Rhetoric Race and Religion
Jimmy Carter is attacking violence against women and blasting the people who use religion to propagate it. Calling the the physical and emotional abuse, subjugation, trafficking, and inequality of women the “worst and most pervasive and unaddressed human rights violation on Earth,” the Democratic former U.S. President is out with a new book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power.
In a weekend interview, Carter, a Georgia Democrat, told NPR that “you can pick out individual verses throughout the Bible that shows that the verse favors your particular preference, and the fact that the Catholic Church, for instance, prohibits women from serving as priests or even deacons gives a kind of a permission to male people all over the world, that well, if God thinks that women are inferior, I’ll treat them as inferiors. If she’s my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I’m an employer, I can pay my female employees less salary.”
This is a long-running focus for former President Carter, who served in the White House from 1977-1981. In 2009 he left his Southern Baptist religion, writing that “carefully selected verses” in the Bible were used “to justify the superiority of men.”
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