We Are All Here!

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Last night we watched a three-hour program reminding us of how hard it has been for women to reach for gender equality.

There have been great accomplishments, but still there is far to go.  For instance, while we have more women in Congress than ever before, the numbers, still, are far from fair or reasonable.  Still, we have never elected a woman to be president.

Our prejudices have deep roots.  Roman Catholics are about to elect another male pope.  All of the cardinals, bishops, and priests are male.  Women are second-class citizens in the Catholic Church, as they are in many Protestant churches.  It is even worse in most Islamic countries.  Both Christianity and Islam are the offspring of Old Testament Judaism, from where they learned their prejudices.  

It is perhaps as a recognition that women have made significant gains that right-wing politicians turn immediately, after their elections, to making laws to control women.  Their focus on trying to control women's sexual lives is almost prurient; almost pornographic.  

It ought not to surprise us.  It is an attitude learned in church; an attitude blessed by God and preached by male-dominated churches.

Politically, the zeal to control women is partnered with a corresponding desire to control brown- and black-skinned people.  

There have been long struggles by people of color to achieve social and political equality with white men, and there is vicious backlash there, too.  We really have begun to recognize that, as a nation, we are becoming a mirror of the world.  The anger against having a black president is obvious, and shameful, and ludicrous.  

It is the make-believe world of old white men that is crumbling, and the old white men are lashing out as an old reptilian brain might do.  Lashing out at women is irrational.  Lashing out at a black president because he is black is irrational.  It is irrational--a lizard-like response--for people in a democracy to try to deny whole groups of people the right to vote:  it is self-destructive.

The liberation of women is not a problem.  The recognition of racial fairness is not a problem.  The problem is that old white men want to be in control.  

I am an old white man.  The system worked for my advantage, although not to my advantage.  It stunted me, as unfairness always does.  It makes us less.  It is a much better world when white men are just a part of what we are as a human community in a real world.  

Enough of holy men!
Enough of white privilege!
Enough of it being a man's world!

We are all here.