Skip to main content

Men Who Fear Women

Our Lieutenant Governor has spoken: women are not to lead.  

https://www.wral.com/nc-s-lieutenant-governor-we-are-called-to-be-led-by-men-not-women/20318578/

Very sad and sadly not that unusual.

Despite all of the biblical examples of women who have led (despite cultures that viewed them as property) a lot of weak men cite Christianity as a justification for their version of Affirmative Action:  all citizens are equal but men are more equal.

Despite my (many) flaws I have been mentored by a large number of women in my career and this is one of those things that I feel pretty strong about:  women are blessed with leadership skills in commensurate proportion as men.

So what can I do as a person of faith, as a citizen in a democracy (not a theocracy), as a father/husband/son/brother/uncle?

1) This shit needs to be laughed at more and ridiculed. Men who need affirmative action in a culture as misogynistic as ours are pathetic.

2) Folk that cherry-pick proof-texts from the Bible:  they need to explain passages in context. If they're citing Paul's epistles, then they need to talk about the role of the women in holding the church together after Christ's death. Christ appeared to women first, not to the men "in charge".

3) Folk that want to deny others the opportunity to use their gifts should be on the defensive about why not just let people do what they do well. This shit only succeeds when you don't have strong women leaders in sight.

4) I need to keep pushing the women in my life forward into the spotlight and step back in the shadow whenever I can.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more