Jimmy Carter Leaves Church Over Treatment of Women
July 20, 2009
After more than 60 years together, Jimmy Carter has announced himself at odds with the Southern Baptist Church — and he’s decided it’s time they go their separate ways. Via Feministing, the former president called the decision “unavoidable” after church leaders prohibited women from being ordained and insisted women be “subservient to their husbands.” Said Carter in an essay in The Age:
At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.
And later:
The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.
After watching everyone from philandering politicians to Iran’s president taking a sudden look heavenwards when the roof starts to come down on them, it’s refreshing to see Carter calling out the role of religion in the mistreatment of women.
The question for Carter — and for others who find themselves at odds with leadership — is, when a group you’re deeply involved in starts to move away from your own core beliefs, do you stay and try to change from within or, at some point, do you have to look for the exit? Carter did give the former a shot — in recent years publicly criticizing and distancing himself from church leadership, while staying involved with his church. Now, he’s seeing if absence might do what presence did not.
Source / Politics Daily
I am proud of President Carter, especially for his characterization of the Baptists’ view as “repugnant”. Organized religion has been used too many times, too many ways, by too many groups, to keep women “in their place” for me to view any of it with anything but the utmost suspicion!
Goober just keeps getting weirder with age. Did he just get around to reading the Bible? Does he just now discover his Baptists who’s beliefs are based on the Bible follow the scripture? What has he been doing; sleeping through worship services for 40 years?
If you want to be a member of a Biblical group, you need to accept what’s in the Bible. If not, move on, I guess Goober just took a little longer to figure this out – and this dolt was president! Who votes for these morons?