FEAR OF WOMEN pt2

It was as if God was saying;

I gave humans a hunger for joyous sexuality and a yearning for love and then forbid them from satisfying this powerful drive. I created this clever double bind as a means of testing their obedience to my commands.

Great problems arose -- the neurotic bishops couldn't monitor every bed -- they learned in the confessional that the peasants were still weak -- confessing their sins of the flesh, accepting their penance and going right back to the marriage bed. Since something must be done, they decided that God and themselves who spoke for him, could bring himself to tolerate sex but only if it included the possibility of conception.

They had to allow some sex for obviously, the prohibition of sex couldn't be complete or else the human race would vanish in one generation. Nevertheless, they believed that God still hated sex and distrusted women who carried sexuality in their bodies, but he would allow it as a concession to human weakness. After all, not everyone could be as holy and as chaste as God's priests. Especially not women.

Women are still devalued and debased; condemned to second class citizenship as not one woman in the huge Catholic and Orthodox movements has been admitted to priestly leadership. In Islam any woman who shows a modicum of interest in anything from voting to driving a car or in limiting the number of children she shall carry, is quickly stoned to death.

The Southern Baptist Convention of some fifty thousand American congregations automatically cast out each of the sixty odd churches that recently defied the Convention's order against ordaining women preachers. The Missouri Synod Lutheran councils have only recently decided that under some circumstances women can vote on congregational issues. In contrast, we are pleased that our own denomination is now ordaining as many women as men. In fact, the United Methodists have become a refuge for the best and brightest young women from the reactionary groups.

We gain their best and brightest, for we will ordain and hire them and set them out doing God's work. Even some of our bishops are women which drives many reactionary clergymen wild when they must work with them on community issues.

Thus, as it always happens, the nature of Christ's revelation of love for women as well as men has been distorted and debased by a narcissistic male aristocracy within the church and through each secular society. From the very beginning of the Christian era, men with religious and political power immediately began shaping the church and its theology to meet their own needs.

When the rich estate owners needed farm workers to plow the fields and harvest the crops, the church soon agreed and began teaching that human sexuality was legitimate only if we paid the piper with a new child to work the aristocracy's estates. When slave trading and owning was a common abuse of black humans, the clergy of Dixie fell right into line with the slave traders and owners.

There was hardly a single group within Colonial America that didn't profit from the slave trade so, of course, expedient preachers in fundamentalist churches had to bless and justify the wretched business.

The reactionary church still blesses every war that secular rulers begin and always send their young men to kill other young men and to die horrible deaths to profit the society. For sixty years the church -- Catholic, Orthodox and Fundamental Protestant, taught that the Cold War was a struggle between God and Satan.

Of course, it was really a desperate struggle between two great financial, political and industrial systems for dominance around the world. Every intelligent person sees that now -- but the reactionary church for reasons of its own soon turned the Cold War into a great spiritual crusade being fought by God's holy people. Actually, both Roberta and Jard have trouble seeing Chase Bank and Wells-Fargo -- or General Motors and Standard Oil as great spiritual entities doing God's work for humankind!

We both are covenant Christians but never Victorian prudes for whom any departure from radical assumptions is an adequate reason for punishment -- preferably a public flogging -- from self-righteous and reactionary pulpits across the land. We, ourselves have had rollicking sex lives for half a century and recommend it most highly.

We don't care -- let the hypocritical and primitive blue noses call us a dirty old couple for enjoying our love, we have an even lower opinion of their sexual neuroticism. Of course we wouldn't have titled our book about marriage LOVERS FOR LIFE had we not believed that God's ideal for each couple is a permanent union that matures from youth through all of life and on to the elderly years with even deeper love.

We believe that sexual love and our reproductive capacity are spiritual gifts that are best shared with one very special person within a life-long commitment. We understand and accept that for many reasons marriages fail and both men and women move on, doing the best they can to settle into a new relationship that offers them the love and satisfaction each person deserves.

It is total lunacy for any neurotic bully within the church to teach that a pair of kids must remain lonely, loveless and celibate for the next fifty years because they made an unfortunate marriage when twenty or twenty-two years of age.

God has never limited us to one roll of the dice at love that is blessed by the church -- and even if we mature along the way, must live a loveless life forever after. That truly is psychopathy disguised as spirituality regardless of how well concealed by a Medieval sexist theology.

We accept that this psychosexual union most persons crave should be open to new life; is most satisfying with children, grandchildren and in our case, with great-grandkids! But we really didn't want to be over blessed with offspring every time we shared sexual pleasure in the past half century!

To satisfy our curiosity we once calculated that there have been some 5,000 times one of us has reached for the other with carnal intent and ended up sleeping in one another's arms, deeply contented, both going off to work the next morning with a smile on our faces and a song on our lips. Jard had no intention of keeping Roberta barefoot and pregnant all our lives and she would likely have strangled him had he tried!

We are convinced -- the religious assumption that any expression of sexuality that blocks conception is an affront to God and the church -- is pure neuroticism from the sick minds of those Medieval scholars who corrupted the church's beliefs about sexuality during the Dark Ages of Europe.