Today, I am re-posting the Memorial Day post that I wrote last year. Look for a new post on Wednesday, June 1, 2011.
Honor our Soldiers who Died
Today is a day to honor American soldiers who have fought and died in wars. Let us remember that women have fought for the last nine years in wars and many have died fighting.
For years I had hopes that men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan would see our fighting women and that somehow they would see our women as equal and would seek to have that for themselves. I could just imagine a little girl of 9 years old wanting the freedom our American women soldiers have. That little girl would now be 16years old. What has happened to her?
Only time will tell if any change has happened for these little Iraqi girls.
Today I read in the newspaper that some Afghanistan girls 13 years old had tried to escape their town to keep from marrying old men who their parents had decided they were to marry. They were spotted, and taken back to their town, and publicly whipped for their disobedience.
American women and men are fighting for these women. Over 1,000 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2001.
Did our presence make any difference to the women over there? Many can now go to school, but a lot of girls are still denied an education. Girls are still forced to marry old men who may already have other wives.
Read these two books to get a good idea of how women are treated in a restrictive country. A country where we are sending our women and men.
AThousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, 2007 (Riverhead Books Publisher) He is the author of the Kite Runner which was a wonderful book. This one is better and better shows how women are treated. (Fiction)
The End of Manners, by Francesca Marciano, 2008 (Random House Publishers). This was an excellent book about a social service woman who finds herself in Afghanistan trying to help orphans. She tells of the Afghanistan culture of how awful women are treated. (Fiction)
Remember our women and men who return to the United States and where our women walk into a church and know that they, like Afghanistan women, are seen as inferior by their religious leaders.
Remember our men and women who have died fighting in these countries.
Let us honor our soldiers today who have died fighting for others.
bWe Baptist Women for Equality's Blog 
My niece went into Afghanistan on one of the first commercial flights to work on a medical project for John’s Hopkins to eradicate a horrible disease that was easy to treat called Leishmania.
They had to deliver medical supplies by GPS since there were no addresses. She brought back films of women being beaten in the streets and no one dared to intervene. She was devestated they could not help. they had been warned about intervening.
But we are no better here. Many on the left want to allow Sharia law to be practiced in the US. We allowed the Dearborn police to arrest Christians at the Arab Festival who were witnessing. Many think freedom of religion means we allow Sharia law to be practiced. This is also a huge problem in Europe. Those who oppose it like Gert Wilders have been driven from their country.
See his film Fitna. And google his speeches to see what Islam has brought to Europe.
I would give you a link but there were so many threats from Muslims that youtube pulled it and I cannot find it. All I can find when I google are Muslims speaking. Welcome to how it is done. Gert Wilders knows this and knows we are basically cowards and think giving in is “tolerance” even though they have NO tolerance for us.
Freedom is a rare commodity these days. And pretty soon, we will be looking the other way when their women are abused just as they do in Europe.
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Absolutely true. This is the very same attitude pastors who promote male headship have. They disrepect women or they would be on their hands and knees praying for their wives and daughters to have this curse of second-class lifted from them – instead of glorying in the fact that they are male – and women are just women and are made to be this way.
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It is the same attitude! But they won’t see it.
The lead pastor at the church we used to go to recognizes that “quiverfull” practices are wrong, but doesn’t get that his understanding of scripture as giving the husband authority over his wife* is the same view, only less harsh.
*Of course he calls it “leadership”. I’m not sure how that term is supposed to be less offensive than “authority”.
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I can’t understand why wives need leadership. Children need leadership, but not wives.. Actually Leadership implies authority because a leader has authority. We’ve got to get through to them somehow!
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The key is to use “servant” instead of leader. Of course they try to market “servant leader” which is an oxymoron to Western understanding. If they were forced to use the biblical term of servant, it would not be so attractive to them.
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“servant leader”: only refers to men. When a woman serves, she is a “servant.” When a man serves, he is magifcally a “servant leader”.
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Women don’t seem to see through it.
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@Mabel–Oh! I do like your use of the word “magically”. I’ve read descriptions of the behavior of a wife and of a husband, and the behavior was very similar–one moved for the schooling of the other, and the other spouse moved for a good job opportunity for the other. When the man moved in support of his wife, he was leading. When the woman moved in support of her husband, she was following his leadership.
So yeah, your point about whatever the man does is leading by virtue of him being male and whatever the woman does is serving/following by virtue of her being female? Yes. A million times: Yes.
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Look at what’s been done to the original/dictionary meaning of the word “complementary”. Not to mention the word “equal”, of course. It’s no wonder, what with the use of words in a way that doesn’t have a lot to do with the dictionary definitions that it’s difficult to communicate basic ideas.
Yes, we believe that the husband has a special “leadership” role, and that husband and wife are equal (to paraphrase, hence the lack of quotation marks). That makes sense to NO ONE but the people who believe it. It is not logical.
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In response to Michelle: that’s why I refuse to call hierarchalists “complementarians”. We egalitarians are the true complementarians. If you read Kevin Giles (forgot which book), you will find out that the egalitarians used the word complementarians to describe themselves, and then Wayne Grudem stole the word. According to Kevin, it is difficult to discuss anything with the so-called comps, who have a different set of definitions for ordinary word, e.g. role is always gender specific when the definition of the word “role” has nothing to do with gender. I for one make it a point of never calling them complementarians. It is way too good a term for them. It is deceptive and misleading. They are no comps, they are hierarchalists, pure and simple.
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@Mabel: Yes, I am getting that way, too. I don’t appreciate the language that obfuscates the truth. So I’m also shifting to not using it. I’m not using “leader” or “leadership” for what the husband is supposed to do in their system–at least not without pairing it with the word “authority”, to make their point clearer than they would like it to be.
I’ve read some of Giles’ articles, though not his books. Rebecca Merrill Groothuis has written great critiques of the use of the word “role” to describe what is better referred to as a lifetime, or at the very least one’s life after s/he is married!
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Michelle and everyone else here, I hope some of you live near Houston. Shirley and myself are working with CBE and Fuller TX to organize a one day conference on the gender issue some time next year, date TBD, probably in the Spring. I always long to meet face to face with people I have met on the internet. It would be a blast for all of us to get together.
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I add my welcome to that, too. I would love to meet all of you.
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