Been reading A LOT of Christian perspectives on gender roles lately and my brain sorta aches from the weighty and emotional back-and-forth of it all.
One interesting argument put forth by the complementarian/patriarchal side (I'm so so so sorry, I've read so many articles in the last 12 hours and I can't find which one it was. Terrible of me I know.) is the 'you shall desire your husband and he shall rule over you' curse, as an excuse for imbalance of power in male-female relationships. Um, yeah.
This could all just be me misreading and misunderstanding the Bible, so please feel free to discuss, but when I think of Biblical curses, I don't think of them as being the same as Biblical commands. When God curses Cain, the first murderer ever, Cain cries out that the punishment is too harsh and he fears that other people will see his cursedness and use it as an excuse to carry out their own vengeance and kill him. God tells him that anyone who does so will incur a punishment seven times more severe! So is a curse something that people need to rush out and fulfill on behalf of the cursed person? I've never thought so.
When God curses Adam and Eve He doesn't go to Adam and say, "Look, you're wife's going to desire you: rule over her." He says it to Eve, giving her a concrete consequence of her behaviour. He gives Adam a concrete consequence for Adam's behaviour too: life's going to be hard and short and work will be difficult and painful. If we are meant to enforce the opression of women, does this mean that we should tear down any man who finds himself in a fulfilling and enjoyable job?
It's an imperfect metaphor but I always saw God as the doctor going, "You jumped off the cliff at this angle: these are the bones you broke." The curse is not a part of God's original plan for the Earth, but a symbol of the Earth's brokeness! The curse is not a command on which to base behaviour but a sign that tells how commands have been broken and behaviour is not as it should be!
When humanity rebelled against God's command, it's as if the perfectly running train was driven off its tracks by a rebellious driver. Now the train is broken - but we should still try to drive the train on the tracks as was originally intended, right? Even if the train is broken and halting?

I am not a feminist; at least, I don't agree with all the agendas of second- and third-wave feminism. I tend to be very THAT BATHWATER STILL HAS A BABY IN IT about nearly everything, so I find it very difficult to definitely pick a side on political and social issues. I place a lot of value on traditionally 'feminine' qualities, many of which cop a lot of ridicule and abuse these days... such as a propensity to prioritise family life, community and children over breadwinning... or simply virtues that are seen as 'feminine', such as patience, meekness, gentleness and compassion. Let me make myself clear: I don't see these characteristics as particularly gendered at all - I value these qualities wherever I find them in humanity, whether it be male or female. Feminism and I can't agree a lot of the time because it seems to me that feminists reject these values and ideas in favour of qualities more traditionally 'masculine', such as leadership, independence, fighting spirit and courage. Which are all fantastic, wonderful qualities... just not necessarily better than those qualities traditionally seen as 'feminine'.

I Am Very Very Distressed In My Mind

Hey.

I know that of late I have not been a happy little blogger and that this has probably been displeasing to some or all of my dear readers (it displeases me also, if that's any consolation), but forgive me yet another rant of unhappiness.

If you have, by chance, encountered my mother in the last week: face to face or facebook to facebook (or whatever) you may have noticed that her topic of conversation has pretty much circled around one topic. This topic.

When something makes me angry I usually avoid talking about it or reading about it or listening to anything about it until I go mad, mad, mad in my strong emotional state... and write a blog about it. Which isn't terribly productive, I realise, in the end; considering that I have an audience of about three people who probably know or can guess what it is I have to say about said topic anyway. But it makes me feel better.

In this case, I would really love it if writing this blog made some sort of difference, though I realise the chances of that are very slim.

Ismail is a young twenty-six year old man who fled Afghanistan when he was about fourteen years old. We all should know that Afghanistan (for a very long time) hasn't been the most peaceful of countries for a boy to grow up in and live out his dreams; add to this the fact that Ismail is an ethnic Hazara - a group systematically persecuted in Afghanistan for hundreds of years, and you might be able to piece together his reason for leaving. He fled to Europe and eventually ended up in Ireland, where he was able to complete a High School Certificate equivalent - but not allowed to seek higher education or employment. So, unable to make a life in Ireland, he obtained a false passport, got on a plane to Australia and handed himself over to the authorities in the belief that he would be treated with humanity in a country that prides itself on 'a fair go for all'.

He has been incarcerated in detention ever since. On Saturday he is going to be 'forcibly returned' to Afghanistan - the first person to be involuntarily deported after seeking asylum in Australia.

We, in Australia, are fed a lot of... bovine poo about refugees. The government parties use the 'boat people problem' as a scare tactic to try and win votes at election time - the media loves to tell us just how much the refugees cost our country in space and money and culture; everywhere our national predilection for racism and paranoia is fed like some sort of sacred flame.

Think of the films you like to watch. Any spy films, dystopian themed films, Holocaust themed films in that bunch? When you watch characters in these films steal away from dangerous enemy territory, clutching a false passport and sneaking their children through ditches, do you feel that they are selfish human beings? Do you feel that they are wrong for disobeying the law? Do you feel that they are cowardly or otherwise immoral?

Refugees aren't just people who didn't make good in their homeland and want to sponge off another country's government - refugee are, well, a good place to start would be refugees are people. Refugees are fleeing from places where bombs fall on their houses. Refugees are fleeing from places where their daughters can't walk to school without being raped, fleeing from places where they cannot make fundamental life choices about what they believe, where (or if) they will live or how they will make a life. Refugees are fleeing from places where they have no hope for a future. They leave places where trouble has come upon them unsought.

Can you imagine what it must be like to BE a 'boat person'? Floating for days and days on the ocean, packed in with other miserable, frightened people with minimal resources of any description on a boat that will probably be two leaks away from sinking to the bottom of the ocean? Besides the almost always nonexistent hygeine facilities and the awful food and the lack of defense against the ravages of weather, there are also pirates. Not jolly, yo ho ho pirates with parrots and peg legs: real modern pirates who steal any kind of material possession you might have managed to bring with you. Pirates who rape and kidnap wives and sisters before the very eyes of their families. I'm not trying to shock or scandalise you for effect - these attacks are real, documented. This stuff happens.

And then, when you reach Australia, a civilised first world country, where poverty means hand-me-downs and Centrelink payments for Australian citizens, we imprison you in a detention centre, give you hope and snatch it away; make you wait YEARS and YEARS without any kind of certainty about your future and without anything vaguely resembling the freedom, liberty and justice that a country like Australia has to offer. People in detention centres suffer from the worst kinds of mental illness and are never offered any treatment.

Not only is Ismail being sent back to a part of Afghanistan where he has never even been before (and he has not been in the country since he was a child) and where he knows no one - the authorities have handed him a bill for the expense of his unwanted journey - over $30,000. This, for a man who has been locked up for two years like a criminal - who came to Australia because he wished to seek education and employment!

Bear in mind, this is a person my mother and brother know (from visits to Villawood detention centre over the last few months). He is not a random money-grabbing opportunist or a scary alien from another planet. I am told that he is a patient, gentle man who is genuinely scared of dying. He has seen three suicides and a riot happen at the detention centre. When he confessed feelings of depression and anxiety he was put in isolation in a video monitored blood stained room.

Ismail left Afghanistan because he feared death. Australians are sending him right back to Afghanistan - and his case will create a precedent for other Hazara people to be sent back into the arms of death. Pray for Australia. Pray for Afghanistan.


Pray for Ismail.

"There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found... if not in the enfranchisement and elevation of women?"

Hi all.


Been doing some thinking lately. Occasionally with this blog I like to sit down and have a crazy opinion fuelled spiel about something that’s been on my mind - and this is one of those times.

Tonight I’m going to talk about an issue that is never very far from the back of my mind - purely and simply because it fills me with anger and terror and a very awful sense of helplessness and sorrow. Please don’t stop reading when I say I’m going to talk about abortion.



I feel that, as a young woman, I really do have a right, nay, a responsibility to say how I feel about this complicated and controversial issue (I think men have a right to an opinion also, but hearing an opinion from a man can really make some pro-abortion campaigners angry because they feel that the issue doesn’t have the same implications for men. I mean, all this is obvious, but I digress.) To put it pure and simple, I cannot see abortion as anything but out-and-out, brutal, clinical, government-sanctioned murder. Murder of the innocent and helpless, which wrenches my heart when I contemplate it. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m crying physical tears as I write this. There is no way that any scientist or philosopher could ever find a way to convince me that a developing child in the womb, an embryo, foetus, whatever, is not a human being. A human being, a person, with all the right to life that any person in the world ever could be said to possess.

But this issue is not limited to the silent and invisible holocaust of the unborn.

In his book What’s Wrong With The World, author G. K. Chesterton says:

‘Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul.’

 The suffragettes certainly had a point in their insistence on votes for women. Because it isn’t as if the decisions and laws made in Parliament have no effect on women: oh, no! As well as subjecting women to the same punishments and limitations as men, laws took legitimate rights away from women; such as the right to not be abused by a spouse, or the right to see and care for their children if a marriage broke down. I think no right minded person could now say that women should be barred from a democratic vote - though at the time many people, even sensible and kind-hearted people, thought that giving a vote to women would mark the beginning of the apocalypse.

Of course, these people, however good-hearted they may have been, they were wrong. In this modern, enlightened Western hemisphere it is almost universally recognised that women and men possess equal human rights under God, or the law, or whatever it is that binds them. (I am, of course, speaking distinctly within Western culture - I am aware that in other parts of the world and ways of thinking women receive no such acknowledgement.)

But, bizarrely enough, what Western culture seems to have entirely forgotten with its inclusion of women into all the rights and privileges of society, is that men and women are not exactly alike, and what may have functioned well for a male-dominated culture simply cannot be found workable in a world of sex equality.

Back in the day, feminist views on abortion were quite different. Alice Paul, author of the original Equal Rights Amendment (1923) in America is quoted as calling abortion “the ultimate exploitation of women." What could be less natural and more invasive than a culture that expects a woman to have a growing infant cut out of her womb simply for the sake of convenience? I say, if we live in a culture in which a woman’s unexpected pregnancy can prevent her from completing her education let’s blooming well change that culture! Don’t chop and change people to fit conditions - change the conditions! Pregnancy is not a disease, it is a natural and expected consequence of sexual relations. Speaking of which…

I know I come across as a massive prude when I say I believe in total celibacy outside of marriage. Since the sexual revolution people (again, in the West) celebrate the right to do whatever they like with their sexuality.

I won’t pretend to believe that everyone thinks, as I do, that sex is an intimate and beautiful expression of love between a man and a woman, though I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to think so. From this perspective, I cannot see promiscuity as anything but an exploitative and degrading use of sex. Sex without total trust and commitment is a sad, sad use of a good thing: and is not in the smallest instance ‘loving’. Promiscuity does hurt men as well as women - STDs, emotional damage, etc: but the consequences for women (including the aforementioned STDs, etc) can often be much more severe, even without bringing pregnancy into the equation.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I think that, when weighing the damage done to women by our culture (and I haven’t even mentioned body image, weight issues, objectification, discrimination or any of the myriad of other problems the world throws at women) one will quickly realise that society is disproportionately difficult for a woman to navigate.

Why then do we get lumped with the horrific option of ‘kill your baby’? Why not ‘let’s support you through your pregnancy’ ‘how about the thousands of couples waiting to adopt?’ ‘motherhood is an honourable state’.

Pro-’choice’ advocates ignore such choices as those I have above listed. They also say that the choice should be left up to the woman, whom, I think, in her fragile hormonal state, with no other options offered to her and heavy pressure from friends, family, school, work and society at large, will see no other path before her. I can’t describe the guilt and pain that these women often suffer for the rest of their lives - you can find testimonies from such women here. And here.

Plus, as I'm sure most pro-abortion feminists don't realise; in other countries, particularly developing countries where women do experience significant deprivation of rights, a common practice is to kill unborn baby girls, specifically because of their gender. This is not right. This is not giving women choices and rights, this is murdering girls before they even have the possibiliy of becoming conscious of them.

Why don’t we teach people the self respect they need to be able to say no to noncommittal and unloving sex? Why don’t we teach our young people to be responsible for their actions? Why don’t we consider the thousands of childless would-be parents?

Why do we devalue the unborn child?