I am so sick and tired of SBC apologists pointing out that the subchurches are independent, usually when SBC does some colossally assholish thing.  If they all mark in lockstep and never speak out about the worst in SBC or its member churches then they lose that right to plausible deniability, AFAIC.

“Hairston said. “I was pretty shocked.” “

Srsly? Where has she been?  Yet another reason I’m thankful for my liberal Lutheran upbringing.  Most of us aren’t afraid of vaginas.

With Sarah Palin and her supporters threatening librarians and eagerly awaiting End Times, there’s no surprise here. A hilarious satire of this is “The Department of Homeland Decency: Decency Rules and Regulations Manual.” It’s motto is: We are marching proudly backwards to the future. Its website www.homelanddecency.com also has a new What Would Sarah Say? contest. Winners get refrigerator magnets from the Department of Homeland Decency.

Is this a matter of theology?

Well I think the churches that don’t ordain women justify it via some parts of Paul’s epistles that say that women should keep silent in church.  Which was pretty much the last straw for me, as a Christian trying to reconcile liberalism and feminism with belief.  I realized that misogyny is written into the theology, so unless you just want to start whittling away at your scripture, there’s really no way to reconcile the two. Though that particular bit of Paul is somewhat easy to knock down—it’s a likely forgery.  Still ended up in scripture though, so who wrote it is sort of beside the point.  “King David” likely didn’t write the psalms, either, but that doesn’t mean they don’t count. 

Personally, I think the reason this is being yanked or hidden is because they don’t want too many women to see it and ask questions about why women can’t preach in their denomination.  One way that conservative Christianity works is that it flourishes in isolated and non-cosmopolitan areas, where people just aren’t really exposed to a lot of different ideas, or are taught to believe that other groups are dangerous or wrong.  Which is always a lot easier when there aren’t any representatives of said groups around to evaluate for yourself.

Well I think the churches that don’t ordain women justify it via some parts of Paul’s epistles that say that women should keep silent in church.

I’ve never understood why anybody takes Paul and his pseudepigraphal imitators seriously in this day and age, particularly when you can quote the gospels against him - there are repeated stories in the gospels about anonymous women who “get it” and are singled out as positive examples of faith while the (male) apostles are behaving like clueless eejits.  And it’s not a modern observation, either; I remember reading some poems by a lady in the 1600s making this argument.  You’d think that Jesus’ example would take precedence over the pronouncement of some random dude whose sole claim to authority is a vision.

Ami, religious fights are never easy; if slavery hadn’t been made illegal, there would still be churches using a tiny selection of verses to point out that it was A-OK with the Almighty. And all sects rely on interpretation, even those that claim to be fundamentalists; there can never be a definitive victory in that battle because it’s all subjective.

The harder that a given church fights against women’s equality, the more it appears that the only reason that church exists is to keep them down in the first place. Which is why I don’t worship much anymore, despite my own nominal beliefs; once I became a feminist, your average church became a poisonous place to be.

I clearly remember two things related to this in my own experience; my mom being passed over as a leader of the new building committee, despite having 20 years of experience in real estate, because a woman leading men was immoral (no similarly qualified men were available, either.)

And two, once having a woman (missionary? local charity leader? can’t remember) come and speak on a Sunday about her work and all the grumbling about a “woman in the pulpit, attempting to preach.” 

Of course, the irony is that churches are dying, closing their doors, everywhere, in the US. Membership keeps dropping; once kids reach their teens, they leave. And older couples might even drift away.  Doesn’t surprise me; women have always done most of the real work in your average church; all the socializing, fundraising, scutwork that they can’t afford to pay for, women have done. Women were the ones who brought their families, too—many dads always stayed home Sundays. All the good works the church takes credit for—helping the poor, clothing drives, food drives, community outreach—that was pretty much mostly women, always. But now they have other things to do like jobs, and don’t have to worry about what the neighbors think if they don’t go so much, and volunteering every free hour to teach Vacation Bible School or clean the church kitchen just isn’t on their to-do list. Especially since they will never get the real credit for making the church thrive.

This is pretty much why churches and organized religion (even the ones that “allow” women) are dead-end games.  They’re just there to get money; they could give a rat’s ass about your soul, no matter what they tell you.

Women who continue to attend churches (instead of worshipping their deity on their own) are pretty much self-hating.  You can believe in your deity all you want. No religion can take that way from you. So, why PAY to be treated like a subhuman animal by these mouthy, preachy assholes who run the churches?

Hmmmm???

“Personally, I think the reason this is being yanked or hidden is because they don’t want too many women to see it and ask questions about why women can’t preach in their denomination.”

I agree with Opoponax.  Keeping information out of people’s hands is another way of controlling their beliefs.  The Southern Baptist churches view women’s role in both church and society as subservient to the male, having their women find out that there are women preachers who are as knowledgeable, or more so, that the men pastoring their church is a danger to their dominance.

The question I have is why women in conservative congregations put up with it?

While I’m pissed about this, I’m not totally surprised. Just over 100 years ago(maybe less, I forget the exact year) women were declared legally not people in Canada (which was overturned by the British court later). When will people like this realise that the only way their faiths will survive is by not doing shit like this.

All three of the big Middle Eastern religions are misogynistic to the max. Funnymelodists in particular can’t just skip over First Corinthians 14:34-35. Catholics look to tradition: had Jesus been a feminist, there would have been some women among the Twelve.

The orthodox Jewish practice of refraining from intercourse for seven days after the end of menstruation strikes me as especially weird—think of it as a type of rhythm method to maximize the chance of fertilization.

Opoponax:  Interesting item on the forgery.  Got a cite?  I’d like to learn a bit more about it.

you just have to ask for it, as if it were some sort of porno rag

It is a porno mag… every issue of it is pornographic.

Is not the whole notion of “salvation for me/damnation for you” the biggest S/M fantasy of all?  Is there any part of religion that’s not a BDSM trip?

These people are so backward…  It is like the 1800s.

When the Klan started admitting Catholics as members, that was not progress towards tolerance, but racial/caste consolidation.  When your ship is the Titanic, the issue is where the ship is headed, not who plays the cello in the ballroom.  I don’t give a damn whether North Korea’s army is integrated by gender; I care whether they are planning and are able to flatten Seoul with whatever conscript pool they have. The target should be the content of Christian theocratic/dominionist goals and actions including within the SBC and its constituent congregations, not the labor pool that our opponents choose to effect a dominionist reality.

Only way I would cheer the admission of women into the SBC is if one could could convince that women’s admission would turn the SBC into the Unitarian Universalist Association.  Wrong, epic fail.

Catholics look to tradition: had Jesus been a feminist, there would have been some women among the Twelve.

The irony being that some scholars have discovered that several of the early church “fathers” were actually women—their portraits were “fixed” later on once women were excluded from the hierarchy.  So it’s quite likely that at least a few of the 12 apostles were women and that fact was concealed or elided.  Heck, if you read the Bible, Mary Magdelene’s not even a whore—that’s a tradition, not something that’s actually in the book.

The orthodox Jewish practice of refraining from intercourse for seven days after the end of menstruation strikes me as especially weird—think of it as a type of rhythm method to maximize the chance of fertilization.

I don’t see why that would strike you as weird.  Almost every law about sexuality within Judaism can be traced to maximizing fertilization.  I’m not sure if it’s because it was written by a group of people struggling to survive in an inhospitable climate, an oppressed minority group that felt that if their numbers were stronger,the oppression would end, or just a tribal thing. 

One clue might be found in the fact that God’s original covenant with Abraham said that his offspring would “number the stars”.

Is not the whole notion of “salvation for me/damnation for you” the biggest S/M fantasy of all?  Is there any part of religion that’s not a BDSM trip?

Imagine a dom-sub relationship where your much beloved dom never actually shows up  but relies instead on surrogates.  Weird.  Way too weird.

Ummeli’s got it covered.  “Forgery” wasn’t a particularly elegant choice of words on my part.  Though I’ll say that it’s a good choice of words in describing the mindset of a Christian who’s decided to find a way to see all scriptures they don’t like as illegitimate.  The goal being to force everything you don’t like to magically not count.

Infidel, just because these women are religious does not mean that it’s OK to discriminate against them. If they want to become pastors, it is (should be) their choice; obviously they do not think that their religion is incompatible with “pastoring” as a woman.

Yes, the goals of the organization may be sexist. But it is also sexist to discriminate against women entering the organization.

Tim: Yet another reason I’m thankful for my liberal Lutheran upbringing.

Yeah… the one reason I stayed with the church as long as I did was that all the goals they worked for I agreed with: peace, equality, protection of the environment, fair trade, social justice. The only disagreement was about theism…

Paul was actually rather feminist for his day.

Except that the Christians I’ve met live now, not 2000 years ago. 

I can’t prescribe what others should do regarding their faith, but my ultimate decision was that I wanted a faith that reflected my own beliefs, not a faith I had to rationalize and justify.  When I started finding too much scripture that contradicted my beliefs, I decided it was time to look elsewhere.

I was under the impression that Paul was referring to a PARTICULAR bunch of women, recent converts,  who kept disrupting services with questions instead of being quiet and waiting until they were over.

Opoponax, ummeli:  thank you, both.

Ruth Graham once cited Jesus’ command to Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John as evidence that women could be pastors. In general I’d have to say that the general view of the Bible is very anti-woman. 19th Century feminists recognized this and were often outspokenly atheistic.

I marvel at gay-friendly curches. Fred Phelps is right; God hates fags. Luckily there’s no such god as he believes in, and I’d argue there are no meaningful gods of any kind. Sure, God could be hiding for his mysterious reasons, but that just makes the god hypothesis the equivalent of Brain-in-a-Vat, Descartes’ Demon, and the Massively-Deceived-Dog. These are interesting and important epistemic problems, but not the sort of thing that will shape how we live our lives. More conventional gods can be shown to be false, and somewhat more abstract gods have no real explainatory traction and are thus unworthy of consideration. God is dead. Get over it.

As for the menstrual taboos of Jewish law: I don’t they really maximize fecundity. First off I’d like to point out that it may have been the case that women might not have had regular periods as often as we experience today. Ancient Hebrew women might have been either too underweight to ovulate, pregnant, or experiencing a lack of periods due to extended breastfeeding. Thus what we think of as a regular part of a woman’s life might have seemed somewhat scary to them. This doesn’t justify their sexual taboos, but may explain how they came about.

Even so, a ban on period sex and seven days thereafter wouldn’t really maximize chances of pregnancy. While 13 days past start of period does get you into that optimal pre-ovulation window, if the guy has no other sex bevore that he’ll be shooting a lot of blanks. Sperm count will be high, but motility will be low as there will be lots of stale sperm at the front end. Fairly regular sex, even every day but at least every two or three days, is about the best plan for pregnancy given normal sperm counts and a woman who has not had her tubes scarred by Chlamydia. The whole “I’m ovulating” thing from late-80s sitcoms is nosense. Getting the little swimmers in there a day or two ahead is more likely to result in pregnancy. Furthermore, if a couple already has a pretty active and happy sex life, her hormones will get the guys (well, girls too, since half of the sperm are X bearing) close to the right time.

Rumor among field archeologists, pilots, flight attendants, soldiers, and other women who travel in their work is that if you use a method of contraception that has a high rate of user failure, you’ll get pregnant once you get back home.

Hector B.:
The orthodox Jewish practice of refraining from intercourse for seven days after the end of menstruation strikes me as especially weird—think of it as a type of rhythm method to maximize the chance of fertilization.

This is just as easily argued as being a protection for the woman against disease in a bronze age culture. There are far better examples of misogyny within Hebrew cultural practices, however, so no loss.

Paul can be taken as being specific to his culture in many passages, especially since he was responding to newfangled heresies even as the church grew. (One group was centered around female priestesses, I was told, but can’t verify at the moment.) It’s notable he goes out of his way of saying, at one point, that his beliefs are what he’s writing about and not God’s word, and it would be understandable if he forgot that disclaimer on some of his statements.*

That’s no excuse for modern churches. They’ll obsess over a line of scripture which they claim justifies theft, rape, and murder, or drag a rule out of the Old Testament that has no moral force due to the events of the New Testament, and set up a culture that puts themselves at the top of the pecking order. But 95% of the New Testament—all that pesky stuff about the poor and the social outcast, such as prostitutes—is ignored. It’s hard being a right-wing pastor. You have to make up so much bullshit yourself for every sermon. It’s not like you have a book or a body of scriptures to rely on.

And, as Mnemosyne points out, women were the backbone of the early church. Of course, the early church was, in effect, communist. But hey, fundies already ignore their “own” scriptures. Do you think ignoring history is really a stretch?

*(Paul’s writings is the only place in the NT that homosexuality comes close to being seriously discussed, and it’s in passing at that. But there’s something very important here: Paul was Jewish, a zealot in fact and a religious leader, and the Hebrews definately had laws aginst homosexuality. The fact that Jesus did not recapitulate these laws may not have dawned on Paul—he was at odds with the (“other”) apostles on other things. And I’ve heard many ministers conclude that the “thorn in my flesh” Paul spoke of was his OWN homosexuality. In the modern world, nobody can hate a gay man quite like a resentful, closeted gay man can.)

Who Sexist now? Hypocrite christians.
These lying christian types like Palin are the false prophets Jesus warned about.

Heh.

My fairly liberal Lutheran church is just across Broadway from the SBC Vatican.

There’s a Lifeway right there, and it’s be great to get all the women of my parish to march across the street and ask for a copy of the latest Gospel Today, that naughty rag.

We might could get the women of First Baptist across the street to go with us, as they’re not SBC, but y’know, sane Baptists.

Hmmm…I’m gettin’ idears here.

Southern Baptists creep the hell out of me.  And I was raised one!

One of the top religions that will cost you a fortune in therapy later in life.