The Women Problem

 Half the World are women. Half the World still has a woman problem. Do you believe it? I am 51 years old. That's half a century. Until I was six years old no woman had run in Marathons. They couldn't run in races. Unladylike I suppose.  Then this woman tried. She was the first woman to try it and nearly got kicked out or tripped up in the process. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/04/02/149876890/photo-the-first-woman-to-enter-the-boston-marathon?ps=cprs

Watch again and think hard.  Read the article about the 'official' who tried to rip off her numbers. He just decided women can't run more than a mile and a half. Just decided they couldn't do it.  And who wants to see women running races with men? He just decided no one did.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/04/02/149876890/photo-the-first-woman-to-enter-the-boston-marathon?ps=cprs
  Women could not vote in America until around the 1920s. Women could not vote in France until
well after WWII.

Today, girls are aborted in China and India because they are girls at sickening rates.
  Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act Amendments of 1992 (that's just twenty or so years ago) women who worked in this country were routinely sexually harassed just for working outside the home and the men were never punished. If they complained they were routinely fired. Until only about twenty years ago there were mens exclusive clubs that only men could join. They were whisky- stocked cigar dens of men's egoism.
   Now it is estimated that still at least one in ten women in America faces some form of sexual assault at some point in their life.

    There are places where women are still not welcome. Under a sort of 'separate but not pretending to be equal' ethic religious men and religious women enjoy totally different accommodation in the catholic world. Convents are regularly under maintained and strapped and stressed for cash and priests live in relative oppulence in palace style rectories and cathedrals in many places in Europe and the US.   Any talk of equality and 'rights' is dismissed as antithetical to Christian service. Women
who want children cannot be at the same time 'religious' under that calculation. It's odd.


This feeds into religious views on the women's 'reproductive rights' discussion where celibacy is revered as synonymous with piety. People with NO nuclear families of their own, e.g. no wives that they emotionally or physically take care of dictate to people who do how they should plan their families from a presumed moral superiority. It is hard to imagine a greater "Sin of Presumption."

   Women are not asked how they feel. They are not considered in the process of exclusions and demeaning treatment. They are told from above, from males above what to think, how to act and what to do, even when it concerns their own very bodies.

    Whether the contraception discussion is a correct framing of the issue (which should look more in my view at actual hazards of pharmaceuticals) the fact that it can credibly be framed as a 'war on women' is troubling.  It is credible because of the lack of women's participation in the moral decisionmaking. They are told what is the proper moral way to think rather than listened to by people who consider celibacy the highest form of piety. The emotional life of women which is not understood at all by the male hierarchy is totally discounted and ignored if not simply exploited. And they use female cover to engage in female discrimination.

   This is a serious process problem.
It is why male authority often does not understand how abusive what they do is. It is why someone like Clarence Thomas can sit there in a confirmation hearing and deny straight faced he did anything wrong (also why its about time he retired because he never should have been seated.)

  This is the same mentality that says the male authority is morally superior and compels that no woman is good enough or an equal yoking enough to marry a priest or get the same seminary degrees. It is junk theology.

     There should be a Mediation office, like Georgetown has, called an "Ombudsman" established in every Archdiocese in the world wherein the voices of people who dissent, disagree or feel hurt or imposed upon by the church can be heard before they leave all together. I recommend that they start at the Cathedral head in Washington where Donald Wuerl is supposed to sit. They should establish a church Ombudsman and a well staffed Ombudsman office of mediators to start a process of badly needed reform.