In an article published today, President Jimmy Carter said:
“In the United States for the same exact work for a full-time employee, women get 23 percent less pay than men. And in the Fortune 500, only 21 of those leaders among the 500 are women, and in that high level, they get 42 percent less pay … That is really derived, I would say, indirectly from the fact that religious leaders say that women are inferior in the eyes of God, which is a false interpretation of Scriptures.”
Recently, in Massachusetts, Senator Richard Ross sponsored a bill that proposed the following:
The Massachusetts legislature is conducting hearings Wednesday on a bill that would bar divorcing couples with children from carrying on a sexual relationship while in their own home.
The bill would prevent parents from “conducting a dating or sexual relationship within the home” until the divorce is final.
Although seemingly written to spare children the pain of seeing their parents become involved with other people, the bill’s language is so broad it can easily be interpreted as forbidding sex entirely.
Parents that wish to have sex would need to get a judge’s approval.
State Sen. Richard Ross sponsored the bill on behalf of his constituent Wrentham Selectman Robert Leclair.
Note, though it says that “parents” would need to have approval for sex, the bill appears to say that only the residential parent, which is almost always the woman alone, must refrain from sex without a judge’s permission. I am not in favor of promiscuity. But, I am most certainly not in favor of having the government control over this issue. Of course, the argument is about concern for the children, but somehow there is little concern expressed for the non-residential parent, who is most likely to be the male.
Both in Texas and in Minnesota, good Christian Republican women have argued against equal pay bills. Despite the statistics showing the clearly not equal pay of women, these women are committed to not allowing any law that would require equal pay. On the one hand, there are those who argue that it makes women into whiners.
“We heard several bills last week about women’s issues and I kept thinking to myself, these bills are putting us backwards in time,” State Rep. Andrea Kieffer (R) told colleagues at a Wednesday hearing on one of the measures. “We are losing the respect that we so dearly want in the workplace by bringing up all these special bills for women and almost making us look like whiners.”
One would think that as simple an issue as equal pay for equal work would be an easy one. But, if one wants a living wage today or if one want equal pay, then that makes one a whiner, because only business owners have the right to have their dreams fulfilled. In today’s conservative Evangelical world, it seems as though only the 1950’s and before are the truly Christian times. I am only waiting for arguments against miscegenation and other old arguments to become mainstream among politically conservative Evangelical Christians.
No orange???
That segment of the pie is so thin that it is unseeable.
For those not familiar with the term, “miscegenation” means inter-racial marriage. Especially black man with white woman, i.e. Blazing Saddles’ “Where De White Wimmen At?”
A very common word in the Former Confederate States. And stated reason for a LOT of lynchings and vigilante mutilations from Reconstruction to the Sixties.
Reason I remember it is I read the word as a kid in a Forties-vintage fiction writer’s guide; one of their ironclad rules was “Don’t use miscegenation!” Didn’t know what the word meant for years afterwards.
I have spent probably a ridiculous amount of time reading various forums lately (it’s been slow at work) and I am saddened, amazed and embarrased at the vitriol coming out of people claiming to be Christians mouths! It’s no wonder that the lost don’t listen to the Gospel because so much coming from “the Christians” is hateful and it causes people to reject Jesus. We who follow Jesus need to be extremely careful what we are espousing because right now, the Church is turning people away from the Gospel. So many have forgotten that we are to be known by our love; not our rigidity, legalism and judgementalism.