Imagining a New Christian Sexuality

Patriarchy will not diminish in its power, much less decease, in the present environment. The 2008 national election cycle is not at all clear on this point, and whatever the outcome, some step in women assuming their rights & leadership role(s) will have been taken. Thirty years ago in the state of Texas when my grandfather died with almost no assets to divide or fight over, my mother could not inherit directly for herself but had to do it through my father. It's the kind of thing you cannot believe until it is close up & personal! That type of thing has surely changed, but throw some money into the pot & see what happens yet.

Professor de la Torre has done a magnificent job of lining the biblical references up so that all data of a particular point is almost self-interpreting, but I doubt that that method has done him any good whatsoever in addressing the literalism of the biblethumpers & their derogatory anti-feminism, which is surely medieval in its origins. Nevertheless, this kind of biblical literalistic fundamentalism in the U.S. is hardly a century on the scene, and it did not come out of its closeted existence, both literally & figuratively, without the dignification of a Ronald Reagan a quarter century ago. As the educational level of our population has plummeted downward, this kind of thing found a readymade audience to exploit, and it is quite sad to see the adherents, particularly as the captive subjects of this phenomenon, the children, are put in so-called "christian" schools or homeschooled where all information is not only skewed but tainted with anti-intellectualism & falsification via half-truths. Bush & Co. has been the midwife to this rise in conservatism, and the millions of dollars in misplaced "chastity" advertising not only in the U.S. but in Africa as a part of U.S. Aid have degraded the feminine while casting a blind eye to the male participation aspect. Real "sex ed" in public schools, meanwhile, has been treated as degrading while the teenage pregnancy statistics in this country are the worst [i.e., the highest] in the western world. Without a biblical literalism as haindmaiden, this would be hard to accomplish. Other countries in the West do NOT have our fundamentalism problem to deal with. Having a woman in the French Presidental runoff is an achievement indeed, & hopefully its fallout here & everywhere will be bountiful.

You cannot have progress & retrogression simultaneously on Women's rights. Mirror images in other issues show similar skews. Two steps backward & one step forward is not progress.

I would leave to the funamentalists to line up the biblical texts for citation & then show not only their biases in alignment but their omissions and how those omissions were crucial. It's a largess legacy of a century of neglect on sexual matters, not to be taken lightly. No progess can be made so long as literalism is king.