in the New Testament, the self-styled orthodox insist that I'm not one of them. But if you can support someone who thinks the Bible has been superseded by the Book of Mormon just because you think his views on women and gays coincide with yours, you are far more interested in public policy outcomes than Christian orthodoxy. For you, it really is all about sex.

Second-Class Victims

Maureen Dowd asks the world's most logical question. The shameful answer is that women's rights often take a back seat to other civil rights issues:

I know that the International Olympic Committee is another old-boys’ club and that tyrannies are legitimized in the name of sport. But the I.O.C. does have a charter that bans discrimination, and it did bar South Africa from the Games from 1970 to 1991 because of apartheid. So why not resist the petrodollars and kick out Saudi Arabia for gender apartheid?

Things That Were Said Back In Those Days

In response to questions from Paul Brandeis Raushenbush at the Huffington Post about the Bible's teachings on gender and sexual orientation, Sunday school teacher and former President Jimmy Carter gives us some of that old-time historical and cultural criticism:

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews -– everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

There are some things that were said back in those days –- Paul also said that women should not be adorned, fix up their hair, put on cosmetics, and that every woman who goes in a place of worship should have her head covered. Paul also said that men should not cut their beards and advocated against people getting married, except if they couldn’t control their sexual urges. Those kinds of things applied to the customs of those days. Every worshipper has to decide if and when they want those particular passages to apply to them and their lives....

Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things -– he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.

I draw the line, maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people. I’m a Baptist, and I believe that each congregation is autonomous and can govern its own affairs. So if a local Baptist church wants to accept gay members on an equal basis, which my church does by the way, then that is fine. If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to.

Rush To Judgement

Kathleen Geier ponders the new misogyny:

I really don’t have any idea why there appears to be so much more openly sexist behavior now than there was 20 or 30 years ago. The internet allows many people to be extremely nasty anonymously, with impunity — that’s certainly part of it. Pop culture has become more vulgar, and porn has become more widely available, and thus more influential, I think. The proliferation of everything from home video to cell phone cameras to the internet has caused us to become a more visual culture, which partly explains why women today are judged much more harshly on the basis of their looks. We’ve become a much more conservative country, politically, and the Christian right, which is explicitly anti-feminist, has become more powerful. But that can’t be the whole thing.

Sometimes I think the new misogyny is actually a sign of feminism’s success, and that most of the sexism is perpetrated by old white guys bitter about using the patriarchal power they once had, yet refuse to go gentle into that good night. But plenty of young men engage in this kind of behavior as well.... Perhaps the horrible economy and the increasingly stressful lives and economic insecurity of the 99% have made people in general a lot meaner, and specifically made men more likely to scapegoat women for the problems in their lives, financial and otherwise.

Hat tip to Rick Perlstein

Sandra Fluke Vs. Today's Biggest Loser

Hat tip to Bebe Bahnsen

Birth Control And The Dufus Vote

After weeks of conflict over the peripheral question of whether employees of Roman Catholic institutions should be offered free birth control, the New York Times finally gets to the nub of the the matter -- the Obama administration's requirement that all employers offer contraception to insured employees:

Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.

As I've argued to conservative friends, the religious freedom issue is relatively trivial compared to the federal government deciding in its great wisdom that of all the procedures and medications that could be free of charge, including hay fever pills, Lipitor, and prostate cancer screening, the nod now goes to birth control and other women's health services.

What are the feds up to, anyway? One motive is equity. If women seem to be unduly advantaged under the Obama health care reform, perhaps it's because in the past they've been charged higher premiums than men and had to endure pregnancy being defined as a preexisting condition. Providing free birth control is in the insurance companies' interests as well, since contraception is cheaper than prenatal and obstetrics care during an unplanned pregnancy.

Far more important, the policy will reduce the number of abortions. The more birth control, the fewer abortions. Nothing could be more obvious, except to two powerful constituencies. The first is the Roman Catholic church, which in its absolutism equates never-pregnant with getting an abortion. In doing so, it facilitates more abortions, especially in the developing world. (The Protestant view of contraception runs the gamut.) A theologically sound way out of the thicket of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical on reproduction, is to compare the emotional condition of the parents when an abortion occurs vs. the moment of contraception. God can tell the difference between a fetus and a sperm and egg that are never formally introduced, and so can almost everyone else. Catholic women in the U.S. have figured it out for themselves, thereby writing smarter theology than the pope.

But understanding women's perspectives is not the Vatican's specialty, nor indeed Rush Limbaugh's, who viciously attacked a Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified before Congress about a friend who lost an ovary because she couldn't get birth control. I'd like to think he'll get spanked for his 13-year-old's potty mouth -- at least a few lost advertisers. Critics are demanding that Republicans denounce him, but they probably won't*. He's powerful, because some people like what he says. On this issue, he's channeling the creepy vein of misogyny that lingers in our culture and crops up during debates over women's reproductive rights. Remember that women didn't even get the vote in the U.S. until 1920. Even today, some smile inwardly when Rush calls Sandra Fluke a whore.

So the second powerful constituency preventing a rational discussion of contraception is composed of ignoramuses and dufuses. That's why on this issue, which is all about reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions, I'm sorry to say that Big Brother knows best.

*After posting this, I learned that this morning Speaker of the House John Boehner released a statement saying that Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke were "inappropriate." Carly Fiorina, last year's GOP candidate for the Senate in California, said they were "incendiary" and "distracting."

Under Santorum, Sell Pepsico. Buy Coke.

I may have exaggerated when I wrote that as president Rick Santorum would take the condition of women's equity back to 1920, when U.S. gender apartheid ended. From the mouth of his most generous supporter, Foster Friess, the correct date is 1950. The Episconixonian regrets the hyperbole.

Issa Dope

If it should help set up a Rick Santorum nomination, Barack Obama's fancy footwork on reproductive rights last week may be remembered as one of the best rope-a-dopes in modern political history. Santorum's gender gap would be wider that Jackie Gleason. Imagine the high fives at the White House this morning as Darrell Issa and his fellow House Republicans muzzled women at a hearing about denying them birth control. Sarah Posner reports:

One of the witnesses Issa refused to allow the Democrats to call was Sandra Fluke, a student at Georgetown University (where [Democratic Rep. Eleanor] Holmes Norton teaches at the law school), which Holmes Norton called "the foremost Catholic university in the country.

Had she been permitted to testify, said Fluke, she would have discussed the stories of Georgetown employees who are denied birth control coverage, including a woman who has lost an ovary because she was even denied coverage for pill not even needed for contraceptive, but for medical purposes. As a result of not having the proper medical care, the woman, now 32 years old, lost an ovary and is experiencing an early menopause, threatening her ability to have children.

Issa denied Fluke the opportunity to testify because she was "not qualified." She said, "women impacted by the [policy] are the most qualified to speak." Those voices, she said, "were silenced today."

Hat tip to the Rev. Susan Russell for this photo of experts testifying at the hearing about women's reproductive rights.

Sanity As A Political Virtue: Pro And Con

As Rick Santorum campaigns against women's reproductive rights in the wake of last week's health insurance imbroglio, Andrew Sullivan credits Barack Obama without another successful jujitsu move:

Santorum could win the primary on an issue that guarantees him a landslide loss in the fall. The Christianists and theocons have over-reached - and the far right in the Congress is playing along too, further entrenching the view that the GOP is anti-contraception. Obama meanwhile seems like the sane compromiser who cares about women voters.

If sanity also prevailed in GOP politics, Santorum's desire to bring about pre-1920 conditions in the realm of gender equity could be easily blunted by Mitt Romney. As Sullivan points out, Romney's health plan in Massachusetts also required Roman Catholic institutions to provide free contraception to employees who wanted it. Santorum, of course, can use that against Romney in the upcoming GOP primaries. By the same token, you might think that for once Romney would consider making a virtue of his record by saying that it's antithetical to conservatism for Santorum to say that as president he'd want to put an end to the use of birth control. As a matter of fact, Romney might say that Santorum is evincing tendencies that are borderline despotic. That would be the kind of bold move David Brooks called for on Feb. 10. If Romney is too scared of the right to take advantage of his opportunity (one might also say responsibility) on an issue of such profound concern to millions of Americans, you have to wonder about the efficacy of a system in which one party rewards sanity and the other relentlessly punishes it.

Frown At Brown In Town

This critique of Chris Brown's return to the Grammy awards last night gives the impression that the entertainment industry, which is generally pretty proud of its superior enlightenment, may be soft on violence against women:

I want to say this to anyone who is listening: This is not okay with me. A man hitting a woman in anger is unacceptable and is not easily forgotten or forgiven. A man who hits a woman in anger deserves to be reported to the authorities and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, regardless of who might be inconvenienced in the process. A man who hits a woman in anger may eventually be permitted to go on with his own life, but he is not permitted back in my life, even if it’s been three whole years.

Hat tip to Ciara Ney