This cartoon has been making the Internet rounds in
the past few days:
The immediate subject is Malala Yousafzai, the
14-year-old Pakistani girl marked for death because she’s committed the great
sin of advocating for education for girls. You know—the barely-a-teenager who was
shot in the head last week because the Taliban oppose the notion of educating
women. Or basically any notion of education that doesn’t promote the particular
world view of their particular sect.
Radical Islamists make a good target in this regard
because not only are their views extreme, they are armed and willing to use
violence in pursuit of those views.
However, the cartoon is about “religious
extremists”, who are not, sadly, limited to those of the Muslim persuasion or
Pakistani nationality.
I’m thinking the sentiment expressed—fear of a girl
with a book—is equally applicable to males with radical religious views around
the world. Throughout our own country, as a matter of fact.
In particular—how about the Michigan state
representatives who banned
two women colleagues from speaking in the legislature after they dared to
utter such reprehensible words as “vagina” and “vasectomy”? That wasn’t 150
years ago, or even during the Eisenhower administration. That was in June.
Or Todd Akin, the Republican Congressman, senatorial
candidate from Missouri and proud holder of a masters of divinity degree from
Covenant Theological Seminary, who is so glibly able to split medical hairs by asserting
that victims of “legitimate” rapes won’t get pregnant for purely biological
reasons, and therefore the only women seeking abortions are amoral sluts?
(Akin is also proclaiming that doctors regularly perform abortions on women who
aren’t actually pregnant, just to collect fees.)
(You’ll notice that this concern about reproductive
paraphernalia doesn’t extend to persons of the male sex. Men can clearly put it
around wherever and whenever they want without any comment from this crowd.
In fact, while the religious right is highly vocal about cutting off insurance
coverage for birth control for women on purely moral grounds, you never year
Yap One about not covering Viagra or Cialis or the like, or about the morality
of using chemical means of prolonging male sexual activity far beyond the years
which the Good Lord obviously intended, or He wouldn’t have created erectile
dysfunction.)
(Actually, that whole disconnect about it being okay
for men to rut like rabbits, but not for women, confuses me, because I don’t
exactly know who it is these men are supposed to, you know, rut with. On account of these same religious
right being opposed to homosexuality, too. And I believe bestiality is off
the list as well, quite rightly. So I just don’t quite get that. And here I’m
thinking about radical Christians as well as Islamists. I frankly don’t know
that much about world religions, but I’m betting there are plenty of others out
there that share these views. I believe the term is hypocrites.)
Or, how about that whole dust-up between the Vatican’s
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (those wonderful folks who brought
you the Holy Inquisition) and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—you
know, the American nuns who have committed the ultimate affront to the Church
Universal and Regressive by advocating an inclusive ministry that doesn’t
demand a lifestyle litmus test for communicants?
Or the various men behind the assaults on American women’s
access to healthcare, to women earning equal pay for equal work or to women
being protected from domestic violence?
To all these men, the sight of a woman with anything
but a baby in one hand and a soup spoon in the other is indeed
fear-inspiring. And the difference between the home-grown Baptist (or Pentecostal
or Roman Catholic or whatever) Taliban and the ones in Pakistan is what we
call the rule of law. As much as Akin, the bishops and their ilk would love
to suppress everyone holding views not absolutely in line with those of their
own narrow sect by any means possible (up to and including RPGs, since doing
God’s work is an absolute defense for anything in their minds), the laws
currently in place under the framework provided by the Constitution impede them
from taking the same action their true-believing confrères in Islamabad and Kabul and Tehran do vis-à-vis those pesky women and homosexuals and others advocating various affronts to their theologies.
So my fellow Americans can go all huffy about how
superior we are to religious whackjobs who are so afraid of a girl with a book
that they call out a drive-by to terminate her with extreme prejudice. But we
might consider cleansing our own temple first.
1 comment:
Good points, true. But as far as I know, there is only one major religion whose extremists are so threatened by the idea of educating women that they are willing to shoot school-age girls.
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