FEAR OF WOMEN pt3

We understand how difficult it is for fundamental and orthodox clergy to accept women as equals without ripping theology, methodology and traditions out by the roots.

Much of the church is trapped by its ancient view of women and sexuality. One Catholic philosopher we know recently wrote about sexuality -- including homosexuality and contraception.

We all long to hear that our sexual disorders are not really disorders, that the simple yearning to be righteous makes it so. That would quickly eliminate the struggle to mature spiritually from our lives. But to do that would mean that our souls were not to be taken seriously -- that the revelation of Christ doesn't lead to better lives.

The church cannot accept this -- not even in the name of compassion for those who are in error. No good is served when we abandon the old Truths about the role of conception in lovemaking, of love bringing about the creation of new life to glorify God.

To which we add that we cannot see that a woman who brings twelve to fourteen children, into an often hungry world before she dies during her last childbirth, is glorifying God. His rationalization expressed the theologian's sexist views lingering from the Medieval Era. To which Jard adds:

No good is served if we internalize Medieval psychopathy in 21st century theology and demand that couples obey a clutch of sexually frustrated men who pretend God lets them make the rules governing our sexuality without ever playing the game! Great family disasters are formed when theologians insist that women are little if anything more than brood mares to their men and the church.

Actually, the Catholic Church's position about celibacy for the clergy is enforced only among European, North American and Asian priests. The point is often moot across the southern hemisphere, because the vast majority of Latin American and African priests are either married with families or in permanent relationships with mistresses and the children they conceive together.

Both the Pope and the Curia have lost that battle and they pragmatically tolerate it. They must, for their entire program would collapse should they enforce the rules -- the priests would leave their parishes to care for their families. Somehow we cannot see the sexually reactionary portion of the church changing much of anything without a revolution by religious women who demand equality in which they are truly valued as first class persons.

Women cannot force the reactionary primitives to ordain them -- in every reactionary religious group the old boys control the machinery, but more than ninety-six percent of English speaking Catholic couples of child bearing age use contraception to space their pregnancies.

The intelligent and educated women of the West -- through Europe, America, Canada and Australasia have opted out of producing floods of ragged kids they can neither feed nor educate, to work in the fields for the nobles and to fight the aristocracy's wars.

They have sense enough to know that playing Vatican Roulette condemns themselves to perpetual baby making and poverty rather than enjoying satisfying lives of their own.
That is, assuming one hasn't been abandoned by a macho husband who has run away to San Francisco to find himself, after giving her six children in seven years to support without any earning skills.

The worst of the lot fear and hate women, resent them and detest their own sexual needs that make them vulnerable to any woman they love. They are trying very hard to block women from breaking free of their restrictions, just as their fathers and grandfathers in the religions tried desperately to block the use of contraception, the right of women to vote, to work outside the home and in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia to learn to read and write and to drive an automobile and to choose her own husband.

Orthodox Catholic, fundamental Protestant, orthodox Jew and reactionary Muslim men are especially determined to keep women in a subservient relationship with God and his especially blessed rulers -- they themselves. Of course, they lay all the blame for their wicked pettiness toward women on God -- whom they insist tells them he wants women barefoot and pregnant, subservient and meek and always available sexually to they, themselves.