Gender Wars

Jocelyn Andersen has written a book called Woman this is War: Gender, Slavery and the Evangelical Caste System. Her thesis is that Patriarchy leads to abuse. Period. Dave Warnock supports this thesis here and muses more on what action his church should take here. He also intends to review Jocelyn's book. I look forward to this.

There are several important statements in Dave's post and comments. He writes,

Oh and friends in the Church of England, don't think we won't notice if you give in to a noisy minority and don't implement full and equal women Bishops. We are watching and waiting, I for one will not be willing to compromise on this.

I for one am tempted to say Methodists should not consider any more steps implementing the Covenant with the Church of England (such as Bishops ourselves) until a women is installed as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I am fully with Dave on this. I do not think that any form of compromise with those who do not treat women as equals is useful. It is only under prolonged pressure and disapproval, that those who do not treat women as equals will shift their position.

It is similar to smoking cigarettes. Once society as a whole disapproved of smoking in public places, cigarette sales decreased. On the other hand, some forms of smoking have gone underground when made illegal - for example, marijuana. Will those who treat women as chattel and babymakers simply retreat further? I don't know, but like prostitution and pornography, I don't think we can compromise in hopes of mitigating these evils. We need to stand against them.

If laws and societal disapproval can decrease the number of people smoking, why not come out against treating women as non-equals in the home and church? Shirley Taylor on her blog, Baptist Women for Equality, asks this of us all.

PS Joel has also written about this issue here linking to a post on Daniel Kirk's blog. I have to run but will read these later.