Jimmy Carter to organized religion: you're sexist, misogynist

Posted at 3:00 PM Jul 20, 2009

By Andrea Grimes

Saturday afternoon, I would love to say that I passed a peaceful hour in New York City's Union Square. Instead, I cranked up my headphones and tried to bury myself in my copy of Lolita because someone had given a Bible-thumping kid from Baylor University a microphone and, perhaps only accidentally, an audience.

Usually I find sidewalk evangelism to be more amusing than anything else--really, was I supposed to launch into tongues outside DSW Shoes?--but the smug entitlement of this young, handsome white guy hollering about women as weaker vessels was more than I could take. I was tempted, then, when the gay guy sitting next to me offered up a proposition.

"I'll hold him down if you want to give him a swift kick," he said when he saw me laughing, "because he'll be on to the homos next, and I'll need your help."

I told my new pal-in-misery not to bother. I was, I said, a former Bible-thumper myself, and felt that generally speaking, wide-eyed young'uns who get off on self-righteous judgment were harmless, if irritating. It's when they get into large swarms that the trouble starts. Case in point: the Southern Baptist Convention, which has now been officially abandoned by former President Jimmy Carter because of how the church and, he says, most all religions, treat women.

As Jessica at Feministing notes, this has gone all but uncovered in the mainstream American press, possibly because he officially left the church in 2000 and only last week released a position paper detailing why. It's made little waves anywhere but BlogHer, Ms., the Guardian and Australia's The Age. The statement is beautiful and pointed and wonderful and important:

At their most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

He goes on to blame, without hesitation, explicitly sexist religious leaders who oppress women:

The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.

What Carter and the group of Elders who stand with him in this statement do not say is that religion is bad or evil--indeed that would be a shock, coming from Carter--but that the continued institutionalization of misogyny is detrimental to everyone, everywhere. Amen.

Here's more Carter on women's rights. Sweet god(dess, or whoever), I'm going to need a tissue: