What Is Her.meneutics?
The Christianity Today women's blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
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When the State Took Away My Life: North Carolina Grapples with Sterilization Practice
It all began just a mile down the road from my house.
The small, rural Virginia county where I live is home to an infamous court case that resulted in “one of the most chilling statements” ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court. That case, Buck vs. Bell, unleashed decades of forced sterilization on those deemed “unfit” across the United States.
Last week a taskforce appointed by the State of North Carolina recommended reparation payments of $50,000 to each surviving victim of the state’s involuntary sterilization program. The program ended in the 1970s, but incredibly, the laws remained on the books until 2003.
According to the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation website, “Between 1929 and 1974, an estimated 7,600 people were sterilized by choice, force or coercion under the authority of the N.C. Eugenics Board program.” Those targeted for sterilization in hopes of ridding the population of “inferior” genes included people who were sick, epileptic, “feeble-minded,” or otherwise disabled. At least 33 states had involuntary sterilization programs, but North Carolina was the only state that gave social workers the power to petition for the sterilization of members of the public, subject to approval by the state’s Eugenics Board. Over 70 percent of North Carolina’s victims were sterilized after 1945, when most other programs waned, and as of 2010, 2,944 victims were estimated to be living. Surviving victims will receive the reparation payment if the taskforce’s recommendation is approved by the state legislature. The victims include:
· Naomi Schenck, who married at 16 and had a miscarriage at 17. At the hospital, her husband gave permission for a D and C, but doctors sterilized her instead. She never had children.
· Elaine Riddick (pictured above), who was just 13 when she got pregnant after being raped. After giving birth to her only child 43 years ago, Riddick was cut open “like a hog” and sterilized after her illiterate grandmother was “bullied” into approving the procedure.
· Nial Ramirez, who was sterilized after having her daughter at 17 because she was told that if she had more children, her family would no longer receive public assistance. Ramirez says she was told at the time the procedure was reversible, but that was not so.
How to Respond to Our All-American Muslim Neighbors
And how to respond to absurd boycotts, for that matter.
Lowe’s national retail chain, following a conservative Christian group's call for businesses to boycott advertising on a new TLC reality show about Muslims, pulled its advertisements from All-American Muslim. The Florida Family Association (FFA) claims the series, which follows five families in and around Dearborn, Michigan, is nothing more than propaganda masking a radical Islamic agenda. Though the FFA suggests over 60 other advertisers have also pulled their ad dollars, these reports have not yet been confirmed. In any case, Lowe’s has borne the brunt of media criticism for pulling their ads from the show.
The FFA’s odd beef with All-American Muslim is that the Muslims being featured are not radical enough. One is a high-school football coach. One is expecting her first child. Another goes shopping for the traditional hijab after abandoning it following September 11. With the exception of shopping list items, these folks feel pretty similar to most middle-class Americans. But not according to FFA, which says "the show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to the liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish."
FFA’s twisty logic is subtle, so don’t miss it. By using the phrase “appear to be,” FFA is not willing to admit that these Muslim Americans might actually be ordinary folks. Rather, to support the imaginary agenda—and to promote their own—the organization maintains the story that somehow, TLC producers are tricking us by presenting those who “appear” to be ordinary.
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Why Identifying as a Republican—or Democrat—Can Be Idolatrous
And how Sojourners’ Lisa Sharon Harper navigates one side of the political spectrum.
It took Lisa Sharon Harper nearly 10 years to reconcile her faith with her political views. Then she met her first self-described evangelical Democrat in 1991.
At the Los Angeles Nazarene congregation where she attended after college, about half the members were Republican and half were Democrat. It was the first time Harper realized she could both serve God and stay true to her family and upbringing.
Harper, recently named the director of mobilizing at Jim Wallis’s Sojourners, was raised by politically involved parents who had her knocking on doors to get out the vote as early as age 7. In a new book, she says she views politics primarily through the impact of policies on relationships, corresponding to the way she understands God’s relational view of his creation.
The book, Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics, released last month from Russell Media, confronts conflicts that fellow believers face over policy and politics. Harper unabashedly represents the Left, while King’s College politics professor D. C. Innes represents the Right.
Harper calls the book “a tool to help more Christians be involved in politics.” She and Innes agree that “political disengagement is not a moral option.” But while both writers are self-avowed Christians, neither pulls any punches about having nearly completely opposite political positions.
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'Unwanted' Girls Defy Sexism in India
How will Americans respond to the unwanted kids in their midst?
The Associated Press recently ran a deeply moving story about a name-changing ceremony in Mumbai, India. “More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean ‘unwanted’ in Hindi have chosen new names for a fresh start in life,” reports the AP’s Chaya Babu.
Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.Sudha Kankaria of Save Girl Child, a group that advocates for Indian girls, told Babu that being known to family, friends, and everyone else as “unwanted” makes girls “feel very bad and depressed”—and no wonder.
The fact that so many girls are killed before birth on the mere basis of their gender, and that those who do survive are often given names like “unwanted,” points to something deeply wrong with the culture’s view of women. In the renaming ceremony, the girls chose happy- or strong-sounding new names for themselves—names like Vaishali (“prosperous, beautiful, and good”) and Ashmita (“very tough”). Their choices demonstrate that this ceremony was a step toward changing that cultural paradigm—toward giving not just this one group of girls, but India itself, a fresh start.
When it comes to making children feel unwanted, though, India’s not the only country with a problem. The United States may not have as high a rate of sex-selection abortion, but unfortunately, we’ve been all too willing to fall for the lie that a child’s value is based solely on whether he or she is “wanted.” Who could forget former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’s desire, expressed in a magazine interview, that “every child born in America” be “a planned, wanted child,” as a way to cut the rates of crime and poverty? Her interviewer clearly understood this as a reference to abortion, as her very next question concerned abortion laws.
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Success, Honor, and the Legacy of Joe Paterno
Why the world should never forget the football coach after the sex abuse scandal at Penn State.
“Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good.” Joe Paterno
I’ve spent a good deal of my life trying to make sense of child sexual abuse. In 1978, 26 sets of boys’ bones were exhumed from serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s crawl space. Three other bodies were found elsewhere on his Chicago property. I have been haunted ever since by the reality that a sick, dangerous man did unthinkable things to boys while I played hopscotch on my driveway just minutes away.
A couple of years after Gacy was found out, clergy abuse in the Catholic Church surfaced. Although I, nor anyone I knew in our local church and school where I grew up, experienced sexual abuse by the priests in our parish, evil seemed to strike dangerously close to home again. Was there nowhere a child could be safe?
Last week when the Penn State scandal broke and the Grand Jury report released graphic details of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged rape of a young boy and other incidents of abuse, memories of Gacy I’d fought to suppress reemerged. And learning about the cover-up by college officials reminded me anew of the double-injury inflicted when our trusted institutions fail in their duty to report allegations of child sexual abuse.
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What the Herman Cain Case Reveals about Harassment
How Christians can respond to sexual harassment allegations in their own communities.
When sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain began to leak out, my reaction was skeptical. I’ve been observing the political process long enough to know that many people consider sexual accusations—real or imaginary—a fantastic way to bring down a candidate they don’t like.
It’s not that I don’t believe sexual harassment is a problem. On the contrary, it’s a real issue that many women have had to deal with. Including myself.
I was 14 when a boy at my Christian school started insinuating himself next to me every morning, on the gym bleachers where we all waited for classes to begin, and saying filthy things to me in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. For weeks this went on, because I didn’t tell anyone. I simply could not bring myself to speak the words. I was too grossed out, ashamed, embarrassed, disgusted—you name the unpleasant and unwanted emotion, I felt it. All I could manage to do was to distance myself mentally from the whole thing and pretend it wasn’t happening. It was more than 20 years before I told my mother about it.
Of course, not all harassment is as clear-cut. Many a woman, in the office, at church, and elsewhere, has had moments of wondering, “Did he really just say what I think he said?” or “He didn’t mean it that way—did he?” What comes across as a flirtatious remark or gesture could be exactly that. But it could also be the result of a man’s cultural background, or what he was used to hearing in the era when he grew up, or just a thoughtless moment. Some remarks and gestures are simply too ambiguous to interpret without being able to crawl inside the mind of the person who made them.
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A Real Christian Education
My daughter Penny reveals that academic success is not always connected to test scores.
Our daughter Penny started kindergarten six weeks ago. At the end of her first day of school, she greeted me with, “Mom! I didn’t miss you!” She’s loved every moment since. I’m sure much of her experience is typical—she walks to school, she works on spelling and reading and basic math concepts, she plays on the playground at recess. And yet Penny’s experience also highlights significant changes in American education over the past few decades because Penny has Down syndrome and an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) and regular therapy sessions. Hers is an “integrated” classroom, with two teachers and a classroom aid. Forty years ago, she might not have been eligible to attend public school at all, much less in a classroom alongside her typically-developing peers.
Penny’s academic skills are similar to those of her friends at the moment, but her behavior is different. Her teacher breaks the day down into 10-minute intervals, with a sticker for every stretch of self-control Penny displays, and frequent rewards—"Freeze Dance," a prize from the prize box, the chance to read out loud to the class—throughout the day. It’s a lot of work to have Penny in the classroom. And it’s a great place for Penny. I hope and pray that it’s also a great place for the other kids, that Penny’s presence contributes to the learning environment in such a way that she is a blessing to her peers, even as she is blessed by their inclusion of her.
The New York Times recently ran a series of opinion pieces about “differentiated learning,” in which teachers modify curriculum so that children of various academic abilities can all work in the same classroom at the same time. Most of the commentators held up differentiated learning as an ideal, but they also expressed concern about how this learning works in practice. Cassandra Davis attributes higher test scores for struggling students to inclusion and differentiated instruction, but Michael Petrilli counters that differentiated learning harms high achievers because teachers pay less attention to the kids who least need their help. Frederick Hess summarizes the disparity: “low-achieving students benefit when placed in mixed-ability classrooms (faring about five percentage points better than those placed in lower-track classes) but high-achievers fared six percentage points worse in such general classes.”
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Exotic Animals and Kingdom Ethics
Principles for why we should avoid treating all animals as possessions.
In the tight-laced society of 18th and 19th-century England, bull baiting, bear baiting, and cock fighting were popular forms of entertainment. Thanks to the efforts of William Wilberforce and other evangelical Christians (who were hard at work abolishing slavery at the same time), these activities were not only outlawed, but are now viewed through 21st century eyes as the acts of savagery they surely are.
Certainly, circuses, big game hunts, and Industrial Age-era zoos don’t descend to the same level of depravity as animal fighting for “sport” does. But might these be lesser forms of barbarism even so?
This week’s horror story of exotic animals released by their suicidal owner in Ohio makes the answer obvious, I think. The event was a disaster just waiting to happen. Long before law authorities (who had little or no choice of actions given the danger posed by the loose animals to humans) shot nearly 50 tigers, lions, and other exotic animals, these creatures should have received the protection of the law. Their troubled owner had a long history of felony animal abuse charges, and his state is one of several with little or no regulations on ownership of such animals. With better laws and effective enforcement of those laws, this tragedy—including the suicide of the owner whose increasing desperation about his circumstances with the animals he harbored seems to have triggered the chain of events—could have been averted.
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A Christian Response to Gay Bullying
Christians can defend bullied kids and articulate God's design for human sexuality.
A few weeks ago, Jamey Rodemeyer was found dead by his parents in their Buffalo, New York, home. But Rodemeyer’s death was different. The 14-year-old was one of many young people who have committed suicide over bullying and taunting over sexuality. Last year, Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge in New York after a roommate secretly filmed him in a sexual encounter with another male student and posted it online. Asher Brown and Seth Walsh committed suicide after facing relentless taunting for being gay. And Sladjana Vidovic was one of five students from an Ohio high school to commit suicide in the course of a year.
. . . until adults take responsibility for how we treat one another, until we see that we are doing the same thing we are asking kids not to do at school — politicians do it, adults do it — to say that he [Bono] is different and he is wrong and to make something of it, shame on us for doing that and being an example for kids.
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PETA to Launch Porn Site
The group's newest and wholly misguided campaign overshadows a kernel of truth about animal suffering.
Shock and disgust. Those words best describe the public’s reaction to PETA’s most recent campaign. In a decision that can only be described as true to form, the 31-year-old Virginia nonprofit has once again chosen a campaign method that overshadows its own cause.
Continuing its by-any-means-necessary approach to animal advocacy, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced the launch of its own porn site. Peta.xxx will include pornographic material mixed with graphic images of animal abuse. Spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt justified the tactic explaining, “The racy things we do are sometimes the most effective way that we can reach particular individuals.”
Perhaps my favorite response to the misguided idea came from a Feministe writer who sarcastically speculated, “Definitely sounds like an effective way to get people to go vegan — associate animal cruelty with sexual arousal. I see absolutely no potential downsides.”
Jokes aside, PETA’s new campaign marks an escalating pattern of misogyny. Most of us are familiar with PETA’s “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign, in which celebrities pose nude. PETA has also employed numerous body-shaming tactics that included a billboard picturing a fat woman with the caption “Save the Whale, Lose the Blubber. Go Vegetarian.” In another ad that numerous airports banned from the walls of their security lines, a woman’s body was pictured through the lens of a body scan with the following words printed across her lingerie: “Be proud of your body scan: Go Vegan.” It should also be noted that neither ad pictured the woman’s face.
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How Much Do Our Stories Matter?
Christian theology makes clear both the limits and the necessity of stories for meaningful moral discourse.
In yesterday’s post, I told three stories about people who used reproductive technologies to have babies: A mother became pregnant via IVF after her first three children were tragically killed. A couple turned to an Indian surrogate to bear the child they could not. A fictional character wanted a baby for many reasons, stemming from both self-protection and love.
I put people’s stories (including my own) at the center of my study of and writing about reproductive ethics. There is a name for moral deliberation that gives significant weight to people’s stories: narrative ethics. Traditional ethics uses a juridical process, in which experts consider the moral questions raised by a situation, explore those questions using established ethical principles, and render a judgment based on which principles are most applicable. Narrative ethics is less cut-and-dried. It allows room for amateurs to weigh and discuss the complexities of a particular person’s story, acknowledging that such factors as the person’s intentions and past experience are relevant.
But there’s a problem with focusing exclusively on our and others’ stories: Humans are prone to self-absorption, self-pity, and a tunnel vision that puts our own pain, problems, and desire for happiness front and center. We are all too capable of justifying poor decisions and bending or obscuring the truth to suit our needs. In short, we are all sinful and overly caught up in the self.
So practicing narrative ethics does not mean that anything goes, that people have unlimited freedom to pursue whatever they want in isolation from moral, cultural, and emotional consequences. Rather, practicing narrative ethics means that we give weight to the myriad and significant circumstances that lead people to make ethically fraught decisions, and allow people’s stories to influence our dialogue and our language.
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Why Dogs Should Be Sent to Court
Examining the case of Rosie, a golden retriever who sat beside a 15-year-old raped by her father.
When a 15-year-old rape victim from Poughkeepsie, New York, took the stand to testify against her father last summer, she wasn't alone. In the witness box, at her feet, sat Rosie, a golden retriever, who snuggled up close to the girl as she reported how her father had molested and impregnated her, The New York Times reported this week, and when the girl hesitated, Rosie pushed her gently with her nose and encouraged her to keep talking.
Citing “prosecutorial misconduct,” the defense's lawyers say that allowing the dog into the courtroom was emotionally manipulative. “Every time she stroked the dog,” defense lawyer David S. Martin told The New York Times, “it sent an unconscious message to the jury that she was under stress because she was telling the truth.” Having a dog on the stand in this case, Martin feels, prejudiced the jury to side with the prosecution and compromised his client's constitutional right to a fair trial.
District Attorney Kristine Hawlk, who handled the case, says that's nonsense. And “testimony enablers” such as therapy dogs are becoming more common, according to the advocacy group Courthouse Dogs, which claims that the presence of a trained therapy dog not only can help bring comfort to child victims, but can humanize the courthouse process overall. Comforting child victims through the emotionally fraught process of testifying in court is not without precedent; in 1994, a New York appeals court ruled that a young child could take a teddy bear along to the witness stand.
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Kids' Diets: Why We Need Immovable Love, Not ‘Let’s Move’
Where Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign falls short.
The first time my daughter grabbed a box of cookies out of the pantry, flipped the package round and round, and asked me how many calories were in each one, I laughed it off.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.”
The second time she asked — while reaching for another square of our regular Friday night pizza — an alarm went off. This time she added, “I don’t want to get fat. That’s bad.”
Even as I told her that she didn’t need to pay any attention to calories, that they were good things, that we needed them for energy to run and play, I seethed. After all, I had a new enemy: whoever had introduced this calorie nonsense into my home and had made my healthy, vibrant 7-year-old worry about counting calories.
As it turns out, naming the enemy was more difficult than anticipated. Even as I read a horrifying (if overblown) story about the number of 5- to 7-year-olds who are being treated for eating disorders in the UK, I couldn’t simply blame the media, Barbie, or the uber-retouched, sickly skinny celebs on magazine covers the way the Telegraph report did. After all, how could a thin woman in a magazine cause my daughter to dread getting fat?
But I was wrong. While loading food onto the conveyor at the grocery store, I saw her. On a magazine cover. In her pretty dress and sweet cardigan, ankles crossed ladylike on a picnic table set with apples in their summer glory.
I reached for the August issue of Better Homes and Gardens. “Fresh and Healthy: Michelle Obama,” the cover read. At last I had found the culprit: one of the world’s most beautiful, powerful, and intelligent women. Great.
If you don’t know, Michelle Obama’s major initiative during her husband’s presidency has been the Let’s Move campaign, which aims to end childhood obesity within a generation by encouraging healthier eating and activity “during their earliest months and years.”
While well-intentioned to be sure, something about it strikes me as insidious.
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Obama Visit Challenges 'African Woman' Stereotype
The Young African Women Leaders Forum demonstrated that not all African women are victims and in need of Western help.
Two weeks ago, on an official trip to Africa, Michelle Obama gave a speech encouraging 76 young sub-Saharan African women participating in the Young African Women Leaders Forum in South Africa. They gathered at the Regina Mundi Church in the black township of Soweto, where 35 years ago, in June 1976, South African youth nonviolently protested Apartheid laws affecting their education. Many of those students lost their lives in the ensuing government-issued police open shooting. Today, Regina Mundi is a memorial to those who refused to sit idly by as their country and people continued to suffer under Apartheid.
It was here that Michelle Obama had the opportunity to share words with 76 young women. Washington Post reporter Krissah Thompson, who traveled with the First Lady, writes that she challenged them to ensure that women are no longer "second-class citizens," fight the "stigma" of HIV/AIDS, and "stand up and say violence against women" is a "human-rights violation." It has been refreshing to have young African women highlighted not as refugees of war, victims of violent rape and female genital mutilation, contagions of HIV/AIDS, or recipients of monthly dollar pledges. For one day a couple of weeks ago, the world was offered a glimpse of another African female population: dedicated, persevering, brilliant women committed to using their gifts to highlight awareness, nurture justice, and improve the conditions of their respective countries.
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Bachmann, Palin, and the Trouble with 'Evangelical Feminism'
Feminists say Bachmann and other conservative women can't join their club. I say the club needs some new ground rules.
When I heard rumblings about Michele Bachmann’s run for the presidency, I got nervous — though not the reasons you might think.
I’m not nervous about the political leanings of the Minnesota congresswoman and conservative Lutheran mother of five. In fact, I often agree with the way she votes. Instead, I’m nervous about ensuing conversations in my circles of feminist friends. As a fish-out-of-water, conservative feminist, I know what awaits the presidential hopeful.
Feminists don’t exactly have the best history of supporting politically conservative women. Even as Elizabeth Dole, Arizona governor Jan Brewer, and Sarah Palin sought to shatter some of the last panes of the American Glass Ceiling, they were derided among secular feminists, and others, for supporting traditional moral and economic values. Essentially, they belonged to the wrong party. And women who charge Democratic men with criminal actions certainly get a different response from those who charge Republicans: think Paula Jones’s reception versus Anita Hill’s.
Feminists of the Jesus-loving persuasion aren’t always much different from their secular sisters, if a recent Washington Post guest column by Rachel Held Evans says anything. The author of Evolving in Monkey Town writes, “As a Democrat, an evangelical, and a strong supporter of women’s equality, I can’t bring myself to call Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin ‘evangelical feminists.’ ”
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Thoughts on Afghanistan from a Marine Wife
The 'drawdown' announced last month gives me another opportunity to be sore afraid — or to trust God.
Less than three weeks ago, I watched as my husband, Nathan, became the commanding officer of a U.S. Marine Corps infantry company. About 160 men, most of them barely adults, stood at attention in their camouflage and combat boots and waited as he became their leader. Moments earlier, some of the troops had curbed their cursing and offered startled greetings — “Afternoon, Ma’am” — when they saw me standing there in my dress and heels. It was a Friday.
The following Tuesday, I watched via televised address as my President announced a plan to dramatically decrease the number of troops in Afghanistan. The network-worthy news that evening was that we will be reducing our forces from the current 100,000 to about 67,000 by next summer. That’s a quick decrease of nearly a third — “a drawdown,” President Obama called it, which in many ways sounded altogether promising.
War-weary like everybody is, as a military wife I have perhaps more reasons to be overjoyed at prospects: Another war over! We’re getting out of there, finally! But my response to the announcement was instead lit by the light of the week before, by my husband and 160 other living, breathing men lined up in a dusty military gym. By how much he means to me and by my fears of what could happen to any one of them. In many respects, the concerns I have are not unfounded; in fact, I justify them by the fact that they are bona fide news stories.
For instance, it was reported only months ago that the number of troops killed by IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices — roadside bombs) in Afghanistan rose by 60 percent last year, while the number of troops wounded by them tripled. Ask any 19-year-old deploying to Afghanistan, and he’s not worried about the Taliban so much as he’s worried about some guy who took a lucrative job rigging trip wire and fertilizer, blowing up U.S. convoys.
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The Lost Girls of China and India
Why so many baby girls are being killed in the world's two largest countries.
Across most cultures and throughout time, parents have wanted boys more than they have wanted girls. Recently developed technologies are allowing parents to reject their girl children before they are even born.
In India and China, the world’s two most populated nations, parents have chosen to abort hundreds of millions of baby girls.
According to Samanth Subramanian, writing for The National, “Indians are aborting more female foetuses (sic.) than at any time in their nation's history, with the practice growing fastest in the more affluent states. . . . There are now 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6.”
Furthermore, the BBC News reports that in India, “activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade.” In addition to a large number of abortions using so-called “sex-selection,” the infant mortality rate is higher for girls than boys in India, probably due to a combination of neglect and infanticide.
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Working for the (Son of) Man
What a theology of work might look like for female professionals, who tend to downplay their success.
“You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone." So goes Tina Fey's advice in her new book, Bossypants, to young women in the workplace.
Fey’s advice couldn’t be more true. Every day seems to bring more news of unemployment and low job creation in the United States. Although the so-called “man-cession” (more men being laid off than women) began to reverse in 2010, women are not catching up to men in the slow return to the workforce. Further, reports the National Association of Colleges and Employers, women who do manage to find work are paid 17 percent less than new male workers, despite the fact that they are just as likely to be hired.
Meanwhile, we are in the middle of college graduation season, when some 3 million young people are trying to enter a workforce with already four workers for every job opening. College-educated workers who remain unemployed face what is the longest unemployment duration in history, and may have to settle for work that did not require a college degree (known as “mal-employment”), thus having a trickle-down impact on those with less education.
Further, according to Harris Interactive, 59 percent of parents provide financial support to their adult children who are no longer in school. And an estimated 85 percent of new graduates are moving back in with their parents, at least partly to save money. As it happens, I fit all of these statistics.
Conditions are difficult all around, and the numbers seem designed to make us all feel less valuable in our respective workplaces. But according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, women tend to feel less valuable in their workplaces, anyway.
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Rethinking the Death Penalty
Why recent information has shifted discussion about capital punishment away from debating morality and toward exposing abuse in the criminal justice system.
In March, the state of Illinois became the sixteenth state to abolish the death penalty. In his remarks after signing the bill, Governor Pat Quinn didn’t debate the morality of executing murderers. He didn’t discuss whether or not the death penalty deters heinous crimes. He didn’t even linger on the fact that all but fewer than 60 nations around the world reject capital punishment. No countries in Europe, except Belarus, practice it; other countries which continue to use the death penalty include Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and, of course, the United States.
Quinn simply said that our system of imposing the death penalty was defective. "Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it," the governor said.
The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to “serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment,” reports that since 1973, more than 130 people have been released from death row after having been found innocent of the crimes which brought them there. About five people per year are released after DNA or other evidence establishes their innocence.
It seems that only in the past decade or so has such information about our criminal justice system’s faults, as they relate to capital punishment, been established and revealed, shifting the conversation about capital punishment away from debating morality and toward exposing abuse in the criminal justice system. That is, it’s only been in the last 10 or 15 years that we have become aware, as a nation, that issues such as prosecutorial misconduct, eyewitness error, and even the false confessions of those who are mentally ill or intellectually disabled have resulted in the wrongful convictions of innocent people.
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'It Must Stop'
The death of 14-year-old Hena Akhter spotlights concerns the international response to sexual assault.
Last July, Bangladesh’s High Court declared fatwas, a ruling or legal opinion given by an Islamic religious leader, illegal. Investigations and news reports of fatwas invoking violence against women led human rights organizations to submit petitions to the court, which then took action.
Yet the practice is still used in Bangladesh, particularly in rural villages, and not always documented. The first reported case of fatwa since the ruling occurred last November when 40-year-old Sufia Begum was brutally caned for an alleged affair. Although doctors suggested she be taken to another hospital that could better tend to her, her family claimed they could not afford to move her. Begum died in December from her injuries.
Violence against women, such as sexual assault, is a global problem; April marks Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the U.S. Bangladesh is just one country where the problem is spelled out on the international scene.
On January 31, 14-year-old Hena Akhter died after a fatwa ordered her to receive 101 lashes. Her crime was that she allegedly had an affair with a married man; her family says the man, a 40-year-old cousin, raped her. The cousin was sentenced to 201 lashes, which he did not undertake.
Bangladeshi authorities condemned Akhter’s fatwa, which occurred over 50 miles away from the capital, Dhaka. “This is against the rules of Islam,” said Haji Abdul Wahab Bepari, chairman of the Naria sub-district. “We don’t have these strict Shari’ah laws in our country. The villagers should have stopped this.”
Authorities were further outraged when it appeared that the fatwa was deliberately hidden. Police officers have been investigated for their report; now, four doctors are facing charges of hiding the cause of Akhter’s death. Their autopsy report ruled that it was a suicide and there were no injuries. A second autopsy was ordered by the court, which found severe injuries on the body and claimed the girl had bled to death. Justice Shamsuddin Chowdhury Manik of the High Court said, “We are appalled to see the magnitude of illegality.” Other justices similarly decried the doctors’ actions and their audacity to fabricate the suicide story.
Bangladesh professes to be a moderate Muslim-majority country (of its population of 160 million people, almost 90 percent falls in this category). But it faces the difficult task of changing cultural mentality, as well as enforcing punishment against those who carry out fatwas. Chowdhury called for the ministry of religious affairs to cease funding for the mosques and madrassas (Muslim schools) that order fatwas.
Is that enough? Akhter’s case brings up another problem: the response to sexual assault. Nicholas Kristof blogged, “Let’s hope that the public reaction and punishments are so strong that the word goes out to all of Bangladesh’s villages that such misogynist fatwas are not only immoral but also illegal. And that the crime lies not in being raped, but in raping.”
Akhter’s father said, “The thing that happened to my daughter, the kind of justice she received, it should not happen to anyone else. It must stop.”
Continue reading "'It Must Stop'" »
Bill Maher Slurs Sarah Palin, NOW Responds
The National Organization for Women seems to believe that being conservative and pro-life means being anti-woman. Not so fast.
When comedian Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a “dumb t--t” on his HBO show last week, few people were holding their breath waiting for the National Organization for Women to come to her defense. But as a matter of fact, NOW — the largest feminist organization in the U.S. — did. They just did it in a way that brings to mind the old saw, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
You’re trying to take up our time getting us to defend your friend Sarah Palin. If you keep us busy defending her, we have less time to defend women’s bodies from the onslaught of reproductive rights attacks and other threats to our freedom, safety, livelihood, etc. Sorry, but we can’t defend Palin or even Hillary Clinton from every sexist insult hurled at them in the media. That task would be impossible, and it would consume us. You know this would not be a productive way to fight for women’s equal rights, which is why you want us stuck in this morass.Given Palin’s position on “reproductive rights,” it's hard to miss Bennett's swipe at the very woman whom her organization was defending against a sexist slur. Her statement carried this subtext: Pro-life women are less important than pro-choice women. Even without the mention of reproductive rights, the phrase “even Hillary Clinton” would have been a dead giveaway. Bennett's comment suggested that pro-life women are a disgrace to their sex, and if by some misfortune they need defending, then it should be done only under protest.
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Prayers for Japan's Unborn Children
As the country quells a nuclear crisis, I'm reminded that even the best-intentioned parents can't fully protect their children.
My microwave avoidance seems silly today, as I read about the potentially dire effects of radiation exposure on pregnant women and their fetuses in Japan’s earthquake-devastated north, where damage to a nuclear reactor has caused an ongoing crisis. Experts warn that unborn fetuses are particularly vulnerable to the effects of radiation, which their mothers can breathe in or ingest through tainted food. Radiation levels that do not pose major threats to adults can be devastating to babies in utero, particularly during vital periods of development. According to The Daily Beast,
Should the worst-case scenario become a reality, it could lead to a generation of children born with all manner of maladies, from congenital malformation to mental retardation. Even at radiation levels too low to make a mother-to-be sick, health consequences for a fetus can be severe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fetal exposure to radiation is particularly damaging during the stage of organogenesis (9-42 days), a period of gestation crucial to the development of the heart, lungs, and brain . . .
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Assaulted Woman to Be Kept Alive, Rules India Court
Until the story of Aruna Shanbaug, I had never heard the phrase "passive euthanasia," let alone grappled with whether or not I participated in it nearly 20 years ago.
On March 7, India’s Supreme Court decided a landmark case that will allow life support to be legally removed from some terminally ill patients. The ruling involved the case of a woman who has been in a vegetative state since she was sexually assaulted and suffered brain damage 37 years ago. Her parents are dead, and a friend wanted hospital staff to stop “force-feeding” her mashed-up food. While the court ruled that Aruna Shanbaug be kept on life support, it distinguished between "active euthanasia" and "passive euthanasia," allowing the latter for certain terminally ill patients.
Until I read these reports, I had never heard the phrase "passive euthanasia," let alone grappled with whether or not I participated in some such cruelty.
It was nearly 20 years ago. An elderly relative had been badly deteriorating in a residential care facility for a few years when she was hospitalized with congestive heart failure. She was initially conscious, but quickly lapsed into a coma. Tests showed she had minimal brain function. The doctor said she wouldn’t recover. Although there was a medical directive in place that prohibited heroic measures, a feeding tube was inserted.
After a week or so, we were told the feeding tube had been removed because it had a kink in it. Everyone knew that if she went back to the nursing home with the tube, it would take a court order to remove it again. It was left to her family to decide what to do. The feeding tube was not reinserted. She was given intravenous fluids to keep her comfortable and she died a few days later.
Even if the hospital staff was lying about the kink in the tube and removed it of their own accord, I don’t believe this was “passive euthanasia.” I believe it was resisting, or correcting, medical encroachment.
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Women Step to Frontline in Mideast Protests
Women's political gains will be a litmus test for fledgling governments in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain, says Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock without wi-fi for the past month, you know the world has witnessed waves of political change in the Middle East. On February 11, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak relinquished control of the country to the military, and stepped down after nearly three decades in power. His resignation was the culmination of over two weeks of protests in Cairo, where hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy supporters rallied to decry Mubarak’s years of abuses.
What had begun as a group of youth activists working online soon grew into a major movement, with both men and women flocking to Tahrir Square in protest, unusual for this predominantly Muslim country.
“Egyptian women often shun crowded public places,” writes Laura King for the Los Angeles Times, “fearing the pervasive sexual harassment that is the norm here. Simply walking down a Cairo street can be an ordeal of catcalls, pinching and unwanted propositions. But women attending the protests reported being treated with an unaccustomed respect. . . . Gaggles of teenage girls, dignified matrons and white-haired grandmothers have trekked daily to the square, swelling the crowd at a time when numbers were a crucial gauge of opposition power.”
Egyptian women drew encouragement from women protesters in Tunisia, following a rebellion that also found its roots online. Tunisian women used Facebook and Twitter to reach out to their Egyptian counterparts with bits of wisdom learned during their own revolution: “Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas,” The New York Times quoted one Tunisian advice-giver as saying. “This is a protest against patriarchy in all its forms, and that is the kind of thinking that can find its way into every home,” said 29-year-old Reem Naguib, a doctoral student at Northwestern University working on her dissertation at home in Egypt. “It's a revolution in how we're perceived.”
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Live Action, Planned Parenthood, and a Year of Change
Surveying two months of dramatic news on the abortion front in the U.S.
It’s only February, and already I have whiplash from the news speeding past me from the U.S. abortion front.
The frenzy began on January 17, when a Philadelphia abortion doctor was indicted for killing a patient. Next came the revelation that he had also gruesomely killed eight babies and that his filthy clinic had not been inspected for 17 years. At Pro Publica, Marian Wang reported, “According to the grand jury report . . . Pennsylvania health officials deliberately chose not to enforce laws to ensure that abortion clinics provide the same level of care as other medical service providers.”
Then, on February 1, Live Action, a California based “new media movement for life,” released a series of videos in which actors posing as sex traffickers secretly recorded Planned Parenthood employees giving out unethical and sometimes illegal advice. A clinic worker in New Jersey, for example, was fired and denounced by Planned Parenthood for advising the impostors to have underage sex workers lie about their ages so that clinic workers could avoid reporting them to authorities. “As long as they don’t say [they are] 14, and as long as there’s not too much of an age gap [with ‘boyfriends’], then we just kind of . . . play it stupid,” the worker said.
On February 16, Live Action moved on to the next thing, which was to enlist Abby Johnson, author of the memoir Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey across the Life-Line, as its chief research strategist. (CT reviewed Johnson’s book in January.)
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Michael Vick's Long Road to Recovery
A Christian animal-welfare activist reflects on the NFL quarterback and dogfighter's restoration.
Two weeks ago, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick was named the Associated Press NFL Comeback Player of the Year. Vick is the 12th recipient of the award but the first to “come back” as an ex-con who served time in federal prison.
Even non-football fans are familiar with the meteoric rise of Vick, recruited by the NFL two years into college to become its first African American quarterback chosen in the first-round draft. But by 2007, Vick’s early notoriety as a bad boy with a bad attitude blossomed into a full-blown federal case. Charges of dogfighting and gambling ended in conviction, imprisonment, suspension from the NFL, and, finally, bankruptcy. Vick’s second chance came in 2009, when the Philadelphia Eagles decided to sign him. That’s the road that brought Vick to his recent award.
I don’t follow football, but living as I do in Virginia Tech territory, where the Virginian rose to fame, I had little choice but to follow Vick even before his fall. But because his story connects to matters at the core of my being — creation care, activism, education, and the essence of the Christian faith — I’ve been compelled to follow it closely.
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Ohio Mom Gets Jailtime for Better Education
The case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, who falsified her address to get her three children into a better school, raises questions for Christians concerned about educational equity.
What do Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and an African American single mother in Ohio have in common? Both faced gut-wrenching realities that sometimes cause law-abiding individuals to blur the lines between what’s legal and what seems morally permissible. The shades of gray present both an interesting dilemma and a significant opportunity for Christians concerned about legal and educational justice in the U.S.
Les Misérables is a familiar tale. Set in 19th-century France, the story's protagonist, Jean Valjean, is arrested for stealing a loaf of bread in order to feed his sister’s seven destitute children. Valjean spends several years in prison for his crime. After his eventual release, the plot takes us through a complex story rooted in themes of social inequity, justice, mercy and fairness. We are caused to wrestle with whether or not Valjean’s original sentence was just. After all, Valjean was simply trying to take care of his sister’s starving children. The kids had no other apparent options and presumably would have starved to death. Should we grant leniency to Jean Valjean, given the circumstances?
Let’s consider the modern-day story of Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single mom in Akron, Ohio. Williams-Bolar has three children, and she’s raising them in Akron’s public housing projects. Like most inner cities, in Akron quality schools are sparse, and the local neighborhood public schools are among the worst in the area. According to 2008-09 state data, only 48 percent of African American students scored at or above proficient in reading, and only 39 percent scored similarly in math.
Knowing the life-changing importance of a good education, Williams-Bolar made a decision to send her children to live with their grandfather in nearby Copley-Fairlawn School District. Her children were never official residents of Copley-Fairlawn, so Kelley was breaking the law by using her father’s address to send the children to Copley-Fairlawn. Last month, she was convicted on two felony charges for falsifying records and sentenced to 10 days in jail, 3 years of probation, and 80 hours of community service.
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Surprised by Beauty at the March for Life
The people who caught my eye — the ones the mainstream media overlooked — at this year's march.
T. S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” alluding to the way life and death are inextricably connected, as when “lilacs” are bred “out of the dead land.”
This is the way the March for Life — held every January in Washington since the Supreme Court passed Roe vs. Wade — feels to me. I’ve attended a half dozen or more times, always arriving with great anticipation and great dread. Overwhelming every other impression — the crowds, the gridlock, the many signs — is the eternal cold. And this year’s temperatures were among the lowest for the March. Why didn’t the Supreme Court have at least enough decency to issue its mortal ruling in June? But perhaps the dead of winter is more fitting, after all.
A crowed estimated by organizers to number between 250,000 and 400,000 flowed over Constitution Avenue on January 24, spilling out across the city. Before processing, as always, participants received marching orders in an hours-long rally where elected officials meted and were meted rewards for their faithfulness to the cause. Here is where, typically, the cameras, reporters, and newscasters expend their energies and headlines. By the time marchers gather at the Supreme Court, the route’s end (and, of course, its ultimate beginning), the majority of photos have been taken, the sound bites recorded, and the stories filed. This part of the story — the culmination of the March and the people who populate it — rarely makes headlines.
But it’s the non-headliners who are the lifeblood of a movement in its 38th year. Here are a few I encountered:
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Christians Launch Anti-Slavery Efforts for Super Bowl XLV
This year's game is located in one of the nation's seedbeds of human trafficking.
Cowboys stadium. Troy Polamalu. Black Eyed Peas. Ben Roethlisberger. Sex trafficking of minors. Christina Aguilera. Doritos’ controversy-tinged “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. Those irritating Go Daddy commercials.
Which of these things is not like the others? Believe it or not, they all describe the close-at-hand Super Bowl XLV, where cheese heads and yellow-towel touters will cheer on their respective teams, Dallas hotels and airports will receive an estimated 100,000 visitors, with a projected economic impact of $611.7 million on the area, and pimps and traffickers will set up makeshift brothels in hotels and blocks of houses, selling the bodies of vulnerable children and teens. And while major sporting events are well known as seedbeds of sexual exploitation, this year’s game might be worse: Texas senator Leticia Van de Putte recently reported that over 20 percent of all trafficking victims into the U.S. come through Texas. And in 2008, reports the Fort Worth Star Telegram, 38 percent of all calls to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hot line were from Texas.
In response, several Christian anti-trafficking ministries are working alongside government officials to curb trafficking at next Sunday’s game. Traffick911, a Fort Worth-based nonprofit founded by Deena Graves, has launched the “I’m Not Buying It” ad campaign, featuring singer Natalie Grant and former New England Patriot Devin Wyman, with the tag line, “What would you do if it was your daughter?” The group is petitioning the Super Bowl Host Committee to endorse the campaign and run a 30-second ad during the game, and has received over 65,000 signatures.
Graves told Baptist Press that Super Bowls are notorious as trafficking zones because "you have a large number of male tourists traveling without families. Second, there are large amounts of money at these events. For example, the Super Bowl host committee estimates there will be 40,000 people coming into our area who do not even have tickets to the Super Bowl. They're coming just for the party atmosphere. It's kind of that mindset of 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.' "
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A Woman, Not a 'Gestational Carrier'
How the global infertility industry reduces women to profitable body parts.
Editor's Note: This is the second Her.meneutics post responding to Melanie Thernstrom's New York Times Magazine article on twiblings. Ellen Painter Dollar covered it last week.
As millions around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, issued a press release announcing the birth of their baby boy, born on Christmas Day. Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, a healthy baby, was born through modern, assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Using an anonymous egg donor and a "gestational carrier" (a term that is getting some criticism), Elton and David fulfilled one of their greatest wishes: to be parents. They have now joined the ranks of the growing list of celebrities having babies via ART.
This got me thinking about another list I read a few years ago: the "Ten Best Chores to Outsource." Expecting to see housecleaning, gardening and landscaping, pool cleaning, laundry, I was shocked and saddened by the number one "best chore to outsource": pregnancy. From the Time piece:
Outsourcing brings to mind big factories and call centers. But entrepreneurs around the globe now offer services — from tutoring to sculpting a bust of your grandpa — to regular folks for a fraction of the cost in the West. Thought the world was flat before? Well, now you can hire someone in India to carry your child.
Entrepreneurs like Rudy Rupak, CEO of medical tourism agency Planet Hospital, are just another example of those who are hopping on the ART modern-family bandwagon. Rupak's brokering business even offers what his company calls the “India Bundle,” an "affordable" package deal that gives would-be parents an egg donor, four surrogates for four embryo transfers, room and board for the surrogate during the pregnancy, and transportation services when the parents arrive in India to pick up the baby. Costs escalate from there depending on services rendered. Gay couples wanting to do egg-sharing so that each can offer sperm to fertilize the eggs (so that each has a biological child) drives up the price. All the various preimplantation genetic diagnostic tests also drive costs upward. In sum, this setup is a consumer model of baby-making.
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Happy Wastegiving?
Tips for celebrating abundance tomorrow without creating unnecessary waste.
A few years ago, my husband and I were waiting for our dinner to arrive in a Thai restaurant, when a movement at the next table caught my eye. An older couple was finishing up their meal. The man was settling the check, and the woman was fishing two plastic containers out of her purse. She shoveled their leftovers into the containers, wrapped them in a reused plastic bag (also from her purse), and proudly carted her DIY doggy bag out of the restaurant.
I felt embarrassed for them. Who could be so penurious as to bring their own doggy bag to the restaurant? Couldn’t they just enjoy the meal? Was it really so wasteful to use a restaurant’s takeout boxes for your leftovers?
“Let’s not ever become those people,” I told my husband.
Of course, the scene wouldn’t have bothered me save that I could easily see us becoming that couple. We were both raised in Christian families by parents who taught us the values of thrift and stewardship that we gratefully practice to this day. Another way of putting this: There are jokes about people of both our ethnic backgrounds being cheap.
I married a wonderful man who will put even two spoonfuls of leftover macaroni and cheese in a tiny container in the fridge. That container will then, sometimes, migrate to the back of the fridge and begin sprouting colorful mold flowers. This is not all bad. For one thing, a full refrigerator uses energy more efficiently than an empty one. But it shows how, despite best thrifty intentions, food waste happens.
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Christian Woman Sentenced to Hanging for Blasphemy
Asia Bibi, the first woman to get the death sentence under Pakistan's blasphemy law, was charged with insulting Muhammad.
Blasphemy laws in Pakistan legislate against “wounding the religious feelings of any person,” specifically regarding Islam. In 1992, the death penalty became mandatory upon conviction on blasphemy charges. So far no one has been executed under the blasphemy law, but others have languished in prison for up to 14 years without a trial. Up to 10 others have been murdered while under investigation.
This week, Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother of five from the Punjab Province, became the first woman ever sentenced to death under Pakistan's blasphemy law. Bibi has already been imprisoned for over a year. Pakistani officials make arrests based on a blasphemy complaint, and suspects are held during the investigation.
The police complaint against her said she called the Qur'an "fake" and made comments about one of Muhammad’s wives and his declining health late in life. The incident under investigation happened when Bibi, a farm worker, brought water to her fellow female workers. Apparently, the Muslim women refused to share water with a Christian, calling it “unclean.” The Punjab is home to Pakistan's small Christian minority and has seen over 30 group incidents against Christians since September 11.
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Why I Boycotted Amazon This Week
When it comes to how-to books for pedophiles, defending the defenseless is more important than defending free speech.
I jumped on a bandwagon Wednesday. I was one of the thousands who tweeted out against Amazon.com’s decision to carry on its Kindle store the e-book The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-lover's Code of Conduct.
According to Philip R. Greaves II, his self-published book would “make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow.” Greaves hoped “to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter [sic] sentences should they ever be caught.”
Ah, lovely. This book, for sale at the same place I regularly order Christmas gifts for my own children. The ones this guy would probably want to molest, albeit “safely,” thereby receiving a “liter” sentence for doing so were he caught. I don’t think so.
So, even though I love Amazon, even though my own book is sold there, and even though I’m grateful Amazon gives us writers a chance to be read and critiqued and ranked, I joined the masses in an “#amazonfail” Twitter campaign. While others called for boycotts and aggressively shamed the company, I simply tweeted, “Glad to have ordered the new Wimpy Kid from @Borders. @Amazon, pull that pedophilia book! #amazonfail”
But even though my words didn’t scathe or scare, I wrestled with what I had written. With what I was asking Amazon to do. As a lifelong lover of books and language and ideas, I seemed to be joining the ranks of the old-school book burners, of those who took offense to a word or an image or an idea and moved to ban it from public discourse. But now, instead of burning a barrel of books on the library steps (I’m imagining that scene from Footloose), we were burning virtual books on Twitter.
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The American Red Cross's Knight in Shining Pearls
Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, the first woman to chair the American Red Cross, says women hold the keys to the world’s economy.
The chairman of the American Red Cross — the humanitarian organization founded by Clara Barton in 1881 — is, actually, not a chairman. Bonnie McElveen-Hunter was appointed the first woman to the position by President George W. Bush in June 2004. Before that, the North Carolina native served two years as the Ambassador to the Republic of Finland, where she was knighted for starting a women business leader’s summit and an anti-trafficking campaign. In all her spare time, she is the founder-CEO of Pace Communications, and served as finance chairman of Elizabeth Dole’s bid for the U.S. presidency. (Dole became the first female president of the American Red Cross in 1996.)
But the work McElveen-Hunter believes God has called her to is with the American Red Cross, which deploys over 1 million volunteers annually to people devastated by natural disasters and political conflicts. McElveen-Hunter, who recently began her third term as Red Cross chairman, spoke with Her.meneutics editor Katelyn Beaty about women in business, Haiti’s cholera outbreak, and why she is handing the John M. Templeton Biblical Values Award, recently awarded her by the National Bible Association, over to her mother.
While in Finland, you established the Women Business Leaders Summit in Helsinki. Then you founded the United Way Women’s Leadership Initiative and a women’s initiative in Greensboro. Why are women so invaluable in today’s economic sectors?
I believe commerce is the most important force in the world today. It’s what ushers in the social, economic, and political change. And if you can create opportunity for women, guess what they do? They help each other. They help their families, and it creates dignity of purpose. The money that’s generated goes to improve people’s lives as opposed to sometimes, with the other gender in some nations, you find that it’s pretty much squandered. So women are really good investments.
I also think women are . . . focused on nurturing and are focused on others. We’re focused on common goals, so we unite and work together. All of those are traits that are so appropriate in the world today, whether it’s business, Wall Street, [or] philanthropy — [they require] the ability to build relationships to do anything in this world, to be successful in business. In the publishing business, you have to build relationships with your readers, with advertisers, with colleagues. And women are uniquely gifted in this arena, for this time.
If you want to look at nations that succeed in this world, they are nations that recognize that destiny requires 100 percent of their resources, both male and female. The nations that are not succeeding, in many cases they are utilizing only 50 percent of their resources. You can’t compete in a global market today without the full utilization of your citizens.
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Sarah Palin's Rogue Comments
The 2012 presidential hopeful calls people who ask whether mothers should work outside the home "Neanderthals," telling them to "evolve" on Fox News last week.
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's spotlight during the midterm elections will likely continue as her TLC show premieres this week and a new book is published in two weeks.
Sarah Palin's Alaska, an eight-part series, premieres November 14 at 9/8c. Her book America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag will be released November 23. But Palin's popularity is divisive for even conservatives, as the anticipation for a 2012 presidential candidate heightens.
Last week on Fox News, Palin praised Geraldine Ferraro for "breaking the glass ceiling," saying that ”Neanderthals” focus on issues like whether mothers should work outside the home, which Palin says is “petty, little, superficial, meaningless." Ferraro, who ran for U.S. vice president alongside Walter Mondale in 1984, was criticized at the time by Catholic bishops for her pro-choice stance.
Palin said, "It kind of seems, Geraldine, that some things haven’t changed. There are still the Neanderthals out there, who pick on the petty, little, superficial, meaningless things like looks, like whether you can or can’t work outside of the home if you have small children. All those type of things where I would so hope that at some point, uh, those Neanderthals, will evolve into something a bit more, um, with it, a bit more modern, and a bit more understanding that, yeah, woman can accomplish much.”
Over at the blog Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood isn't too pleased:
Palin says she cheered Ferraro when she ran for vice president, as if every female candidate feels automatic solidarity with any other female candidate. How “great for our nation” it was that Ferraro ran. Golly gee willickers. The supposedly pro-life, small-government Palin applauds the efforts of someone with an entirely different political philosophy simply because she is a woman.
Before the election, Palin also had some strong words for the media, calling some of them "corrupt bastards."
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Rumblings About Women at Lausanne
Some of the rumblings got right to the heart of what Lausanne is all about, and are symptomatic of why we need such a congress.
The difficulty some of us have remembering others’ names is explained, at least in part, by the fact that when being introduced to someone new, the name we are listening for is our own.
That kind of listening was going on at Cape Town 2010 — not so much in introductions as in looking for a face, a voice, a video, a message in which we would hear our name. When that happened, we felt valued and included. When it didn’t (as for the lone Native American representative) or not often enough or as often as others (as for nearly everyone else), there were rumblings in the camp.
Writer Margaret Feinberg reflected last week on those rumblings. “Lausanne offered a microcosm of the macro-challenges faced by the church around the world. Throughout the week, almost everyone I encountered felt marginalized in one way or another. . . . Though I shared some of the frustrations . . . I finally realized: We all feel marginalized in some way. That's the human condition. Extend grace. Move on.”
In fairness to the Lausanne committee, most of the 4,500 delegates were attending their first congress. So we had no way of comparing Lausanne 2010 with 1974, or of gauging the progress this Congress made in increasing diversity within our ranks. From what I have heard, the changes were monumental, but more are needed.
I also agree with Margaret, that we need to move on to the deeper topics touched on all week. Woven throughout the Congress were gut-wrenching stories from delegates of human trafficking, brutal atrocities, and unspeakable injustices. They were stark reminders of our mission’s urgency. Remarkably, many stories led to forgiveness and reconciliation — breathtaking examples of the gospel’s transforming power. They gave me a whole new definition of what it means to be a follower of Jesus in this broken world.
But, to be honest, some of the rumblings get right to the heart of what Lausanne is all about, and are symptomatic of why we need Lausanne.
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Girls in Sports No Longer 'Tomboys'
There are also no longer any 'woman astronauts,' according to my 10-year-old daughter.
Athletic competition builds character in our boys.
We do not need that kind of character in our girls.
~ Connecticut judge, 1971
Last month the Women's Sports Foundation held its annual Salute to Women in Sports at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg attended, as did actor Holly Hunter and dozens of athletes, including figure skater Michelle Kwan, softball star Jennie Finch, and New York Jets kicker Nick Folk.
Founded by tennis legend Billie Jean King 31 years ago, the foundation seeks to "advance the lives of girls and women through sport and physical activity." It's well known that girls who play sports reap many off-the-field benefits, including better grades and higher self-esteem. “Eighty percent of the female executives at Fortune 500 companies identified themselves as former ‘tomboys’ and having played sports,” the foundation's website states.
When I was a girl, organized sports belonged to the boys. If a girl played, she was without question a tomboy. At my brothers’ baseball games, I sat in the grass, picked at the scabs on my knees, made dandelion chains, and ran into the woods to retrieve foul balls. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in the 1970s, I knew only one girl who played baseball. Katie was quiet and tough and came from a large Roman Catholic family. Like her bevy of siblings, she had straight brown hair, dark blue eyes, and a scattering of freckles over her nose. I could spot her coming down the sidewalk just by her swagger.
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Women Take Election Spotlight
Politicians like Sharron Angle, Michele Bachmann, and Barbara Boxer show it's possible to be powerful and feminine.
Is the number of women in politics growing? It’s the type of question news talk-show hosts are asking now, thanks to competitive election races in states such as Delaware, Nevada, and California, where women are serious contenders in elections taking place next Tuesday.
Republican candidate Sharron Angle isn’t pulling her punches in Nevada, currently running in a tight race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle told Reid to “man up” in a recent debate, pushing him on issues such as health care and unemployment. Reid called Angle “extreme” in response, wisely steering clear of any gender-related advice. Vice President Joe Biden didn’t fare so well later in the week, lumping together two very different — and, according to him, “extreme” — female candidates as “these women.”
The other woman was Christine O’Donnell, Republican Senate candidate in Delaware. Reminiscent of Sarah Palin, who endorsed her, O’Donnell is the type of woman who has many fellow conservatives racing to disassociate themselves. O’Donnell hits a lot of strong points and is an outspoken Christian. But she also has made flamboyant statements — about witchcraft, masturbation, teaching evolution in schools, and the separation of church and state — that have raised eyebrows and set off “airhead” alerts across media. O’Donnell, like Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), also has been noted for wearing pearls and peep-toed shoes and the color of her toenails. It seems that an emphasis on fashion accompanies female candidates who don’t fit the mold of the traditional political candidate.
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Mildred Jefferson: 'A Physician, a Citizen, and a Woman'
Jefferson, an eloquent leader of the pro-life movement and the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, died October 15.
There are few who can discuss abortion from as many perspectives as those held by Mildred Jefferson — the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a lifelong pro-life activist, who passed away on October 15 at age 84.
She could talk about it as a doctor. She could talk about it as a woman. And, she could talk about it as a black woman.
Born to a Methodist minister in east Texas, Jefferson earned degrees from Texas College and Tufts University before graduating from Harvard in 1951. A surgical internship at Boston City Hospital eventually led to another trailblazing accomplishment: becoming the first female doctor at the former Boston University Medical Center.
Jefferson's involvement in the pro-life movement was prompted in the 1970s by a resolution passed by the American Medical Association allowing members to perform abortions if the procedure was legal in their states. She helped to found the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and served as its president for three years, along with serving in several other pro-life groups.
Darla St. Martin of the NRLC told New York Times reporter Dennis Hevesi that no one spoke for the pro-life movement better than Jefferson: “She probably was the greatest orator of our movement. In fact, take away the probably.”
Hevesi also recollects Jefferson’s 1981 testimony before Congress in favor of a bill that would have turned abortion into legal murder:
Dr. Jefferson, a surgeon, was speaking in support of a bill, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, that sought to declare that human life “shall be deemed to exist from conception.” Had it passed, it would have allowed states to prosecute abortion as murder. “With the obstetrician and mother becoming the worst enemy of the child and the pediatrician becoming the assassin for the family,” Dr. Jefferson continued to testify, “the state must be enabled to protect the life of the child, born and unborn.”
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Outsourcing Baby-Making in India
The disturbing realities of reproductive tourism as a global growth sector.
It’s a typical story in our global economy: Citizens of wealthy nations hire Indians to provide goods and services that cost less than the same goods or services domestically produced. But in the case of “reproductive tourism,” the Indian laborers are surrogate mothers who literally labor on behalf of foreign couples. They are paid to 'host' babies who are later carried home to the U.S., Britain, Israel, Australia, and other developed nations.
One expert recently referred to reproductive tourism as a “global growth sector,” with India leading the trend. (Reproductive tourism is not limited to India. British women regularly travel to U.S. fertility clinics to access a larger pool of donated eggs, and Indian-style surrogacy programs are springing up in Guatemala.) Fertility clinics in India market their services by offering foreign clients travel services so they can sightsee while in India for an IVF cycle or retrieving their baby. The clinics also recruit surrogates, usually poor Indian mothers; help clients obtain donor eggs and sperm; perform in vitro fertilization (IVF); house, feed, and provide medical care to surrogates during their pregnancies; and deliver babies.
Advocates for this business claim that everyone wins. Childless couples get the babies they long for, and surrogates receive income for better housing and education for their own children. But it’s not that simple. Indian surrogates must live in special housing while they are pregnant. They are well-fed and taken care of, but what does it say about whose families are more valuable when Indian mothers are away from their own children for months while they gestate babies for wealthier foreigners? According to a recent Slate article, many of the women cannot read their surrogacy contracts. Those from higher castes are paid more than those from lower castes, and surrogates are paid only if they deliver a living child.
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Abortion Case: Womb vs. Egg
Ethical issues abound in case of British Columbia couple who wanted surrogate mom to terminate pregnancy after baby was found to have Down Syndrome.
A British Columbia couple creates an embryo using in vitro fertilization (IVF). They contractually hire a surrogate mother to carry the child. Then they discover, through prenatal screening, that the baby has Down syndrome. The couple asks the surrogate mother to terminate the pregnancy. The surrogate disagrees with their decision. According to their agreement, the surrogate can continue the pregnancy, but she will become responsible for raising the child. Then, the surrogate mother, citing problems it would create for her own two children if she kept the baby, goes ahead with the termination.
I know about this story because I receive an e-mail every day from Google about news related to the key words “Down syndrome.” Our daughter Penny, who is four, has Down syndrome. Any given day offers me heartwarming stories about the accomplishments of a young adult with Down syndrome. Most days bring up some questions about genetic testing and prenatal screening. And every so often a story appears, like this one, that raises a host of ethical and legal questions.
Had the couple and surrogate mom gone to court, the scenario would have pushed the limits of abortion law. Whose baby was it? According to the Canadian and U.S. court systems, the legal right to an abortion is not dependent on biological parenthood but on the privacy rights of the woman carrying the baby. As a result, a father of a child has no legal right to prevent (or insist upon) abortion. Similarly, the surrogate mother retains the right of choice, even though the parents who created the baby had entered into a contractual agreement with her.
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Domestic Abuse: Coming to a Church Near You
Christian filmmaker Olivia Klaus goes inside California prisons to hear the stories of survivors of domestic violence who killed their husbands.
“How long am I to remain in this relationship?” This is the haunting question 65-year-old Glenda Crosley asks in the documentary Sin by Silence, about the abusive husband she killed in 1986. She has been in prison for as long as she was married — 24 years — and wonders when her ordeal will be over.
In the film, shot almost entirely inside the California Institution for Women, Crosley says the first time her husband, Sam, “truly got physical” was when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. He shoved her into a wall. Eventually she came to believe that the violence wouldn’t end until one of them was dead. According to The Bakersfield Californian, at the time of Sam’s murder, the couple was separated and having an argument in a parking lot. When Sam walked away from her car to the trunk of his, she believed he was going to get the tire iron he had threatened her with the week before. She rammed him once, drove away, then turned her car and hit him again. He died at the scene.
Elizabeth Leonard is the author of Convicted Survivors and a professor at Vanguard University, a Christian college in Costa Mesa, California. She says in the film that women who leave abusive relationships are often subject to “separation assault” and are 75 percent more likely to be murdered than before they left. So the answer to the question: Why didn’t she just leave? is not a simple one. In the same 2009 Bakersfield Californian article, Crosley’s daughter Stacy is quoted as saying she remembers her mother trying to leave several times and each of them ending with her father’s rage. She even blames herself for her father’s death because one of the times her mother returned was because a judge wouldn’t release her from a group home unless her parents were living together.
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A Concerning Nobel Prize
The success of IVF technology and our empathy for the families it helps do not trump ongoing ethical concerns.
Earlier this week, British biologist Robert G. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology. Edwards and his late research partner, Patrick Steptoe, pioneered the process by which the first so-called “test tube” baby was born in 1978. Since that time, it is estimated that four million babies worldwide have been born via IVF technology.
Much of the news coverage of Edwards’s prize, tends to dismiss moral and ethical concerns as passé. In an NPR interview with bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn, host Robert Siegel began by asking, “[H]ave four million births through IVF trumped all the moral and ethical questions that were posed by the procedure?” It’s an odd question, like asking whether Americans’ continued reliance on fossil fuels trumps the moral questions raised by global warming. To his credit, Kahn responded by naming ethical concerns that remain, such as how scientists should handle millions of leftover frozen embryos.
Other news stories, however, fail to address ongoing ethical questions at all, portraying Edwards as a brave pioneer who fought back against uptight alarmists. A New York Times article, for example, states that the following:
Advances in human reproductive technology arouse people’s deepest concerns and often go through a cycle, first of outrage and charges of playing God, then of acceptance. In vitro fertilization proved no exception. ‘We know that I.V.F. was a great leap because Edwards and Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely trinity — the press, the pope, and prominent Nobel laureates,’ said the biochemist Joseph Goldstein in presenting the Lasker Award to Dr. Edwards in 2001.
The same article goes on to say that, “The objections [to IVF] gradually died away—except on the part of the Roman Catholic Church—as it became clear that the babies born by in vitro fertilization were healthy and that their parents were overjoyed to be able to start a family.”
However, Roman Catholics are not the only ones concerned about the ethics of reproductive technology, and parental joy does not negate complex moral issues. If anything, the questions raised by IVF have grown rather than diminished, as the technology has become more sophisticated and ubiquitous. Edwards himself famously crystallized one major concern in a 1999 newspaper interview, in which he said, “Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”
Edwards was referring to a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is IVF with the added step of screening embryos for particular genetic mutations, usually those causing genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs, although it can also be used for sex selection, adult-onset diseases such as breast cancer, and even certain physical traits. In naming the “quality” of children as a reasonable concern, Edwards, intentionally or not, was advocating for a reproductive process that treats babies as products, manufactured to parental and cultural expectations, and subjected to quality control. When genetic disorders are transformed from an unexpected turn of fate into a parental “sin”—when disabled children are entirely their parents’ fault—there is great potential for children with disabilities to lose the increased access, inclusion, and support they have gained in recent decades.
The potential eugenic use of IVF and PGD is only one area of concern.
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The Unfunny Side of Modern Feminism
What I observed at Double X's recent event on women and comedy.
Is feminism funny or humorless? That was the question asked and evaluated at a Slate event I attended in New York City two weeks ago called Double X Presents: The Smoking Bra: Women and Comedy. I thought the question was worth exploring because, like so many contentious topics, feminism doesn’t often inspire laughter. The problem is, I was looking in the wrong place for an answer.
I would describe the comedy event in detail, but doing so would violate Philippians 4:8, which instructs us to think on things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. Much of what I saw and heard was anything but that.
Double X editor Jessica Grose opened by introducing a “pioneering” female comedian whose claim to fame was passing gas on stage. Next, Second City alumnus Jenny Hagel, showed a film in which she plays an uptight gender studies professor who tries to convince a thief that she is a feminist, whether the thief likes the label or not. When reason doesn’t work, Hagel turns to rap. Some of her nimble descriptions are compelling, like when she says a feminist is someone who knows that if a guy buys her pie, she doesn’t owe him sex. Others are trite, like when she suggests a feminist is excessively curious about her own genitalia. Megan Kellie then showed a video of crass street interviews asking the question: Why do men think their private parts are funny and women don’t?
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How Christians Will Save America's Schools
Being salt and light in a failing education system.
Sixty-eight percent of eighth graders in the U.S. can’t read at grade level. 1.2 million teenagers drop out of school every year. And 44 percent of dropouts under age 24 are jobless. These statistics, from the Broad Foundation for Education, are grim. And the children are the ones who suffer: Not only are their long-term prospects for employment and economic stability jeopardized, they also miss out on the joys of learning and the relationships with peers and adults that develop in a supportive, structured learning environment.
So is it more money? Computers? Summer programs? Better teachers? Certainly each of these factors plays a role. But improving schools extends beyond policy and unions and technology. For those of us with school-age children, sending our kids to public school and developing relationships with others in the school — parents, teachers, and administrators — might be part of the solution.
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Young, Single Women Outearn Male Counterparts
Does this signal a bridge in the perennial gender pay gap?
The fact that men make more money than women isn’t exactly news. Sure, it pops up in the media from time to time as some ask what we need to do to help that statistic change, while others insist that the gap isn’t real to begin with. For the most part, though, it’s a fact that’s accepted as part of our culture: one of the many inequalities — real or imagined, positive or negative — that exist between the genders.
But when a study comes out saying that some women actually earn more than their male counterparts — as one such study did earlier this month — well, that gets people talking.
According to The Wall Street Journal, data for 2008 indicates that “single, childless women between ages 22 and 30 were earning more than their male counterparts in most U.S. cities, with incomes that were 8% greater on average.” Alas, I’m not expecting to see any corresponding jump in my own income, as I’m neither single, childless, nor under age 30, but at first glance, I’m glad to see that working women, at least of the young, unmarried variety, are making strides in closing the wage gap.
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Craigslist Gives Up 'Adult Services' in the United States
Law enforcement and human rights advocates rejoice, but will the change help end human trafficking?
After testifying at a hearing regarding domestic minor sex trafficking on Wednesday, Craigslist officials agreed to remove adult services advertisements in this country for good.
Her.meneutics has followed the story of Craigslist closely (see a 2009 interview with Kaffie McCullough and news report from March). In June, we interviewed Malika Saada Saar, founder and director of Rebecca Project for Human Rights, which monitors Craigslist’s postings and launched a campaign to end the adult services section of the popular web site. At that time, Saada Saar urged readers:
Be very aware that all of our girls are really at risk of this issue of sexual violence. There is a statistic that 1 in 3 girls, by the time she reaches 18, will have suffered some form of sexual violence. So I think it’s important for us to honor the sacredness of our daughters, and recognize that too often our girls are sexually victimized. Whether it is a trafficker, or someone who purchases our girls, or the next door neighbor who goes onto Craigslist, we have to be able to hold accountable those persons who subject our girls to sexual violence. We should be able to honor our girls’ sacredness, to talk to them, and to recognize that they deserve only to be honored in their bodies, not hurt, not criminalized.
Due to the continuous efforts by human rights advocates, law enforcement, and Congress, on September 3, Craigslist stopped running the adult services, formerly known as “erotic services.” It has received much criticism for its adult services section, which has been linked to sex trafficking, particularly of children.
Approximately 100,000 children are prostituted every year. At the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children president Ernie Allen stated, “Internet services have made it possible to pimp these kids, offering them to prospective customers with little or no risk.”
Craigslist has been reluctant to remove this section. It charges money for these types of postings – sources claim that the site makes $30 to over $40 million on those advertisements – and invokes the argument of free speech and censorship. The Washington Post reports:[S]ome lawmakers questioned whether the need to protect children overrides the need to protect free speech. “Speech in the form of postings that incite violence against children is not protected speech,” Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) said.
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500 Women and Children Raped in Congo
Despite our distance from the deadliest conflict since World War II, there are ways to respond.
I went to dinner recently with a law student whose parents are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As we ate and shared, I tried to recall everything I had read about the DR Congo on BBC’s website or in history textbooks. But my mind blanked.
What year did Zaire become the DR Congo? When did they gain their independence? And did their stint with Marxism-Leninism ever end?
The next morning, as coffee brewed, I decided to reeducate myself on the DR Congo’s history, people, and beautiful terrains. My first questions were close to home. “If I were a Congolese woman, what would my life be like? What are their standards of beauty, roles in the home, recent accomplishments?”
As I typed “Congolese women” in my browser, I assumed the search would yield websites on their literature, political developments, and colorful printed fabrics.
Instead, page after page was all about rape. War crimes. FDLR rebels (a remnant of Hutu forces) systematically destroying the reproductive capabilities of women. A 13-year-old girl tied to a tree and raped by passing soldiers for several days at a time. Besides a few charity efforts, few websites actually celebrated Congolese women; one article celebrated a doctor for his reconstructive surgeries of them.
Gaping in disbelief, I then Googled “American women.” Immediately, links to songs, literature, “famous firsts” of American women, and women-only fitness centers popped up. Most links celebrated their beauty and strength.
The difference between my two searches couldn’t have been more drastic.
The results grieved me for days.
Since then, the violence in DR Congo has continued. Yesterday, the United Nations reported that some 500 Congolese women, girls, and babies have been raped since late July.
In response, some U.S. authorities are calling for more legislation and aid.
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James Lee and 'Filthy Human Children'
The environmental activist's views on human life were obviously extreme and very wrong. But should we rethink limiting our family sizes?
This week ended very badly for James Lee. Maybe the 43-year-old militant environmentalist expected September 1 to be his last day — a suicide mission seemed consistent with the activist’s manifesto that humans, particularly babies, are pollution and are polluting the planet.
Armed and wearing what appeared to be bombs attached to his body, Lee entered the Silver Spring, Maryland, headquarters of the Discovery Channel, which he had targeted on other occasions for its “pro-birth” programming, such as the Duggars’ 19 Kids and Counting. Taking three hostages, he attempted to capture the world’s attention while reiterating his message that people are wreaking havoc on earth and must stop having “filthy human children.”
Every issue has its spectrum, and Lee demonstrates the far reaches of a biocentric perspective that, at its core, sees humans as no higher or better than other life forms. At this point in our history, Lee and those sharing his view contend that humans have overextended themselves as a species to the demise of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other species.
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Preserving Man and Beast
Humans are more valuable than animals — which is precisely why we can't be indifferent to animal suffering.
Jeffrey Kluger’s recent Time magazine cover story, “What Animals Think,” explores new research about the human-like intelligence of animals. A Bonobo (cousin of the chimpanzee) can learn hundreds of words. Dogs demonstrate social skills by following a pointed finger to its object. Crows bend wires to create fishing hooks. Elephants appear to mourn their dead.
Christians can and should marvel at the surprising points of connection between human and animal. But overemphasizing our commonalities can lead to dangerous territory. The Bible articulates a hierarchical model of creation, with humans “ruling” over the animals (Gen. 1:26). (Of course, much depends upon how we interpret the word rule. More on that later.) Genesis depicts humans as set apart from the rest of creation, for only humans have been created “in God’s image” (Gen. 1:27). In addition to prioritizing humans through the actions of his ministry, Jesus affirms the distinct nature of humans when he addresses human anxiety: “You are worth more than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:31). In other words, God cares for all of creation, but God endows humans with particular worth.
Unfortunately, as Kluger notes, “For many people, the Bible offers the most powerful argument [against animal rights] of all. Human beings were granted ‘dominion over the beasts of the field,’ and there the discussion can more or less stop.” He is right: The Bible has been used to wrongly justify disregarding, even abusing animals. In contrast, a proper understanding of humans “ruling” or “stewarding” role should lead to greater flourishing for human and animal alike.
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Have We Forgotten Haiti?
Counteracting our fleeting attention spans.
The hubbub has died down. Other tragedies have struck; our attentions have been averted. A little over eight months ago, Haiti experienced one of the worst natural disasters in history. Since then, Chile, Turkey, and now Pakistan have faced their fair share of environmental turmoil. We watch helplessly as nature devastates the homes and lives of thousands, and then we turn our attention to the latest earthquake, then back to the wars, celebrities, Apple products, and the ordinary everyday.
The reports on Haiti are slower now that the country has entered reconstruction. No longer are we bombarded with television ads to “donate now,” nor are we hit with the gruesome photographs that once streamed onto televisions, websites, and magazines as the events unfolded (though we have heard plenty about singer Wyclef Jean’s bid for the Haitian presidency). To stay up-to-date with the aftermath now requires more intentionality on our parts.
Yet Haiti still needs help — direly. This week, a special recovery commission announced that more than $1.6 billion is needed to rebuild the country’s economy and agriculture sector, a primary source of jobs. A Monday New York Times editorial predicted that overhauling the country’s educational system, making it universal and nearly free, will take about 20 years. Meanwhile, about 1.5 million Haitians are still living in makeshift tent camps; only 4 percent of the rubble has been cleared; bodies are still being dug up; hunger continues; and grief will be present for a long time.
In mid-May, the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University estimated that American donors had contributed $1.3 billion to relief efforts, but that it expected donations to drop off soon. “We’re a nation with a short attention span; three to six months after a disaster, donations approach zero,” said center executive director Patrick Rooney.
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The No-Fault-Divorce Nation
As New York becomes the last state to legalize no-fault divorce, will Americans see a new chapter in our national marriage crisis?
No-fault divorce is now legal in every state, making filing for divorce in America — whether both parties agree or not — simply a matter of getting the proper paperwork.
New York just became the last state to adopt the legislation, passing a bill in early July that was signed into law this week by Governor David Paterson.
According to New York Law Journal, the law lets mutually consenting couples divorce “within six months of stating under oath their unions are ‘irretrievably’ broken.” Proponents say such laws free couples from needing to prove that one spouse caused the divorce by adultery or abuse. But to suggest ugly divorce battles are a thing of the past would deny the devastation of divorce itself. There are plenty of reasons why making it easier to get a divorce is a bad idea. Opposition to the legislation has created unlikely allies out of the Roman Catholic Church, the New York chapter of the feminist group National Organization for Women (NOW), and the nonprofit Marriage Savers, founded by evangelical Mike McManus.
Marcia Pappas, president of New York’s NOW, echoed the Catholic concern for the potential economic inequality for women caused by sanctioning “divorce on demand”:
No-fault takes away any bargaining leverage the non-moneyed spouse has. Currently she can say, “If you want a divorce I’ll agree, but you have to work out a fair agreement.”Robin Fretwell Wilson, an alumni professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, also noted that no-fault laws erroneously overlook the fact that sometimes, one spouse is at fault:
By bypassing mutual agreement, S3890 would treat nearly all divorces alike. Under current New York law, fault matters in property distribution and alimony only in rare instances, when “so egregious” as to be “a blatant disregard” of the marriage. Beating one’s wife with a barbell until she is unrecognizable would count, but verbally abusing and striking one’s wife and child while intoxicated would not, even if the abuse required a physician’s care. Not all reasons for divorcing are equal. Often someone is at fault and that should matter if the law is to do justice.
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The 'D Word' at U.S. Christian Colleges
At my Christian university, we are working toward reconciliation across ethnic and racial lines. We have a ways to go.
When Carmille Akande, a dean at Cedarville University, and I stepped into the Duke Gardens for the opening reception of Duke Divinity School’s Summer Institute — a project of Duke’s Center for Reconciliation — we sensed we were on holy ground. Our gratitude, awe, and love for Christ and his body only intensified throughout the week in June. Being with such a diverse group was a foretaste of the coming kingdom. And as we worshiped, fellowshipped, and lamented alongside brothers and sisters from all over the world, we were better equipped for our own ministry of reconciliation at Cedarville, a Baptist-affiliated college in Ohio.
We learned of Census projections that ethnic minorities will compose the majority in the U.S. by 2040. That, coupled with the fact that the center of Christianity has tilted toward the Global South, predominantly white Christian colleges and universities like Cedarville have to make changes necessary for institutional survival. But more important, the changes are necessary to faithfully represent Christ and his kingdom in our world.
Cedarville has already taken steps toward this faithful representation. In 2006, university trustees approved a statement on diversity, which includes the following:
Cedarville University actively seeks to attract and serve a diverse group of Christian employees and students who exercise their spiritual calling to be agents of reconciliation; pursuing unity, peace, and community in an atmosphere that recognizes our union in Christ and celebrates the contributions of all who seek to follow Christ.
In fall 2008, we hired Carmille as the Dean of Multi-Cultural and Special Programs. We hold diversity training and have a diversity committee. We are trying to diversify our faculty and staff. Such steps mirror those taking place at most other Christian colleges in the U.S. Thankfully many people on campus “get it.” But, like most U.S. Christian colleges and universities, we have a lot to learn — and some institutional sin to overcome.
When we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day each January, hold diversity training, or even mention diversity, I inevitably hear, “Why is diversity being shoved down our throats? I’m tired of it. I love everybody. I am color-blind.” After the 2008 presidential election, minority students who supported President Obama told stories of how their salvation was called into question by some on campus. Many felt they couldn’t openly celebrate the election of America’s first black president without meeting condemnation.
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Q+A: Selling Girls on Craigslist
Rebecca Project founder Malika Saada Saar explains how Craigslist became the medium for human trafficking.
On Saturday night I attended a dinner party in Laguna. A guest seated next to me pulled out a snazzy looking camera, and raved about how he got it for a steal on Craigslist.
In the car, I asked my sister if she’s used Craigslist. “Of course! It’s the best. It’s where all the college students look for housing and jobs.” The online classifieds service is one of the most popular websites in the US today.
It’s also used for selling women and underage girls.
Last year, Craigslist changed their “erotic services” name to “adult services.” They also promised to manually monitor the section for any instances of child prostitution or human trafficking. And they started charging $5 to $10 per sexual service post.
The result? The privately-owned company’s revenues for prostitution have gone up. This past April, the FBI arrested 14 Mafia members for selling girls ages 15 to 19 on Craigslist in New York and New Jersesy.
Human rights activists continue to call Craigslist the “biggest online hub for selling women against their will,” according to The New York Times. But Craigslist’s two largest shareholders, company founder Craig Newmark and chief executive James Buckmaster, appear unperturbed by the complaints of human rights officials and authorities.
One human rights activist watching Craigslist is Malika Saada Saar, who founded the Rebecca Project for Human Rights while attending Georgetown Law. As director of the Rebecca Project, Saada Saar joined forces with other organizations to fight human trafficking in the United States, including trafficking on Craigslist. The Rebecca Project produced the YouTube video on the left with the FAIR Fund youth advocate, and Crittenton Foundation.
Saada Saar recently spoke with me about the problem and her efforts to fight it.
An estimated 100,000 minors in the U.S. are trafficked into prostitution. Why is Craigslist a major hub for trafficking?
[Craigslist] is this iconic, convenient way that we are able to purchase items. And because of the adult services section that Craigslist allows to be part of that process, individuals can purchase a girl for sex in the same manner that they are able to purchase a piece of furniture. Craigslist makes in very convenient.
When you look at who tends to purchase girls for sex, the research shows us that these persons are usually white men who are married and in their 30s and 40s. So it’s more convenient and discreet for them to simply go onto Craigslist and purchase a child for sex, than to go out onto the street and do that, or to go to a more taboo site like Backpage or myRedBook.
How many illegal Craigslist posts have been documented?
At any point in any city, you can go onto the adult services section and see children who are being trafficked. This is not only an issue within the U.S. borders; it’s also an issue within Criagslist Vietnam, Thailand, and India.
How many illegal posts are estimated?
We went onto the site last week because it’s often used as a way of trying to see if Criagslist is in fact manually removing those advertisements for sex that are obviously for children. Those days that we went there, we were able to track at least one girl each day that was up for being sold.
The other part is that there’s been some really good research that’s coming out of the Shapiro Group, a research group hired by the Women’s Funding Network. What their research shows, in the state of Georgia, was that Craigslist was used three times more than Backpage and myRedBook, and that 47 percent of individuals, once they were told that this was a girl under the age of 18, whom they were purchasing, continued with the purchase of the child. Something that’s interesting to note is that Craigslist issued a cease and desist order regarding the research, but the Women’s Funding Network released it anyway.
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Women with the Self-Doubt Syndrome
Some high-achieving women have the 'impostor syndrome' — the ingrained sense that they don't belong at the table of influence.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine asserted that pride was the original sin shared by everyone. I thought for a moment, and had to admit that I did not resonate with his assessment. Pride assumed that one had more confidence than they should, or that it was misplaced. But I — and many of my female colleagues and students — hardly suffered from that. Instead we struggled to believe we had anything to contribute. Self-doubt, not pride, was our demon.
Call this the impostor syndrome, a psychological term for someone’s overall inability to internalize their own accomplishments, and the topic on Scot McKnight's blog recently. Sufferers attribute successes not to their gifts and achievements but to luck, sheer timing, affirmative action, or their ability to trick others. They tend to downplay success when someone congratulates them. According to a study cited by McKnight, “This syndrome is thought to be particularly common among women who are successful in their given careers and is typically associated with academics. . . . It is also widely found among graduate students."
McKnight cited an e-mail from a female colleague, an academic who, due to ingrained ideas about intellect and gender, had internalized the sense that she didn’t belong at the table:
Even being a woman myself, I'm aware that I don't value women as much as I value men. While I read many books by and about women or girls when I was younger, as I got older I somehow acquired prejudice against them. I even noticed that if I was enjoying a book and then found out the author was female I would be disappointed and immediately, on those grounds alone, think less of it. I'm starting to recover from that now, as I learn that being female or feminine does not make someone or something intrinsically worth less in significance, value, or virtue. It's nice not feeling I have to distance myself from all things feminine to have value or be valued by other people.
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Abortion Measures Move State-à-State
The shape of the abortion debate has shifted to state-level politics.
In a changing political climate, Christians are finding their attention and energy divided among a number of issues. Recognizing these tensions, the Manhattan Declaration called for Christians to refocus on core issues, one of which was abortion. Simultaneously, Newsweek reported on a study conducted this year by the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws that suggests that the number of young Americans who believe abortion is a “very important” issue is waning, especially among those who feel strongly on the pro-choice side.
As both pro-choice and pro-life sides confront apathetic constituencies, the debate has seen a groundswell of activity on state level this year. For example, the state governments of Tennessee and Arizona, reacting to the health care bill, have adopted restrictions on abortion coverage in any state-run health insurance exchange.
Attempts to set specific limits on abortion have been successful in Nebraska. Last month, Gov. Dave Heineman passed a law banning most abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy. The law is based on testimony provided to the Nebraska legislature that a child in the womb can feel pain by 18 to 20 weeks old. At the same time, the state passed a law requiring women to undergo a health screening prior to any abortion.
State politicians have approached the issue of “informed consent” from various angles. USA Today reports that 22 states are considering bills to increase counseling or waiting periods and 18 states bills to expand the use of ultrasound. Missouri is in the process of adding a 24 hour waiting period and a “consultation” to current abortion laws.
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Afghan Girls Poisoned for Attending School
Some Afghan groups believe educating girls is forbidden in Islam and corrosive to society.
Some 88 girls and teachers fell ill at three different schools within a week in northern Afghanistan. Authorities believe the sickness is due to poison gas attacks, and have not yet identified who harmed the girls and teachers. The Taliban has been suspected but claim they were not involved and denounce the attacks, which some people consider a terrorist action.
![4250848129_ccbd64b0af.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/4250848129_ccbd64b0af.jpg "Courtesy of isafmedia / flickr.com, <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/4250848129/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a></div>")
On the Wednesday and Saturday attacks, reports said the girls felt “dizzy and nauseous.” The girls who became sick on Sunday experienced fainting, vomiting, headaches, and chills. There were no fatalities, but some girls are continuing to receive medical care.
Male Afghan students outnumber female students six to one, and Afghan girls pursuing education are no strangers to persecution. The recent incident only gained attention because there were multiple attacks in a relatively short amount of time. Girls have been attacked or even killed for attending school. In one horrific case in 2008, Taliban fighters threw acid on fifteen girls and teachers on route to school in Kandahar city. "A real man would never throw acid on the face of a little girl," Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in response. "Beside it being a cowardly act, it is an un-Islamic act."
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The Hard Realities of International Adoption
Torry Hansen's story and the ensuing Russian adoption freeze might make some families reconsider.
A Tennessee woman's decision send her troubled 7-year-old son, Artyom Savelyev, alone on a plane back to Russia this month with a note saying he had psychopathic issues has turned the international adoption world upside down and seems to have frozen adoptions between the two countries. It has also unleashed a wave of resentment from Americans who feel that Russia passes severely disturbed children to foreign adoptive parents because the country lacks the will to reform an orphanage system that's an international disgrace.
As the mom of a 5-year-old girl adopted from Kazakhstan in 2007, I belong to five different adoption list serves, most of which lit up when the news broke. The overriding sentiment on the list serves was that, as awful as Torry Hansen’s action was, Russia is in no position to be pointing fingers. Yes, about 16 Russian adoptees have died in the U.S. since 1996 (out of 60,000 total adopted), but at least 15 adopted children die each year at the hands of Russian parents, according to The Times. Russia has 800,000 children in orphanages, with about 120,000 added each year. Americans adopt only about 1,600 per year, so we don’t make much of a dent. What depressed me in many of the posts written by adoptive parents were the horror stories about children they had adopted or knew about. This one is an example of the comments and links people post.
Many Russian children have some form of fetal alcohol syndrome whereby the child's brain is irreparably damaged due to binge drinking by pregnant moms. One recent Swedish survey estimated that 52 percent of 71 adopted children from Eastern Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine) were brain-damaged due to FAS. Those are horrible statistics, and the Russian Foreign Ministry seems to have few qualms about giving these children to unsuspecting foreigners.
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Female and Athletic: College Basketball's Gender Dilemma
Gay bloggers' backlash to Christian coach's pro-family statement highlights the NCAA's messy relationship with femininity.
What seemed like a simple statement about family togetherness has become a lightning rod in the world of Division I women’s college basketball.
![3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg ""Nash Shooting," University of Texas. Courtesy of aaronisnotcool / flickr.com <div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;"><a href="http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg"><img src="http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b-thumb.jpg" width="345" height="230" alt="3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg" title=""Nash Shooting," University of Texas. Courtesy of aaronisnotcool / flickr.com <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavalierhorn/3108019973/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavalierhorn/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavalierhorn/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a></div>" /></a></div>")
Robin Pingeton, the new women’s basketball coach at the University of Missouri, said in her first press conference April 8, “I’m very blessed to have my staff here. This is something very unique, I think, for Division I women's basketball to have a staff that the entire staff is married with kids. Family is important to us, and we live it every day.”
Pingeton, 41, who calls herself “a Christian who happens to be a coach,” has taken heat from gay rights bloggers who watch college athletics, reported Inside Higher Ed this week. Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights said Pingeton’s comments were meant to “subtly prov[e] that everyone in their program was straight,” and that mentioning her faith “was yet again, a subtle way of saying being lesbian or being gay would be against religious values and isn’t what our program is about.”
Pat Griffin, University of Massachusetts professor emerita, wrote on her LGBT sports blog:
[Pingeton’s] husband and son were at the press conference as were her proud aunt and uncle. Nothing unusual about that. Family is often present to celebrate professional achievements (unless, of course, the family is a same-sex partner). But then she goes on to make sure we know that heterosexual marital status is important to her by noting that all of her assistants are married with children. . . . [Y]ou have to wonder what kind of team climate she will promote for student-athletes who are not Christian or who are not heterosexual.
The backlash to Pingeton’s comments makes sense only in the context of women’s college basketball’s “long and persistent history of struggles over players and coaches’ sexuality,” reported Inside Higher Ed. The height and muscle that help players on the court often put them outside traditional images of femininity, and many of them endure rumors about sexual orientation. Rene Portland, former head coach of Penn State University’s Lady Lions, infamously had a written “no-lesbians” policy, and was sued by a former player who said she was cut in 2005 for her perceived sexual orientation. Sherri Murrell, the only openly gay coach in Division I women’s basketball, told Salon’s Broadsheet that during the competitive recruiting stage, coaches will dismiss other schools’ basketball programs for having too many lesbians.
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Minnesota Man Arrested for Prostituting Wife
Clinton Danner's arrest raises questions about Craigslist's culpability in sex trafficking — and about the church's response to criminal offenders.
A Rockford, Minnesota, man was arrested in Chicago two weeks ago for prostituting his wife using Craigslist, transporting her in a van to hotels in eight states and threatening to take away their 3-year-old daughter should she not comply.
Clinton Danner, 32, met his wife five years ago when she was a 17-year-old attending her family’s church. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Danner held a criminal record for burglary, lottery fraud, and drugs, but was working with a church counselor to change his life. The couple was wed at the church a few months after the young woman became pregnant.
The woman, whose name has not been released due to her victim status, told her parents about Danner a year ago and tried to leave him. Then, while at a downtown Chicago hotel in mid-March, she contacted Polaris Project for help. Founded in 2002, Polaris Project is one of the largest U.S. organizations battling human trafficking. Its hotline, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, gets 400 to 500 phone calls every month.
The woman’s call led to the Cook County Sheriff’s Department involvement and Danner’s arrest March 14. Several metro areas in the U.S. are attempting to change their approach to prostitution, and Cook County has made great strides. The city has educated its police force to better recognize child prostitution and to view prostitutes as victims instead of criminals. (Oftentimes, prostitutes — even if they are minors — are arrested instead of their pimps or clients.)
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The History of Glenn Beck's 'Social Justice'
While warning of a 'perversion of the gospel,' the radio commentator mangles recent American religious history.
Setting off waves of debate in recent weeks, conservative radio host Glenn Beck advised his listeners on March 2 to leave their churches if they found signs of commitment to “social justice” or “economic justice.” Beck called such language “code words” and “a perversion of the gospel,” and he linked it to totalitarian regimes. Christians across the political spectrum called Beck out on his misreading of the gospel and of the American religious landscape. Beck’s grasp of history was just as shaky, but he did not catch as much flak on this point. A better sense of recent American religious history helps to explain both the appeal of Beck’s rhetoric in certain circles and its fallacy.
The “social” half of Beck’s key phrase entered religious discourse around the beginning of the 20th century, with the Social Gospel movement. A response to the suffering, displacement, and dramatic inequity of wealth brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the Social Gospel advocated a shift toward more holistic salvation. One of the theological architects of the movement, Walter Rauschenbusch, spent part of his early career as a pastor in the squalid Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, and he came away convinced that human problems ranged much farther than the need for individual conversion. His books included Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), an exhortation for Christians to move beyond sedate, Victorian piety and embody Christ’s message in a desperately needy world.
The Social Gospel met resistance on many fronts. The movement’s leaders drew heavily on new academic disciplines like psychology and sociology, at times privileging these scientific insights over Scripture. The movement also flirted with Marxism, as, for example, in Washington Gladden’s book Christianity and Socialism (1905). Many American Christians were not prepared to exchange their image of Jesus as gentle and nurturing — the characteristics most emphasized by late 19th-century art and literature — for the image of Jesus as a social reformer, even a revolutionary.
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Joni Eareckson Tada: Health Care Bill Concerns
Protecting the least among us in health care reform.
A few years ago, I helped write a book, How to Be a Christian in a Brave New World, about the bioethical challenges in the 21st century. Today, one of our foremost ethical challenges is how to accomplish health care reform in a way that respects most Americans' traditional religious values.
As a quadriplegic for the past 43 years, I have had more than my fair share of doctors' visits and medical treatments. I know the difference between good care and bad care, and I can tell when a physician has my best interests at heart. I am thankful that, for the most part, my doctors have always treated me as the individual I am rather than just another patient in a wheelchair.
For these reasons -- my faith and my experience with medical care -- I am very concerned about two specific items that currently exist in proposed health care legislation:
-- Federal funding of abortions
-- Rationing of care.
Proposals in the current House and Senate health care bills would set up a health insurance marketplace to benefit small businesses and people buying coverage on their own, with the promise of some subsidies to keep premiums affordable. The difference, however, is that the House bill would prohibit government-subsidized health plans from covering abortions, and the Senate bill would not.
Anyone watching the drama unfold in Washington this week knows that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to round up the votes to pass the Senate version of the bill through the House.
The House-approved version would prevent the American people from being forced to pay for abortions, and it closely follows existing law (the so-called Hyde Amendment) that prohibits most federal funding of abortions.
Another major concern I have is the $11 billion that President Obama has earmarked for community health centers to serve low-income people and the uninsured. Providing access to medical care for the poor is a good thing. However, as the bills are currently written, those funds are not covered by the Hyde Amendment.
Why is this issue of abortion important to me? Given my experience with quadriplegia and other forms of disability, I have a special concern to protect and value life in every aspect. I know of countless individuals who have been injured far more gravely than I was when I took that fateful dive back in 1967. For those whose disabilities keep them bedridden or unable to communicate, is their life of any less value than mine? I should say not!
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'Femivores' and Food Ethics
The trend toward locally grown, naturally raised food is giving some women more fulfilling lives than the workplace ever did.
If a daily trip to the vegetable patch to harvest vegetables and to the chicken coop to gather eggs means a woman is a femivore, then so be it, though I think the term is rather silly. Historically speaking, folks who did those things were just called "farmers," at least if they sold their produce or eggs. Otherwise, they were called "gardeners who kept chickens."
Every day I visit our hens, check their feed and water, and collect eggs. In the summer I freeze, can, and dry fruits and vegetables, and this year hope for a good honey harvest from the beehives. I never thought I was "radical" (see Shannon Hayes's 2010 book, Radical Homemakers). Rather, I’ve been inspired to live a little more like my grandmother did. I always admired her and her simple farmer’s life.
In last week's New York Times article “The Femivore’s Dilemma,” Peggy Orenstein describes the trend among educated women in the West to leave successful but unsatisfying careers to reconnect with nature by keeping bees and chickens and growing vegetables. While the term is a play off of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Orenstein uses femivore to describe women who are taking "the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove [them] into the work force in the first place," and applying them in the home.
Orenstein cites four women who gave up careers to build coops in their backyards, and she connects coop-building to the women’s search for meaning. We didn’t find it as homemakers in the 1950s, and we haven’t found it in a paycheck since. Orenstein thinks keeping chickens is another way women are searching for meaning; if they can be productive and connected to nature, life will be fulfilling. Yet she worries that the coop may become one more cage for women rather than a path toward meaning — one more expectation for women who want to have it all.
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A Sinking Argument on Gender and Courage
Do secular feminists really want men to stop showing courtesy?
Cultural commentator Al Mohler recently covered an unusual study that compared passenger behavior on the Titanic, in 1912, and the Lusitania, in 1915. The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that men on the Titanic were more likely than those on the Lusitania to give up their lifeboat seats for women and children. On the Lusitania, which was struck by German torpedoes and sank in 18 minutes, more women and children died than did men, something the study attributes to the men’s physical strength and speed in getting to the lifeboats. Put bluntly, the men on the Lusitania acted selfishly, while those on the Titanic showed good manners.
Mohler draws from this study a lesson on gender roles and the created order. He writes that “modern feminists” wish to eliminate “all meaningful gender distinctions,” which he believes would lead to the disregard that the Lusitania’s men showed for women and children. “Are we really to believe that the moral call that makes men act against their own self-preservation is just a socially constructed artifact of manners?” he asks. “The feminists . . . call for a world like the Lusitania, but must hope against hope that the world is really more like the Titanic.”
Unfortunately, this argument suffers from two serious flaws. First, the most telling of all the statistics is not taken into account: the overwhelming number of upper-class people, male and female, who were rescued on the Titanic. Time magazine reports thusly: “The Titanic’s first-class passengers had a 43.9% greater chance of making it off the ship and into a lifeboat than the reference group; the Lusitania’s, remarkably, were 11.5% less likely.” In other words, it is not so much that men gave their lifeboat seats to women, but that poor men and women gave up their seats to wealthy men and women. On the Titanic, poor women died and rich men lived. Neither today’s feminists nor Mohler would, I wager, want to support that trend today.
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Should Pro-lifers Call Black Children an 'Endangered Species'?
The controversial Georgia ad implies that, like endangered species, black children should be protected up until they're born.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the controversial billboard campaign sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, that state’s largest pro-life organization, in partnership with a Christian group called the Radiance Foundation. In signs put up around Atlanta, as well as through a dynamic website, the campaign puts the abortion issue squarely in the faces of passersby with the image of a young child next to the startling words, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” It’s a provocative image and caption, created in part by black and biracial people with compelling stories related to pro-life issues.
I applaud the campaign’s message and the attention it draws to the devastating impact of abortion in the African American community (one CDC survey reports that African American women have abortions at three times the rate of white women and almost twice the rate of other racial groups). But I find the use of “endangered species” language and imagery to describe black children to be profoundly inappropriate.
First, there’s the problem of comparing African Americans to animals. Because of the ways those kinds of comparisons have been made to dehumanize blacks in the past, I think the campaign’s organizers should have reconsidered leveraging the “endangered species” comparison for its shock value and attention-grabbing potential.
I understand that the point of the Georgia campaign, like those “Save the Baby Humans” bumper stickers, is to emphasize the hypocrisy in caring more about animals than we do about people. But black children aren’t animals — and that’s precisely why their lives are important. They shouldn’t be compared to the Okaloosa Darter or the Galapagos Petrel, or some other species most of us haven’t heard about and don’t care about the survival of.
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Citing Modesty, Two Women Refuse Full-Body Scans
Pope Benedict and Muslim scholars have warned that the scanners — slated for major U.S. airports — violate principles of human dignity and chastity.
Two Muslim women boarding a plane in Manchester, England, last week became trailblazers in the debate over full-body scanners by refusing to undergo the scan, citing religious and medical restrictions. They forfeited their £400 airline tickets to Pakistan, as such scans became compulsory in the UK in February. The women are the first known passengers to refuse a scan under the new rule. Muslim scholars in the U.S. have already issued a fatwa against full-body scans as a violation of Islamic teaching on modesty.
More airports worldwide are installing full-body scanners after the Christmas Day bombing attempt by a Muslim Nigerian carrying explosives in his underwear on a Detroit-bound flight. The first round of 150 full-body scanners slated for major U.S. airports are being installed today in Boston’s Logan International Airport.
The Times (UK) reports that full-body scans give security staff detailed images of passengers’ nude bodies, which human rights groups decry as a “virtual strip search.” According to the Associated Press, the images are viewed in a private room and conceal passengers’ faces to protect identity. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has assured passengers that the scans are optional and that images are deleted. (This may not be true outside the U.S.; GetReligion’s Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes that one Indian celebrity has already said he received printed images of his nude body at Heathrow.)
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Michelle Obama Tackles Childhood Obesity
The First Lady has been criticized for mentioning her daughters' weight to launch the 'Let's Move!' campaign.
As President Obama presided over a seven-hour cross-party debate on health care last week, First Lady Michelle Obama continued to make headlines in the advancement of her latest cause: childhood obesity.
In an historic appearance at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association on February 20, Obama called for a nationwide program to combat obesity in America's children, stressing as she did that such a plan need not be expensive.
Aims of "Let's Move," the name given to the Obama obesity initiative, include a $400 million annual budget to encourage grocery stores to carry healthier food selections, especially grocery stores in "underserved" areas, according to National Public Radio. "Let's Move" will also beef up (pardon the pun) initiatives to offer healthier lunches in schools, and partner with schools in achieving those goals.
It's no secret that being overweight is unhealthy and that obese children tend to grow into obese adults. And with childhood obesity continually on the rise, according to the latest government statistics, it's obvious something needs to be done. But from the minute it left the starting gate, "Let's Move" has endured some hefty criticism.
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Lead in Your Lipstick, Carcinogens in Your Hair Color
Most of the personal care products you use every day are damaging your health, argues Samuel Epstein in Toxic Beauty.
My story begins on a plane. All I did was ask the woman next to me for some lotion. Eyes wide, she looked at me like I’d asked for rat poison. She told me she did not use lotion anymore and launched into a long synopsis of the book that informed her decision: Toxic Beauty, Samuel Epstein’s frightening glimpse into the cosmetics and personal-care products industries.
My flight mate informed me that most if not all of the cosmetics and hygienic products that I used were bad for my health in one way or another. Then she dropped a bomb: cancer. That was more than enough to get my attention. “The book changed my life,” she said while massaging grapeseed oil into her hands, as I scribbled toxic beauty on my boarding pass.
As my friends can tell you, the only room I usually make for a recommendation in my long list of books to read is at the very end. But this one quickly moved to the front. And now it is my turn to say, “This book changed my life” — including the way I shop, the products I use, my health, my beliefs about responsible living, and my views on makeup.
Toxic Beauty’s central premise is that most of the cosmetic and personal care products (e.g., shampoo, lotion, and toothpaste) contain hazardous chemical ingredients, and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal regulatory agency that should be responsible for monitoring such ingredients, is recklessly negligent.
As Epstein, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, notes, we assume that our products are safe because we believe the FDA would not allow unsafe products on the market. Not true. The law, says Epstein, “does not require cosmetics or personal-care products and their ingredients to be approved as safe before they are marketed and sold.” All that’s required is that ingredients that constitute over 1 percent of the product be labeled.
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Why Boys Are Failing in the Classroom
The author of Why Boys Fail says females now have an unfair academic advantage in most schools — and that the pendulum needs to swing back.
True or false: Our educational system gives boys an academic advantage.
Answer: A resounding yes, when Leave It To Beaver was the TV ratings champ. But Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons From An Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind (Amacon Publishing, 2010), makes a compelling, well-documented case that the opposite is now true. According to Whitmire, male students have been at a disadvantage for at least a generation, and the academic gender gap is widening.
Whitmire, a former editorial writer for USA Today, marshaled an impressive amount of research to support the thesis of his book: “The world has gotten more verbal, boys haven’t." He insists that instructional trends ranging from whole language reading instruction (emphasizing the recognition of words in context versus the decoding skills employed in phonics training) to math education that focuses on analyzing and solving word problems play to girls’ strengths.
The grim stats cut like a machete through every demographic: urban, rural, wealthy, and underserved boys alike are lagging behind their female peers. Whether it is an abnormally high percentage of elementary-age boys labeled "behavior problems," or the 60/40 percent female-male imbalance as the status quo on many college campuses, the female academic advantage has been a game-changer for an entire generation of children, says Whitmire.
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Gay Marriage Leads D.C. Archbishop to End Foster Care Program
Catholic Charities has given its caseload of 43 children, 35 foster families, and 7 staff members to a Maryland-based family-care agency so as not to disrupt client care.
The other shoe has dropped here in Washington, D.C., in a long conflict between the local Catholic diocese and the District of Columbia.
After warning for months that the District's pending same-sex marriage law — slated to go into effect March 2 — put its 80-year-old foster care program in jeopardy, the Archdiocese of Washington formally ended its program February 1.
It is the third Catholic diocese in the country to do so. The archdioceses of San Francisco and Boston stopped their adoption programs in 2006 after their respective states legalized gay marriage (California has since repealed its law) and made it clear that local Catholic Charities affiliates would have to work with homosexual couples.
The District's law would obligate all outside contractors working with the city to recognize gay couples by giving spousal benefits to such couples and allowing them to adopt available children. The Archdiocese of Washington refused to do this. Its Catholic Charities affiliate has turned over its caseload of 43 children with 35 foster families — along with 7 staff members — to Bethesda, Maryland-based National Center for Children and Families so as not to disrupt client care.
The foster care and adoption programs were among the 63 social service programs that the District paid Catholic Charities about $22.5 million to run. Of that amount, $2 million went to the foster care program. Because of the large amounts of money involved, it is highly unlikely that Catholic parishioners could raise enough funds to make up the difference.
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A New Frontier in Pro-Life Stem-Cell Research
FDA-backed Georgia researchers hope stem cells from umbilical cord blood will effectively treat cerebral palsy.
A team of researchers at Georgia’s health science university, the Medical College of Georgia (MCG), announced last week that they are conducting a clinical trial using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood as a treatment for cerebral palsy. The trial will build on a successful series of past tests using adult stem cells in regenerative medicine.
“Evidence up to this point has been purely anecdotal,” said James Carroll, chief of pediatric neurology at the MCG and principal investigator on the study. “While a variety of cord blood stem-cell therapies have been used successfully for more than 20 years, this study is breaking new ground in advancing therapies for brain injury.”
MCG's is the first clinical trial using adult stem cells approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and comes on the heels of last month’s announcement of the first FDA-approved trial of embryonic stem-cell treatment. FDA approval generally means enough funding and prior research has accumulated to make a heavily regulated FDA review worthwhile.
While there’s not exactly a competition, scientifically speaking, between the two different approaches, the fact that the government now supports embryonic stem-cell research underscores the importance of ramping up research into other methods (like cord blood stem cells).
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Singing Praises in Port-au-Prince
Surprised by joy in the ruins of Haiti’s capital.
I had known this day would come. My husband, a pre-med student, had been planning a month-long trip to northern Uganda for a social medicine course, and January 12 was his departure date. I thought that would leave me spending the month at baby showers, coffee dates with friends, and with time to catch up on old movies that he never likes to watch.
What I didn’t know was that a 7.0-magnitude earthquake was about to crush Haiti and send me packing in the middle of the night to catch a January 13 flight to Port-au-Prince. I waved goodbye to my husband as I headed to the airport, while he packed his bags to catch his flight to Uganda that afternoon.
For three weeks, I worked side-by-side with Haitians and Americans who had come to help with relief efforts. As a disaster communications officer with World Vision, my task was to assist journalists who had flown in from around the world, helping them tell the stories of Haiti’s survival. A previous deployment to Thailand during the Myanmar cyclone and work with World Vision in Ghana and Haiti in 2009 had prepared me for long days, sleepless nights, and the challenge of working in close quarters with colleagues for long stretches with little rest. Precious sleep was usually on a cot in a sleeping bag; other colleagues were on the floor or in tents on the lawn.
But what we were living with — or without — paled in comparison to the needs of Haitians we worked with every day. Nearly all were grieving the loss of friends and loved ones and struggling to find food and water for their families. They were fearful of a future quake and of a future unknown in a country fraught with political corruption and abject poverty.
I remember one young man, Patrick, whom I met soon after arriving in Port-au-Prince. He was living in an abandoned football field–turned–makeshift camp near World Vision’s office. The sun beat down on families as they crowded underneath tarps and bedsheets stretched out over their heads. As our team approached to find out how we could help, Patrick spoke to me.
“I lost everything,” he said. “My wife, my children, my family. Please help me.”
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Botox: A Threat to Our National Security
How our cultural fear of aging and dying is giving some terrorists a financial boost.
One of my favorite Bible passages is from Psalm 34. Verses 4 and 5 read: "I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed" (ESV).
I have seen that kind of radiant beauty on those whose hearts are contented in God, who are eager to proclaim all of his blessings and mercies upon their lives. I firmly believe that is the most attractive beauty there is, because it edifies and builds up others. Yet I also know the strong pull of the cosmetic and cosmeceutical industries and the promises they make to stall or turn back the ravages of time. So I write this post with a bit of ambivalence, knowing the money I spend at various salons.
That said, I have never been Botoxed. My dermatologist did inform me a few years ago that it was time to start, because it would keep my fine lines from becoming deep wrinkles. I frowned (deepening those lines) and shook my head. There was no way I was going to stick a neurotoxin in my face, I announced. I was sure that in 20 years, we'd discover why that was a bad idea. She looked at me placidly and said, "I hope not, because I have a face full of it." Maybe she was looking at me in wide-eyed horror, but I couldn't tell.
Likely it won't take 20 years. We are now discovering a new problem associated with the Botox craze: an increased risk of terrorism. The Washington Post recently ran an article about how officials fear that the toxic ingredient in Botox could become a terrorist tool:
In early 2006, a mysterious cosmetics trader named Rakhman began showing up at salons in St. Petersburg, Russia, hawking a popular anti-aging drug at suspiciously low prices. He flashed a briefcase filled with vials and promised he could deliver more — "as many as you want," he told buyers — from a supplier somewhere in Chechnya.Rakhman's "Botox" was found to be a potent clone of the real thing, but investigators soon turned to a far bigger worry: the prospect of an illegal factory in Chechnya churning out raw botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in the beauty drug and one of world's deadliest poisons. A speck of toxin smaller than a grain of sand can kill a 150-pound adult.
No Chechen factory has been found, but a search for the maker of the highly lethal toxin in Rakhman's vials continues across a widening swath of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. U.S. officials and security experts say they know the lab exists, and probably dozens of other such labs, judging from the surging black market for the drug.
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A Walk to Beautiful: A Must-See Film
The Emmy-winning documentary spotlights the plight of women with fistula and the courageous work of Catherine and Reginald Hamlin.
When a woman endures prolonged labor while giving birth, her bladder or rectal tissue rips or tears, forming a fistula, a hole between her birth passage and internal organs. A simple surgery costing $300 can fix the problem, but without access to care — 90 percent of fistula sufferers live in the developing world — the woman is left incontinent, unable to have children, and stigmatized in her family and community. Christian physician L. Lewis Wall wrote about fistulas — faced by 2-3 million women worldwide — in this month’s issue of Christianity Today, connecting their plight to that of the unclean woman in Mark’s gospel (5:25–34).
Thankfully, two Christian doctors, Reginald and Catherine Hamlin, have been at the fore in the effort to make fistula repair surgeries available to more women, founding Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia in 1974. A Walk to Beautiful, a 2007 Emmy-winning documentary, highlights their work, capturing day-to-day life for Ethiopian women with obstetric fistulas. (The DVD is 85 minutes; about 50 minutes of it is available online.)
The documentary follows five women on their journeys to have their fistulas repaired and their dignity restored. Their stories are somewhat similar — how they got fistulas, their hurt and shame, their thoughts of suicide — but each of the women is unique. Ayehu, a 25-year-old mother, lives in a makeshift hut because her husband kicked her out and her mother will not allow her to stay in the home. Fikre, a friend, suffered from a fistula for ten years before going to Addis Ababa for surgery, and convinces Ayehu to do likewise. Ayehu marvels, “How can they bring you back to life?”
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In Iran, a Covert Mission to Bring Women to Jesus
An excerpt from Forgotten Girls: Stories of Hope and Courage.
When Michele heard Naseem speak at a luncheon about her work in Iran, she knew immediately that this was a woman we needed to meet. Naseem had the stories we longed to hear. Naseem was gracious to us, but from the beginning she had a difficult time with our interview. She confessed as much: “You must not speak against anyone’s religion. It is not that I don’t want to tell you the stories. But how can I be certain you will not put anyone at risk?”
Naseem has good reason to fear. A quick Internet survey on Iran finds extremism and conditions that raise concerns for women and girls — actually, for everyone who lives there. Police sweep through Tehran, looking for anyone who appears “too Western.” Women must wear dark layers of loose-fitting clothes, and their hair must be entirely covered. Those who question or resist are arrested on the spot.
A peaceful gathering of women on International Women’s Day was met with the brutal arrests of 30 women in a park. After 17 years in operation, Zanan, a popular women’s magazine, was closed down because it was “corrupting the culture.” And just a month before this writing, a 22-year-old woman was sentenced to five years in prison for participating in an event called “One Million Signatures,” which supports greater rights for women. A female student who complained of sexual harassment by a senior male lecturer was also charged, despite the fact that YouTube postings show the woman’s fellow students with an audio recording of the lecturer sexually propositioning her. “Publicizing certain crimes is worse than the crimes themselves,” the local prosecutor claimed.
This is hard to understand from a Western viewpoint. But Iran is a theocratic republic, 98 percent Muslim, with a strict legal system based on sharia law. Sharia brings together elements from the Qur’an and the Hadith, a collection of the deeds and words of Muhammad, plus judges’ rulings from Islam’s first centuries. It also establishes such things as the inferior status of women. What Westerners are most familiar with is its penal code: the prescribed punishments for sexual offenses that include stoning; for theft that include amputation; for apostasy against Islam, for which the punishment is death.
It would seem that the sexual abuse and exploitation of girls is a huge contradiction in a culture that stones and hangs people for any hint of sexual impurity. “Not really,” Naseem said. “Girls are considered second-class citizens. Exploitation and repression actually fit right together.”
But things are changing in Iran, Naseem told us. Many educated women are pushing for change — carefully, but pushing nevertheless. Then she told us of a far more amazing change: “Many are also turning to Christ.”
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'I Lived Next Door to a Brothel'
Guilt is a poor motivator for fighting slavery and sex trafficking. What my sister calls 'active hope' is much better.
Last week President Obama launched a nationwide human trafficking awareness campaign, proclaiming this month National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
Leading up to this month, my sister, Marissa, and I began e-mailing back and forth about the injustice of slavery and human trafficking. “I can’t help feel guilty — guilty of ignorance, lack of action, or the privilege and freedom into which we were born,” she wrote.
I understood her sentiments. The summer after my sophomore year of college, I was volunteering at a school for slum children in Bangalore, India.
Shortly after my arrival, I discovered that I was living next door to a brothel.
My housemate and I decided to invite some of the girls over for dinner, hoping to hear their stories, but our invitation was turned down. We soon learned that the girls were not allowed to leave the premises for more than five minutes. Any errands lasting longer could result in a severe beating, or worse.
It seemed that all I could do was report the brothel to uninterested authorities.
Like Marissa, I felt guilty and defeated in the face of injustice.
Reports suggest that globally, there are more people living as slaves today than at any other time in history.
Unlike willful prostitution, modern-day slavery means having no control over your body. Your life is at someone else’s command. You cannot control where you are taken or how many men will rape you per day. You cannot control whether or not you get free time, food or sleep, and whether you get to live or die. And there’s often no escape.
India, the world’s largest democracy, has the largest number of bonded slaves. At least 100 million people are involved in human trafficking in India, according to Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta (May 2009).
That’s roughly a third of the population of the United States.
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China's Own Marriage Crisis
Gender imbalance due to sex-specific abortions signals imminent crisis in the Chinese family.
Family planning has become a controversial phrase in China, due to the government’s One Child Policy, a vast social experiment launched in 1979 to cap population growth and speed up economic development. State media reported recently that more than 24 million men in China are expected to be without spouses by year 2020. This is the latest consequence of a policy that has led to utility-based, sex-specific abortions (when faced with only one choice, boys have greater economic potential for parents) and created a critical gender imbalance.
The report, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, raises critical questions about what the Chinese nuclear family will look like in 10 years, or whether it will even exist. Along with the impending marriage crisis and already endangered family unit, subsequent problems will likely include increased underage marriage and forced prostitution.
Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China, maintains that the widespread use of contraceptives (85 percent of reproduction-age Chinese women use them) is a sign of success. “I’m not saying what we have done is 100 percent right, but I’m sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited,” she told China Daily.
Her perspective seems short-term. Workers ages 50 to 64 make up over half of China’s work force today, a result of the 1950 population swell. “[O]ver the coming generation, China’s prospective manpower growth rate is zero,” reports the Far Eastern Economic Review. In comparison, think of America’s baby-boomer generation, which is slowly leaving the work force and becoming dependent on the next, smaller generation.
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Would I Have Hid Jews During the Holocaust?
The story of Miep Gies, the Christian Dutch woman who helped hide Anne Frank and preserve her diary, makes me wonder.
This Monday marked the passing of Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group that hid Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust. Gies, the Christian Dutch woman who died at age 100 after a fall, is credited with preserving Anne's diary and giving it to Anne's father, Otto (the only member of Anne's family to survive the death camps), after the Holocaust.
Reading about Gies's death reminded me of falling in love as a teenager with The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom's story of hiding Jews in Holland during World War II. Despite the horror within its pages, I read the book over and over, moved by ten Boom's incredible faith. "I would do that," I told myself as I read the book. "If I had lived then, I would have done exactly what her family did. I would not have stood silently by."
In college I cried my way through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and attended a lecture by a woman who had been active in the movement to shelter Jews in Poland. I had impassioned conversations with friends about what we would have done, had we lived then. "We would have helped," we said. But what if such helping endangered our parents, our loved ones? Well, then we didn't know. We weren't quite sure. We hoped we would have found it within ourselves to do the right thing.
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Police Arrest Woman Praying at Western Wall
Nofrat Frenkel's arrest exposes divisions within Jewish community about tradition and gender.
Last November, Israeli authorities arrested medical student and Women of the Wall (WOW) member Nofrat Frenkel for wearing a prayer shawl and holding a Torah at the Western Wall (Kotel), Judaism's most holy site. The first time a female worshiper has been arrested there, the event has prompted protests from many sides in an already tense debate in the Jewish community.
Founded in 1988, WOW believes devout Jewish women have the right to gather at the Kotel to pray, read the Torah, and wear religious clothing such as prayer shawls. Torah requires certain practices for men but does not prohibit women from those practices. Despite WOW's appeals to the Israeli government over the past two decades, its laws call for fining or jailing women who partake in these activities at the Kotel, which is segregated by sex.
WOW meets every month for Rosh Hodesh at the Kotel, as well as for other select holidays. Rosh Hodesh is a celebration of the new moon and is traditionally viewed as a women’s holiday. At WOW's December meeting, leader Anat Hoffman said the women wore scarf-like prayer shawls under their coats rather than traditional prayer shawls so that the garments wouldn’t upset other worshipers. The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that the women went wearing prayer shawls and carrying scrolls in protest of Frenkel’s arrest, but that rain caused them to cover both items.
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N.C. Court Upholds Sex Offenders' Right to Worship
When extending grace and protecting 'little ones' clash.
For evangelicals who uphold both the boundlessness of redemption and the care and protection of “little ones” (Matt. 19:14), having sex offenders in church makes it hard to apply both beliefs at the same time.
In mid-December a Superior Court in North Carolina upheld the case of two registered sex offenders who had been attending Moncure Baptist Church, which offers childcare for Sunday worshipers and other children's programs. James Nichols and Frank DeMaio were indicted in March under a year-old state law that orders offenders to stay 300 feet away from facilities primarily intended for use by or care of children. Nichols’s story was highlighted in “Modern-Day Lepers,” a reported piece in the December issue of Christianity Today.
Judge Allen Baddour determined that the state law was too vague to enforce, and violated the men’s First Amendment rights to worship. “There are less drastic means for achieving the same purpose,” Baddour ruled, noting that to meet constitutional requirements, the law should specify whether or not an offender has the intent to be in the presence of minors.
But, as State Rep. Julia Howard (who sponsored the state law) told the Charlotte News & Observer, discerning someone’s intent for attending church or any other facility can be tricky. “The word intent is the most precarious word in the world. Who knows what my intent is? Anytime you see ‘knowingly’ or ‘intent,’ there’s something mysterious there.”
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When Stem Cell Research Isn’t Embryonic
Christians have reason to celebrate miracles of adult stem cell research.
At the conclusion of another year, perhaps we should take a moment to take note of progress in adult stem cell research. Two compelling stories that caught my eye in just the past month took most of 2009 to make headlines as success stories.
This month in Australia, 20-year-old Ben Leahy, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (a disease of the nervous system) walked away from his wheelchair after a treatment earlier this year involving his own adult stem cells. Family Research Council describes the treatment and provides a list of other successful, similar treatments for patients with Multiple Sclerosis. According to Leahy’s doctor, Colin Andrews, “the risk of death [for the procedure that] was at around 8 percent several years ago” has improved to a risk of less than 1 percent. As doctors in Sydney continue to use the method, we can expect the research to improve.
Also, in Britain, a rock climber named Andrew Kent was in danger of losing his leg after multiple breaks and infection, until doctors used a mix of collagen and his own adult stem cells to “glue” the bones back together. This month, six months after the procedure, the support system was removed, and his doctor said, “after 18 months his bones will have healed completely.” Kent should be able to climb again.
Where the mainstream media reported these stories, the articles often omitted a reference to the “stem cell treatment” as adult rather than embryonic.
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'Love Thy Neighbor' Shows Up at Copenhagen
Many Christians who support climate-change protocols have the least of these in mind.
The Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP15) began December 7 and will continue through next week. World leaders are gathering to negotiate carbon emission protocols that will replace the 1997 Kyoto agreement, which expires in 2012. Robust proposals are coming from African countries, along with Tuvalu and other low-lying island nations, which have already felt the negative impact of climate change. Tuvalu is leading the charge for the Alliance of Small Island States, who want binding proposals to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C. Their argument is that, as non-industrialized countries they have not burned fossil fuels nor contributed to global climate change, yet are among the most vulnerable to the consequences of rising sea levels.
Christians are not united on the best response to climate change; neither are nations (see this BBC report on where countries stand on Copenhagen). Some are skeptical about the science (especially, perhaps, in light of British and American researchers' hacked e-mails on how to manipulate data to show human-caused climate change), as well as about the United Nations as a governing body capable of overseeing global policy on climate change.
But one organization, 350.org — founded by Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and Christian who has written for CT and Books & Culture — is standing in support of the most vulnerable countries, calling for protocols in line with current scientific consensus. They want to see a fair, ambitious, and binding deal that includes helping developing countries develop while also bringing CO2 emissions down to 350 parts per million, the level determined safe by the scientific community. 350.org has helped mobilize over 5,200 actions in 181 countries that gathered in cities, churches, schools, parks, and businesses and collectively raised support in an effort to get the world’s leaders to commit to robust climate change policies.
Christians who support efforts by groups like 350.org speak of Christ’s mandate to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to protect their well-being and capacity to flourish. Such love may require that we change lifestyle habits, pay more for energy, and support efforts to assist the development of green energy both here and in industrializing nations.
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Holiday Generosity: Now a Click Away
Why I'm thankful for Amazon's new 'Add to Wish List' button.
I have mixed feelings about wish lists. They rob Christmas of creativity, surprise, and personal contact, but they also make shopping much, much easier. And it's nice to know that if I pay attention to the lists, gift recipients won't roll their eyes and return the gifts before the tree is by the curb.
To cut down on my family's December stress, I make my own wish list each year, feeling vaguely guilty (do I need those pearl earrings?). "Get better gifts," orders Amazon.com's wishlistmeister. I don't like his tone.
This year, though, Amazon has vastly improved its wish list, and now I can ask for anything I want from any online supplier. It doesn't even have to be a merchant: it can be a food bank, a cultural or educational organization, a humane society, a church — any organization that has a website and accepts money. All I have to do is put an "Add to Wish List" button on my Favorites or Bookmarks toolbar.
And 2009 is a good year, I think, to bypass the pearl earrings and go straight for the better gifts: gifts that will help people whose income went down more than ours did, or who lost their jobs or their homes, or who have unmanageable medical expenses, or who aren't sure they will be able to afford Christmas dinner. According to a November 27 Associated Press story,
food banks across the country report about a 30 percent increase in demand on average, but some have seen as much as a 150 percent jump in demand from 2008 through the middle of this year. . . . The U.S. Department of Agriculture said earlier this month that 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of U.S. households, struggle to put food on the table, the most since the agency began tracking food security levels in 1995.
Contributions can't keep pace. David R. Francis writes in the November 30 Christian Science Monitor:
Donations to the nation’s largest nonprofits, including prominent universities, hospitals, and foundations, are expected to fall 9 percent this year, according to a survey by The Chronicle of Philanthropy last month. That’s the steepest drop the publication has reported in 17 years of surveying the 400 largest charities in the United States.
What to do?
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Iranian Christian Women Freed from Evin Prison
Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad and Maryam Rustampoor were imprisoned for 259 days after converting to Christianity.
Coming on the heels of the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (Nov. 8), Christian religious-freedom groups celebrated a victory yesterday in Iran. Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad, 30, and Maryam Rustampoor, 27 — two Iranian converts to Christianity — were freed after being imprisoned for 259 days.
Authorities raided the women’s apartment, which contained "Christian literature," on March 5. The women were charged with anti-state activity, spreading Christianity, and apostasy (deserting one’s faith), and were placed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
In Iran, apostasy alone is punishable by execution or life in prison. The country has been placed on several watch lists of places that repress religious freedom. Recently, Iran has come under fire for jailing believers following raids on churches and homes belonging to Christians.
While in custody, reports came that the two women endured “intense interrogations which have reportedly included sleep deprivation and other psychological pressure.” In the past, Evin in particular has been accused of denying its inmates basic rights, and both women suffered from poor health that went untreated. Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari just released a memoir about her hellish eight-month stay in Evin following a routine visit in 2006 with her elderly mother.
Additionally, the women were heavily pressured to reclaim Islam. Back in August, a judge urged them to renounce Christianity. When Esmaeilabad and Rustampoor would not do so, they were sent back to jail “to think about it.” According to BosNewsLife, at one point in the hearing, one of the women said God had spoken to them through the Holy Spirit:
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Carrie Prejean's Book Urges Women to Stand Up for Beliefs
Still Standing doesn't claim Prejean made the right decisions, only that she has the right to make them.
In her book, Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks, former Miss California Carrie Prejean describes herself as “a sacrificial Christian thrown to the vicious and cruel media lions to be torn apart.” Prejean, a competitor and semi-finalist in the Miss USA 2009 pageant, became the center of media controversy this spring when she responded to a pageant question that she believes “marriage should be between a man and a woman,” not between same-sex couples.
Media treatment of the ensuing controversy — which raged on between Prejean, pageant officials, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, and pageant owner Donald Trump — revealed more incriminating details, such as Prejean's half-naked photographs and pageant-funded breast implant surgery. Prejean’s avowed Christianity also prompted questions about the effectiveness of pageant preachers and Christian women's involvement in the questionable beauty pageant scene.
In the book, Prejean skirts some of the major issues that circulated in media gossip — including her relationship with Michael Phelps, the photographs, her breast implants, and heated comments in her parents’ divorce records — by acknowledging but quickly dismissing them.
Regarding the breast implant surgery, she writes, “It was a choice I had to make, and I made it; and as with all my choices, I’m prepared to stick by it.” It is an interesting answer, considering the book was inspired by another choice she had to make on stage. The book is more about Prejean’s right to make her own choices than an argument that she made the right ones.
The closest she comes to expressing regret is her admission that she did not always listen to the right people. She admits to putting herself “in a position to be exploited” when she signed on to the Miss California pageant, which is also the closest she comes to repudiating her involvement in the pageant scene. “For me, pageants had always been about competition and using that sash and tiara for good,” she wrote. “Now I saw the whole pageant as a sham, glittering and fake. Many of the people I had worked with and the girls I competed with were wonderful. But we were trapped in a system run by petty egos, shallow values, and a sort of venomous incompetence.”
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A Quest to Question Mainstream Media
Connecting the dots between what we see on screen and who we become.
Many people who know me as an author and women's ministry speaker are often curious about why I started a film company. They seem to assume there is a split focus there. Perhaps there is, but because I see media in a more holistic way, one of the reasons I started Citygate Films was to influence the diet, so to speak, of what is being consumed in mainstream media. I also have a heavy concern that the "screen generation" is being fed more harmful images and narratives than uplifting ones.
For example, this is how my day has gone so far. I checked the news, and saw stories about a 15-year-old girl who was brutally gang-raped by anywhere between 7 to 10 men outside of a high school while at least a dozen others stood by and watched it without interfering, and a sadist who allegedly raped, murdered, and stowed the bodies of at least 10 women in his home. Those are just the stories in CNN's headlines — the tip of the iceberg nationally. There are numerous local stories about child sex abuse and murder that don't even make the national news.
Next, I checked my Twitter feed, which carried news of many nonprofit organizations (Christian and mainstream) that are working to improve the conditions of women and girls around the world. High on their list of concerns is sex trafficking and enslaved prostitutes.
I then started work by listening to a media panel about "transmedia" efforts — telling a single story across a variety of media platforms. One of the panelists spoke without shame of working with a clothing company that sponsored an interactive game about a stripper. The gamer controls the stripper's actions, which this media expert cheerfully said allowed the player to either make the stripper engage "in the most depraved actions" or "save her." It's an odd sponsorship, given the fact that the sponsor's clothes aren't seen very often. (The clothing company wasn't mentioned in this panel, but I wish it had been so that I would not patronize their stores or product.)
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Planned Parenthood Puts Restraining Order on Former Director
The director had resigned after watching an ultrasound for an abortion.
Planned Parenthood has found itself in a legal battle with a former director who said she had a change of heart after watching an ultrasound for an abortion and quit the organization .
KBTX of Bryan/College Station, Texas, reports that Abby Johnson worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years, and two years as director, but joined forces with the Coalition For Life earlier this month, praying with volunteers outside the clinic.
Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian churchgoer recently became convicted about. "I feel so pure in heart [since leaving]. I don't have this guilt, I don't have this burden on me anymore that's how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion."
Planned Parenthood filed a temporary restraining order October 30 to prevent Johnson from disclosing information about the organization.
Johnson told Fox News that she became disillusioned after she felt pressure to increase profits by performing more abortions, which cost patients between $505 and $695.
"Every meeting that we had was, 'We don't have enough money, we don't have enough money — we've got to keep these abortions coming,' " Johnson said. "It's a very lucrative business and that's why they want to increase numbers."
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Wheaton Students Advocate for Woman President
An open letter encourages selection committee to commit to 'ethnic, economic, and gender diversity.'
Out of the 111 members schools of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), six are led by female presidents. Some current and former Wheaton College students are hoping their alma mater becomes the seventh, once president Duane Litfin retires in mid-2010.
An “Open Letter to the Presidential Selection Committee” — penned by ’05 male graduate Ariah Fine and posted online Friday, October 23 — “strongly encourage[s] the committee to search diligently for a female or minority candidate to be in the final pool of candidates.” Circulated primarily on Facebook, the letter calls on the committee to uphold its stated commitment to hire someone who will “champion ethnic, economic, and gender diversity.”
As of November 2, the letter has garnered 351 signatures, and was sent to the committee right before the application deadline of November 1. Fine said he received confirmation that the committee had received this letter and a similar one he sent this spring, but hasn't heard from any of the committee members.
The letter claims that the number of white male presidents leading CCCU schools is much higher than those leading secular U.S. colleges, citing the statistic that only 2 percent of CCCU schools are led by females, compared with 21.1 percent of secular schools. Fine said he found these statistics from a 2005 Christian Higher Ed article summary available online, and makes this screenshot available.
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Reforming a Girls' Reformatory
A Kansas facility's shuttering reveals the successes and pitfalls of 19th-century moral reform.
In August, Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility in northern Kansas closed its doors. Heather Hollingsworth’s coverage for the Associated Press highlights the triumphs and downfalls of one of the country’s longest-running girls’ reformatories.
Beloit was started in 1888 by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which ran it for a year or two before handing it over to the state. A separate reformatory for juveniles was still a relatively new concept; up until the mid-19th century, children and adult were jailed in the same facility.
Beloit's WCTU had good intentions to shape “incorrigible” youth into morally upright women. Like other reformatories, girls at Beloit worked in the gardens or at nearby farms and took care of the institute’s animals.
“But with the high-minded ideals of the reformers, there was a dark side as well,” explained Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council for Juvenile Correctional Administrators in Braintree, Massachusetts. “These kids were an eyesore for the upper classes of society. The solution wasn’t to change the conditions they were growing up in, the poverty and lack of parental supervision. The view was to get them out of sight. Then people forgot they were there, and abuses crept into the system.”
One of Beloit’s worst times took place between 1935 and 1936 under superintendent Lula Coyner. With a growing belief in eugenics, Coyner forced 62 girls, nearly half of Beloit’s inhabitants, to be sterilized. The girls had to go to the police to stop Coyner, who was planning for more residents to have their fallopian tubes removed. Under other superintendents, girls had been physically and emotionally abused in other ways.
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Penny Pinching as a Christian Virtue?
The spiritual dimensions of frugal living.
Recently, my child who was home-schooled for six years attended a conference called Gathering Around the Un-hewn Stone. I make note of his educational history because I feel responsible for inspiring alternative ideas that catalyzed more alternatives than I imagined when he was 8.
The event opened with a lecture, "The Ecological Endgame of Industrial Civilization as a Crisis of/for Faith," which was purported to be about the moral bankruptcy of progress as an article of faith in modernity and, by default, of Christianity for the past 300 years. Resistance involves learning how to brain tan a deer, forage for food, and live out “attachment parenting” — a phenomenon about which my son has no need of instruction, given that he clung to me like a monkey when he was a boy.
In her book, In CHEAP We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue, journalist Lauren Weber espouses similar values, which, like rank materialism, are as old and American as Manifest Destiny. Last week Atlantic economics blogger Megan McArdle reviewed Weber’s book for The New York Times, and compared it unfavorably with the work of financial adviser Dave Ramsey, whom she describes as a “popular evangelical guru.”
Weber grew up without much heat in her home and surprised herself by following in her father’s frugal footsteps. McArdle takes issue with Weber’s idealization of fiscal asceticism, but not with Ramsey’s "save now, worry less later" approach. She says Weber’s idea of thrift as a moral virtue is problematic because it unduly worships parsimony. And McArdle rightly notes that if dumpster-diving “freegans” weren’t living off the largesse of their guilty neighbors, they’d have to get jobs like everybody else. The same could be said of Gathering Around the Un-hewn Stone attendees reveling in a buffet of supermarket overstock, but not of trash eaters around the world who have no other choice.
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Signs of Faith in Sarah Palin's Book?
Palin is writing her book with an evangelical author.
Sarah Palin may not be writing a second autobiography for Christian audiences as previously reported, but perhaps her evangelical co-author will persuade her to include more details about her faith.
Shortly after she was nominated as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, media outlets seemed to dig for details about her Pentecostal background. But the focus on Palin's faith appeared to fade after the election as she became a grandmother, battled with her daughter's ex-fiancee, and resigned from her Alaska office.
Palin's 400-page memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, is due out from HarperCollins and Zondervan November 17. (Coincidentally, it's the same day Zondervan releases Rick Warren's The Hope You Need. Warren became the target of criticism after he was chosen to lead the benediction at President Obama's inauguration.)
Going Rogue's product description suggests that Palin will write about "the importance of faith and family," but is still fairly vague. She chose to work on her book with Lynn Vincent, co-author of Same Kind of Different As Me (which is becoming a movie starring Samuel L. Jackson), and a former writer for World magazine.
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Stranded in Manila, A Mother Prays
Twin typhoons Ketsana and Parma pummeled the Philippines and surrounding regions last week, taking more than 250 lives in Metro Manila and bringing the worst floods in 40 years to the capital. When Ketsana struck, Normi Son — an evangelical who works for a Montessori school downtown — found herself separated from her two children, ages 8 and 14. Below is her first-hand account of the floods that threatened to split her family in two.
At about 11 a.m. in my office at Cainta City, Metro Manila, I received a text message from my nephew: “Aunt, you won’t believe [this], but the river behind our house overflowed and the streets are now submerged into 2-meter-deep floodwater. Our neighbor’s fence has collapsed and their house is flooded. A landslide had occurred blocking the only road that would lead us to safety. Do not attempt to come. The roads are impassable.”
I phoned home to find out how my children were. They told me the river was still rising and that the walls behind our house could crumble anytime. My home was built on a piece of land 6 meters from Antipolo River. I felt numb at the thought of my children being stranded at home by themselves. I went to a corner and poured out my heart to God. “Please stop the rain now.” I kept uttering these words throughout the day, but the rain grew heavier. I wondered if God was listening.
Meanwhile, a member of my staff said that her husband had to swim to escape their submerged house. She said that flooding had started around our office. I looked out the window and saw dirty water rising up. Within a few minutes, it turned into a brown river raging in every direction; it engulfed plants, vehicles, bungalow houses, and small trees.
More complications hit us as the day wore on. The electricity was cut off by noon. Everyone on staff failed trying to go home by foot. I spent the entire afternoon with three of them, helping about 50 children and adults who had arrived at our office building. By nightfall, I completely lost contact with my children.
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'Homeless Chic' and the Homeless
Does the 'poorgeoisie' fashion trend trivialize a serious reality?
One million children in the U.S. currently face homelessness, and one of the fastest growing segments among the homeless is families with children. Despite these alarming statistics, it’s the fashion industry’s fixation with "homeless chic" that has sparked the most public debate as of late.
W. magazine's September issue featured a spread called “Paper Bag Princess.” It depicted models on dingy streets wearing high-end shopping bags fashioned as clothes. Italian Vogue's September cover showed two models in tattered layers with dirty faces, hobo sticks in tow. Indeed, Details magazine heralds the arrival of the “poorgeoisie” in “How Looking Poor Is the New Status Symbol.” Steve Kandell writes:
Just because the cultural moment is dominated by bloodlust for the heads of AIG executives doesn’t mean public sentiment has turned against the accumulation of material possessions — it’s just that the material in question is likely to be double-brushed flannel. And that’s the advantage guys who look like Devendra Banhart have over guys who look like Patrick Bateman: The poorgeois are in cultural camouflage, blending in perfectly with a landscape full of genuine privation. The fact that their accoutrements may cost more than many suits is their secret pride.
This isn’t the first time homeless chic entered the fashion lexicon. In spring 2000, designer John Galliano created a stir when his newspaper-clad models took to the runway carrying empty bottles of liquor, tin cups dangling from their backs.
But some industry insiders have found more sensitive ways to approach the new reality of so many. Alongside shots of socialites, fashion editors, and the affluent in cities around the globe, street style photographer Scott Schuman featured a striking photo of a homeless man on his popular blog, The Sartorialist. While his shots don’t usually include commentary, he provided three paragraphs defending what he knew would be a controversial photo. He says:
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U.K. Christian Says Yes to Abstinence, No to Gardasil
Should women like Simone Davis be required to take STD-preventing shots if they are not having sex?
Simone Davis, a 17-year-old British immigrant and devout Christian, will be denied U.S. citizenship unless she agrees to a new immigration requirement that she be vaccinated with Gardasil, a compound that targets human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer and genital warts.
Davis, who was adopted by her paternal grandmother in Port St. Joe, Florida, applied to Citizenship and Immigration Services for an exemption on moral and religious grounds, saying she is not sexually active and does not plan to be in the near future. Her exemption application was denied. Davis’s citizenship quest has been funded thus far by church groups, but her grandmother, Jean Davis, says she cannot afford an appeal. Other opponents say the requirement places an unfair financial burden on women because a three-shot series of Gardasil costs between $300-$1,400.
Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Chris Rhatigan told ABC News, "The decision to include HPV as a required vaccine was made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] . . . The objection to a waiver would have to be to all vaccines, not just Gardasil." But the requirement differs from other vaccines in that it is the only one that targets a virus spread through sexual contact. The other 13 target highly contagious diseases.
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The President's Speech and Parental Rights
To what extent should the government shape children’s beliefs?
Children in many U.S. schools yesterday heard President Obama exhort the values of hard work and personal responsibility in his back-to-school address. Reformed pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church praised the speech as “a wonderful gift of common grace from God to the students of our land.” Before the speech, many parents had protested the way it was framed — the Department of Education had given schools a “menu of classroom activities” that suggested students write about “how they could help the President” — rather than its content. Many parents demanded that their school districts provide alternatives to watching the speech or that they not show it at all. School districts were forced to respond with less than two weeks’ notice to the Education Department’s announcement.
Meanwhile, in Quebec, a court struggle recently broke out over a new, mandatory “Ethics and Religious Culture” course that will replace three separate religion courses for all students. Some Christian parents protested it as a violation of their right to choose their children’s religious education, but Quebec’s Superior Court ruled August 31 that the class does not violate the right to “freedom of conscience and religion” in the Canadian Charter of Rights. Here's how one law professor at the Université de Sherbrooke defended the ruling:
What parents were demanding was the right to ignorance, the right to protect their children from being exposed to the existence of other religions. . . . This right to ignorance is certainly not protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Freedom of religion does not protect the right not to know what is going on in our universe.
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In Their Own Words: Laura Ling and Euna Lee
One of the women, Euna Lee, was driven by her faith in Christ to cover the plight of North Koreans.
Much has been written about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists captured this March, imprisoned for five months in North Korea, and released on August 6. But on Wednesday, for the first time, their story was told in their own words.
Lee and Ling’s story has unfolded over the past few months, and I have watched with interest, both because they are journalists and because they are women. I have tried to see myself in their situation in order to understand what they went through. But I have to admit, it is difficult to imagine myself hiking at sunrise across the border from China into North Korea, living in a third-world prison — or flying on a jet with Bill Clinton. It is even hard to imagine how they felt, behind the scenes, when they taped the “thank you” video posted the week after their return, much less during the ordeal in prison.
Instead, as I followed the story, I kept coming back to unanswered questions: Who are these women? What motivates them? And how did they survive?
Their statement didn’t do much to answer these questions, but this sentence at least provides a clue: “One of us, Euna, is a devout Christian whose faith infused her interest in the story.” Slowly, a new mental picture forms that is based on our shared faith.
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What the TNIV Means for Evangelical Women
To see it go won't mean that much, actually.
As a blog centered on women, it seems only right for Her.meneutics to respond to Zondervan and Biblica’s major announcement that their gender-inclusive language Bible, NIVi (released only in Britain) was a mistake, and that they would no longer publish the controversial Today's New International Version (TNIV).
“Quite frankly, some of the criticism [of the NIVi] was justified, and we need to be brutally honest about the mistakes that were made,” said Keith Danby, CEO of Biblica, which owns the copyright to the NIV. “We fell short of the trust that was placed in us. We failed to make the case for revisions and we made some important errors in the way we brought the translation to publication. . . .”
Zondervan president Moe (Maureen) Girkins lamented that the TNIV “divided the evangelical Christian community,” and said the Michigan-based publishing house would begin phasing out TNIV-related products. “We’re trying to do this right and be as transparent as possible.”
Meanwhile, the Committee on Bible Translation has begun working on NIV 2011, which chairman Doug Moo said will reflect scholarly developments from the last quarter-century. He said the committee is undecided on how much gender-inclusive language the new NIV will include, and that it welcomes input at NIVBible2011.com.
As someone admittedly new to the debate surrounding TNIV — which some evangelical leaders believe abandons Scripture’s integrity in favor of political correctness — I had trouble finding much controversy in Tuesday’s announcement. The publishers focused not on the inherent errors of gender-inclusive translations but on the way they had introduced such a translation to the public. And they seem aimed more at producing a Bible that’s both accurate and accessible than condemning Bible readers who appreciate the TNIV’s use of humankind, men and women, et al. where the text is not gender-specific.
No matter, said Eugene Cho, a Seattle pastor writing for Sojourners' blog. Cho linked the disappearance of the TNIV to the “schizophrenic” landscape of evangelicalism, saying the TNIV was “immensely refreshing and encouraging” given “the increasing rise of the macho, masculine, and ultimate fighting Jesus presentation.” (My gratitude, though, for Cho’s link to Christianity Today’s April 2008 article “A Jesus for Real Men.”)
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Half the Sky: A Must-Read Book
The fight for women's dignity worldwide, the 'cause of our time,' needs Christians now more than ever.
This past weekend, The New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted its entire issue to "Why Women's Rights Are the Cause of Our Time." Some very sober and powerful reading there — and not what you might think upon encountering a magazine with a title like that. In fact, these are real, global, and serious issues that should have the attention and ministry of Christians everywhere. More on that in a moment.
The lead feature was an excerpt from the forthcoming book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn,a former Times correspondent who now works in finance and philanthropy. Here's a summary of the book, titled Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide — one that includes an honest fact about abortion that I was stunned to read in a mainstream publication. This is a good indicator of the journalistic veracity of this book's research:
Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China.After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at pro-democracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.
Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.
A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.
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Teaching an Old Dogfighter New Tricks
Michael Vick appears truly repentant. Can we forgive him?
![2129579471_c237146dba.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2009/08/2129579471_c237146dba.jpg "Courtesy of Nineball2727, Flickr.com, <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonbacon/2129579471/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonbacon/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonbacon/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a></div>")
I was home in Philadelphia last Thursday when the news broke that my beloved Eagles had signed Michael Vick to a two-year contract. This came just four months after his release from prison on charges related to dogfighting. Local reactions were immediate and impassioned; people picketed the Eagles’ offices, called for boycotts on team sponsors, and returned their season tickets, which some estimate to have between a 400- and 4,000-year wait. “Hide Your Beagle, Vick’s an Eagle” was a popular rallying cry on the nightly news.
But others lined up at sporting goods stores to see if they could get one of the first Vick jerseys printed on Eagles green, nearly salivating as they described the new life Vick might breathe into the offensive strategy. While Philly fans are known for their passionate, vocal responses — both positive and negative — to their teams, it seems like since Thursday, even people outside Philadelphia and even the sports world have had something to say about it.
The big question is whether Michael Vick should ever be allowed to play football again, especially in the nation’s premier league. He’s had his chance, and he messed up. Big time.
But this is a story about second chances. Michael Vick wants one. The Eagles are giving him one. Will we extend him the same courtesy? How do we decide who deserves a second chance, and what form that might take?
This all hits close to home for Eagles head coach Andy Reid, who took time off two years ago when his two sons were arrested for drug charges. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on Reid’s introduction of the newest Eagle at a press conference, which was uncharacteristically personal in tone:
“I'm a believer that as long as people go through the right process, they deserve a second chance. Michael has done that. . . . He has some great people in his corner, and he has proven that he's on the right track." Reid also admitted that his personal life influenced his strong feelings about Vick, referring to the arrests of his two sons . . . "I've seen people that are close to me who have had second chances that have taken advantage of those. . . . It's very important that people give them an opportunity to change, so we're doing that with Michael. The other side of that is we're getting one of the best football players in the league.”
Even Donovan McNabb, whose security as the Eagles’ starting quarterback is threatened by a new superstar QB who has held the position with another team, has vocally supported Vick’s return to the Eagles. He writes on his blog that he brought the idea to Reid first, advocating for his friend and future rival, because he believes the situation will give Vick the best support to move on and practice the lifestyle changes he says he wants. “I want to see him continue to grow as a person, spend time with his family and re-establish himself as a leader on and off the field,” McNabb writes. “Due to the nature of what happened and the attention it has received, it may not always be easy for him but he seems up for the challenge. Fortunately, with a tremendous individual like Tony Dungy in his corner, he will have the support he needs.”
Dungy, the former Indianapolis Colts coach and a committed Christian, sat by Vick’s side at his first Eagles press conference. Since retiring in January, Dungy has worked with imprisoned young men as part of his Christian outreach program. Of Dungy’s visits to Vick’s cell, the Los Angeles Times reports:
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Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 1921-2009
Remembering the devout Catholic's tireless work for people whose lives were often seen as worthless.
I saw Eunice Kennedy Shriver once, in December of 1963. I was standing at the back of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., waiting for a Mass in honor of her brother, John F. Kennedy, to begin. Most of the Kennedy family was seated in front when Mrs. Shriver arrived. She rushed past, so close I could have reached out and patted her full-length fur coat.
She was tall, with disheveled brown hair and hastily applied red lipstick. Her face was lined with grief. I saw other Kennedys that day, but Mrs. Shriver is the only one I remember — a 42-year-old, very pregnant force of nature, a woman in pain who knew exactly where she was going. That brief image keeps flashing across my mental screen as I read tributes to one of America’s truly great women, who died Tuesday at the age of 88.
A woman in an era when wealthy women did not work and almost no women went into politics, she may have achieved even more than her more famous brothers. Carla Baranauckas for The New York Times:
“When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made — including J.F.K.’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential,” U.S. News & World Report said in its cover story of Nov. 15, 1993.
A child of privilege with personal connections to pomp and power, she worked tirelessly on behalf of the marginalized. J. Y. Smith for The Washington Post:
Her first job was with the State Department in Washington, where she was part of a program to help former prisoners of war become acclimated to civilian life. . . .In 1947 and 1948, she was executive secretary of the Justice Department's National Conference on the Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency. Having gained control of a $1 million trust fund at 21, she accepted a salary of $1 a year.
In 1950, she became a social worker at the federal penitentiary for women in Alderson, W.Va. In 1951, she moved to Chicago and worked at the House of the Good Shepherd, a youth shelter, and with the city's juvenile court system.
A prominent Democrat who disagreed with her party’s increasingly pro-choice stance, she stood up for the unborn and protested the abortion-rights agenda. The Susan B. Anthony List:
Eunice Kennedy Shriver was an early supporter of the Susan B. Anthony List and its mission to advance, mobilize and represent pro-life women in the political process. She and her husband, Sargent Shriver, also lent their time and talents to the efforts and activities of Democrats for Life of America and Feminists for Life.
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Deciphering the Pennsylvania Gym Shooting
What George Sodini's journal reveals about women and violence.
It seems from his blog that George Sodini had a longstanding anger toward women. The isolated 48-year-old took a gun to a Pittsburgh-area gym last week and opened fire during a fitness class. Three women were killed and nine were injured before Sodini killed himself.
ABC News posted Sodini’s online journal, in which he writes about his hatred for his mother and brother, his frustration of “never having spent a weekend with a woman,” and executing a “plan” as early as November 2008.
“Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend,” he said. “This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded.”
Sodini also made a list of people and places that angered him. First on the list was the church he attended sporadically for 13 years, Tetelestai Church in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.
“Religion is a waste,” Sodini wrote on his blog of Alan “Rick” Knapp, pastor of Tetelestai, a nondenominational church focused on group Bible studies. “But this guy [Knapp] teaches (and convinced me) you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven.”
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Beauty Pageant for Landmine Victims Scrapped
Cambodia's government says the contest makes fun of the disabled. The founder says he's only trying to humanize them.
The Cambodian government last week banned the Miss Landmine beauty pageant, slated for Friday in the capital city of Phnom Penh.
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Government officials initially supported the contest but changed their view, saying the contest would damage “the dignity and honor of people with disabilities." Besides the view that beauty pageants inherently objectify their participants, many people believe Miss Landmine mocks the disabled. (The contest logo is a one-legged female outline sporting a crown with a danger sign in the background.) In Miss Landmine Angola 2008, women took turns walking and posing on the catwalk, many of them supported by crutches.
Norwegian film director Morten Traavik launched Miss Landmine after a 2003 visit to the country of Angola in southern Africa. Civil war had recently concluded, and many landmines remained in the ground, causing injuries. When some children asked him to judge their own beauty pageant held in an alley, Traavik combined the idea of a pageant with raising awareness and support for landmine victims — or survivors, as the Miss Landmine manifesto prefers to call them.
UNICEF ranks Cambodia as the third most landmined country in the world. An estimated 4 to 6 million landmines remain in the ground 30 years after the military conflict between Cambodia’s former Communist regime, Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam. According to the Halo Trust, Cambodia is home to an estimated 25,000 amputees.
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Pants-Wearing Woman Challenges Sudan's Decency Law
Lubna Hussein says she'll take 40,000 whippings if it will change her government's human rights policies.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy has thrown in support for a Sudanese woman who faces 40 lashes for wearing pants in public, a display the Sudanese government says violates its Shari'ah-based laws on public decency.
"We will continue to work with [Lubna Hussein] to help in her struggle, which is the struggle of all women," Sarkozy wrote in a letter Thursday. Hussein, a journalist in her 30s working for the United Nations, was among 13 women, some of them Christians, arrested at a Khartoum restaurant July 3 for wearing pants.
Ten of the women were flogged and fined the next day, but Hussein and two others went to trial to challenge the law, in place since 1989, when President Omar al-Bashir instated a strict interpretation of Shari'ah. U.S. and international agencies have consistently ranked Sudan as one of the worst human-rights violators, particularly for its complicity in the ethnic cleansing in Darfur since 2003, and for its failure to uphold religious freedom.
After a protest on Tuesday outside a Khartoum courthouse where police fired tear gas at a crowd of about 100, Hussein told Associated Press she is "not afraid of flogging. ... It's about changing the law," which she believes violates both Sudanese and Islamic law.
"If the [rulers] claim this is based on Islamic Shari'ah [law], can anyone show me a verse in the Qur'an or in the prophet's teachings that speak of flogging women because of their dress code?"
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Florida's Other Marriage Amendment
Christian groups propose $100 fee for Florida couples who do not get premarital counseling.
The key to a lower divorce rate and healthier marriages starts before the vows are taken, according to advocates for mandatory premarital counseling.