Tag: War on Women

Life After Patriarchy: Lent & Liberation, Part 3

The promise of new life marks the Lenten journey toward the cross and the empty tomb. I believe that journey is incarnated right now in the struggle for life after patriarchy. That’s not how most Christians think about such things. So how might we recalibrate Lent toward liberation?

The struggle to liberate women and women’s bodies from the power of white male privilege will take as many resources and tools as we can collect and figure out how to use, all of them bathed in fervent prayer and compelling worship. The effects of white male privilege are complex and deeply entrenched in daily life and they won’t simply dissipate just because anyone says they should.

Lent is a great time to reflect on those complexities and consider them carefully as we journey toward the promise of Easter. (In addition to these blog posts during Lent, I also recently offered a version of this particular post at All Saints’ Church in Pasadena; you can watch a video clip of it here.) I have some ideas about how all of this relates to the traditional biblical passages we so often hear during Lent, but for now I want to offer a bit more framing for this struggle.

First, I think it’s important to reiterate that I engage in this struggle as a white gay man. I am, frankly, perplexed and dismayed by the near-deafening silence from so many of my white gay brothers about the twin poisons of sexism and racism that infect western society, both today and historically.

We must all note carefully that “homophobia” is not the cause but the result of an insidious confluence of white supremacy and male privilege. I hereby confess my failures in recognizing that confluence in the past and call on all my white gay male comrades to do the same. I urge this not to wallow in white male guilt (which is totally wasted energy) but instead to re-energize our commitment to building a different world.

By committing myself to this struggle, I need not (and actually must not) denigrate being white, gay, or male. We’ve witnessed far too much of that “zero-sum-game” rhetoric of late, to wit: if someone else has rights, I’ll lose some of mine; if “those” people get married, my marriage is weakened; my success depends on your failure. None of that is actually true.

Moreover, I actually enjoy being gay, male, and white. That’s not the issue. The issue, rather, is this: My status as a beloved and cherished creation of God isn’t diminished in the least by insisting that others are, too.

I also believe we must keep the historical trajectory of this struggle over women’s bodies in view. There are so many milestones in that history, but here I offer just five to keep us grounded in the broader struggle.

Greco-Roman Culture. Christianity emerged in the crucible of empire, traces of which have lingered in our churches ever since. Not least among them is the tight bond that emerged among household arrangements, religious institutions, and the political ideologies of empire. This was especially true after the Emperor Constantine wedded Christianity to imperial sensibilities in the fourth century. Note this well: the State will never consider household arrangements a purely private matter; how households function, especially with respect to women and male privilege, is part and parcel of imperial ideology. That was true in the fourth century; it’s true today.

Basic Biology. Let us not forget that the 18th century witnessed the discovery of the vagina and the uterus. Yes, that would be the eighteenth century after Christ. We can, of course, be thankful that those vital organs finally had a name of their own, but this served to provide a supposedly empirical basis for women’s “natural” domesticity. Thomas Laqueur wrote a truly eye-opening book on the history of gender and sex in western culture, which I highly recommend: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. This is, among other things, an important cautionary tale for anyone who thinks “science” alone will save us.

Anti-miscegenation Statutes. White people mostly prefer to forget those laws in the 19th century forbidding mixed-race marriages, which suddenly necessitated the need to refine what in the world race is. Moreover, those statutes were often applied unevenly depending on the gender of the parties. It was, for example, far more egregious for a black man to try to marry a white woman that it was for a white man to try to marry a black woman. Why? The reason in part, both then and today, is the need to emasculate black men for the purpose of propping up white supremacy. Notice the logic: a black man would become the white woman’s superior by virtue of being her husband; this is repugnant from both a racial perspective and a racially gendered perspective (the black man would then be considered an actual man). I recommend Peggy Pascoe’s recent book on this, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.

U.S. Jurisprudence. It was only in 1979 the last state in the U.S. finally repealed its “Head and Master” statutes, which gave husbands ultimate control over all household decisions. Can you imagine something worse? How about this: it wasn’t until 1993 that marital rape became a crime in every state of this country – 1993! Prior to that time, it was simply the wife’s legal obligation to have sex with her husband whenever he demanded it.

Gendered Bullying. Increased media attention to bullying in our schools is a good thing, but I have yet to read any incisive analysis of its cause. The bullying of “effeminate” gay men and “masculine” lesbian women and increasingly transgender people has nothing to do with whom these people love; it has everything to do with violating the gendered order of things in which men are dominate and women are submissive. The war on women is a war on everyone.

Those and many other historical markers should, and I believe must, inform how any Christian preacher preaches during Lent. I have some ideas about that for Lenten themes, which I’ll offer in future posts. For now, I would urge all Christian faith communities to embrace the struggle for women’s liberation as a fundamental Lenten discipline. After all, what kind of resurrection life do any of us really imagine? If it isn’t marked by the full thriving and flourishing of women, then it’s not really Easter.

Ending the War on Women: Lent and Liberation

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6)

We are currently in the midst of a cultural and political war on women and women’s bodies. Perhaps you’ve noticed. If you had any doubts, the recent and truly creepy image of an all-male panel testifying before Congress about contraceptives should convince you. (Just imagine an all-female panel testifying about the virtues of vasectomies.)

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. If Lent can be retrieved as a practice for liberating humanity from the chains of oppression, then ending this war on women must take priority. This will involve attending carefully to the propaganda machine (both secular and religious), mobilizing people to vote when appropriate, repenting where necessary, and recommitting ourselves to the hard work of creating a different world, a world where all can thrive and flourish (if that’s not a suitable goal for a Lenten discipline, I don’t know what is).

I’ll begin with three observations:

First, the current war on women is not new; it is of course many, many centuries old. (I was reminded of this recently by reading a great analysis of the ancient Greek three-cycle play, The Oresteia, and it’s recurrent theme of the fear of powerful women.)

While none of this stuff is new, the current iteration of this power struggle is particularly virulent and insidious in the United States. By “current,” I mean the cultural trajectory that began taking shape more explicitly in the 1970s after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision – a decision that acknowledged what should have been the case long ago, that women have rights over their own bodies. (Yes, abortion is complicated, but my friend and colleague, Susan Russell, recently wrote eloquently on this very topic.)

Second, I believe the current virulence in the war on women is fueled by having an African-American man in the White House. African-American men in American history have quite frequently been the subject of emasculating rhetoric if not also castrating violence; they still are today. Make no mistake about this: white men in power keep their power by subjugating women and treating non-white men like women. If we fail to link sexism and racism we do so at our own, very grave peril.

And third, I am a white man. That means a lot of different things, not least that I enjoy a remarkable amount of privilege in western society. That doesn’t make me bad or evil. It does make me accountable and it should make me responsible. I have, alas, too frequently failed to live up to the responsibility of that privilege for the sake of women’s thriving.

In a recent professional gathering, I was witness to a blatant form of sexism – in both rhetoric and posture – yet I said and did nothing. I hereby repent, and I resolve to do better. As just part of that commitment and for my Lenten discipline this year, I’ll devote regular blog posts to analyzing theologically and culturally the pernicious peril our world faces from the twin threats of sexism and racism.

Notice that I didn’t mention homophobia. I believe the disdain and opposition toward LGBT people is but a symptom of a much deeper and more intractable poison in western culture: the confluence of misogyny and white supremacy. Upon that “wedding” rests most if not all of the truly hideous moments in western society. (Pictured here is Sojourner Truth, from the 19th century. A perfect icon for the incarnation of race and gender.)

One further observation needs to be made here: Religion (including Christianity) has contributed significantly to the subjugation of women and women’s bodies, both historically and today. In that regard, my obligation and responsibility deepen as I am not only a white man, but also a Christian and a priest in the Episcopal Church.

I believe the peculiar character of Christianity, for all its severe faults and foibles, can still help us achieve a better world where all can thrive and flourish. I have some ideas about how to do that but I need help. As I post my own suggestions this Lent, I hope you will add your own. Let’s create a great toolbox for planetary thriving!

At the very least, let us commit ourselves to ensuring that no one ever again has to see a panel of all men making decisions about women’s bodies. That would be a small but nonetheless significant step on the Lenten road toward new life.