Shocking

Zero Tolerance For Isms.

There is a self-proclaimed "unwise" individual working for the GOP in California who sent an email with a racially slurious slanderous photo of the President. It's too appaulling to republish it here so I wont but you can google it. It's one of those "I can't believe anyone is so racist" kind of pictures. I will give you a hint- Jane Godall would adopt him.

It is clear that if this person doesn't resign she should be fired. Because most people recognize that we have to have a zero tolerance policy toward that kind of base racism- it's too incendiary, it's provacative and it is profoundly unkind. What of the first amendment you say? What of Title VII I say. It's harassing to everyone around per se to have to read that sort of an email in an office.

So while it is clearly off the wall inappropriate why don't we have the same reaction where there is clearly sexist stuff pervading. I am talking about institutional sexism. Rampant in your face institutional sexism.

I went to a "chrism Mass" yesterday and I could not help but note that not one female was attired in the priestly or Bishopric attire of an entire altar of men. Not one female is allowed to be a catholic priest. They are opening a seminary ---for all men of course. To be all male priests. This is an 'article of faith' this instrinsic sexism. Like Jesus needs hu-manly sperm to come earth in a consecration when he didn't need it to man-ifest his hu-manity in the first place.
To compound shock with absurdity, the official papal position is that (if you read canon law punishment) it's worse to be a woman cleric than a child rapist pedofile.

This should invoke the same sort of reaction that the aforementioned photo of the President invoked- disgusting. Outrageous. Should never happen. Fire the jerk. But it doesn't.
The church gets to perpetuate the same myth of male supremacy by bold defeminizing all women 'religious'-putting them all in the same drab color-challenged grays , blacks and on a good day dark royal blue habits, --segregating them (yes, just like 'separate but not even pretending to be equal' segregation) into lesser financed religious schools and houses, and
refusing them the status of even being good enough to marry priests as though conjugality somehow dirties them or precludes service -something expressly flatly stated by JPII is NOT integral existentially to the priesthood. He would be shocked to learn a Totus Tuo notion of giving all oneself to God definitionally precluded honoring a woman with marriage. That is a sacramental holy way one does in fact give oneself to God- these are not mutually excludable-only in the tiniest meanest minds are they incompatible. God is Love. Church serves Love or it is not Christ's church.
It's time in this upcoming Month of May, the Month of Mary and Motherhood, that the Church figured hierarchy figured out that Mary is more than a myth, more than a statue, but to honor her means to honor the flesh and blood women in your midst. She is a flesh and blood mother who nursed Jesus with the food from her own breasts, who held him up when he fell down, who taught him how to speak. You do not honor Mary by demeaning women, or considering them lesser than they are, intellectually, virtuously, or emotionally or try to keep them socially in your box.