Women's place

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.