It shouldn’t be necessary. There should be no need for young girls to have to speak out for their own equality. If men are to be the leaders, then they have done a poor job of it. Leaders do not have to step on the backs of girls.
Yet they do.
A young girl in Pakistan began speaking out for girls’ rights to an education when she was only 11 years old. She blogged under a pseudonym. But where there is a will, there is a way, and she was found out. This week she was targeted and shot. Her attackers vow to continue to target her. They will shut her up, one way or the other.
In India, child marriages “denies a girl of her childhood, disrupts her education, limits her opportunities, and increases her risk to be a victim of violence (in other words, her husband will beat her), and jeopardizes her heath,” the United Nations wrote to India’s Women and Child Development Minister Krisna Tirath.
This is a world-wide problem of the treatment of young girls and women.
We rattle our mouths about it as I saw on a website recently. What we fail to do is connect it to ourselves. When the churches in the United States unite and declare girls and women to be equal in fullness and service before the Lord and in their churches, maybe then we will be able to tell other countries what to do about the female population.
Of course we can’t wait for that to happen. So we must speak out where we can. But it is not those who claim divine right to be leaders who are doing it.
From what I see, leadership is only to keep women under control.
It takes courage, and I am not sure I have that much courage, but we must speak out. Let’s start in our own country and in our own churches. Will you join me in this fight for women’s equality? Will you pray for this young girl who so boldly spoke out? Will you pray for India’s Minister Krisna Tirath?
bWe Baptist Women for Equality's Blog 
Shirley:
This young girl is willing to die for her beliefs! When will the women in the United States be willing to die for their beliefs?
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They already do. Women are killed by boyfriends and husbands who abuse them. They allow it because they are told the men are their leaders.
> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:57:32 +0000 > To: bwebaptist.women@live.com >
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Yes, it’s ironic. But they’re not dying “for” their beliefs; they’re dying because of them.
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Tommy: I’m not sure where you stand on this issue, but two points:
1. If you speak from the patriarchal standpoint, isn’t it men who are to die for women as a type of Christ/mediator/protector in the home? ”
2. There are different kinds of “death:” physical, spiritual, and emotional/psychological. Death of the spirit/emotions/soul is usually “death by a thousand cuts,” if you’ve heard of the expression. It works a little like the following.
A little girl is trained in patriarchal societies to believe she is less than a boy and later, than men in some ways. It’s not ever quite clear exactly how much and the inequality varies with the culture (spiritual as well as other kinds of cultures, sometimes from church building to church building) but it has to do with the fact that she owns female body parts.
She grows and becomes accustomed to the “thousand cuts” of her self-image, her self-esteem, her spiritual status, her social status, her marital status, her economic status, her educational status, her human rights status, and so on.
if she is exposed to a life-time of such notions, she experiences the natural “fruit” of being thought of and treated as if she is “lesser” in some/many ways: self-doubt, guilt, humiliation, shame; she feels devalued, degraded (to varying degrees), denied– powerless, perhaps.
It may come to feeling as if she’s nothing more than an appendage to a man, his servant. I read one recent treatise on patriarchal thinking that indicates that men don’t have the capacity to devote themselves to their wives (they are made to devote themselves to their work, primarily), but women are primarily designed to want to devote themselves to their husbands. (I guess there are all kinds of variations on the interpretation of the curses of Genesis 3 by patriarchal men). If these logical conclusions of what happens when one group claims superiority over another group make any sense to you, I invite you to imagine yourself in a similar situation for a few minutes. Of course, I realize I could be preaching to the choir. 🙂
The fact that that little girl who was shot in the head had the guts and courage to stand up for girls’/women’s rights at such a tender age is an incredible anomaly. She has courage and wisdom well beyond her years. Either that, or she’s seen such horrific examples of the abuses of women by her patriarchal culture she feels she has nothing to lose.
And this, by the way, has nothing to do with abortion, which is where a lot of men try to spin it. But it does have everything to do with feminism of the kind Jesus Christ advocated and for which He died.
We need to pray we are never in a situation like whatever it is that caused a child to have such courage. But the only way to stay the terror of the logical conclusion to the oppression of any group, in this case, girls and women, is to continue to speak out and expose such thinking for what it is. Thank God for venues such as this and for other sites where there is still freedom to speak out and help women and girls.
Blessings,
Phyllis
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Tommy is a great supporter of women’s equality.
> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:53:08 +0000 > To: bwebaptist.women@live.com >
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Sadly, a young lady in Pakistan may die for her beliefs. Sigh.
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Yay! 🙂
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It looks as if I’m saying “yay” to Hannah’s comment. Mine goes with the news that Tommy is a supporter of women’s equality. ;). And yes, so sad that that girl was shot.
P.
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It can get confusing sometimes! Sometimes I don’t know who is talking with who!
> Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 01:16:46 +0000 > To: bwebaptist.women@live.com >
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To all: Yes I am a supporter of women’s equality. Satan has to be very pleased that so many women who could be doing so much for the Kingdom of God are not “allowed”. It takes a lot of courage and a willingness to pay a high price going against those that misuse the Holy Scriptures to hold women back from their “calling.” I took a stand sometime in the last several years as it relates to a woman being called by a Southern Baptist Church. It is a long story but I am confident I have and do suffer consequences for taking the stand that I took. Would I take the same stand knowing what I know now–absolutely!!
All I am ever trying to say here is that it is past time for women to not put up with this nonsense and to use thier gifts right now regardless of the consequences.
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Tommy, you rock.
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