[Dialogue] All About Eve

[Del Morrill]

A friend of mine forwarded this great article.  Thought you might appreciate
it, also.  Del.
  
>From The Moscow Times, Global Eye 
August 6 - 12, 2004 
All About Eve 
By Chris Floyd
Look out, ladies! The divinely-appointed duo of George W. Bush and Pope John
Paul II are on the prowl again, bringing their patented one-two punch to
boudoirs and back alleys everywhere. Last summer, the pious pair launched
simultaneous broadsides against the apocalyptic threat of gay marriage; now
they're firing their missiles of moral correction at the ultimate source of
the world's distemper: uppity females.

This week, the pope's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (known as
"The Inquisition" back in the glory days) released a "major statement" on
the status of women. The Inquisitors declared that women who resist their
subordination to men too strongly are "giving rise to harmful confusion" and
perverting their "natural characteristics" of "listening, welcoming,
humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting." 

It seems these pushy broads should instead be focusing on the "deep
intuition" planted in them by God that makes them want to breed and nurture.
(As opposed to intuitionless men, who apparently have no role whatsoever in
reproduction or parenting -- which, come to think of it, might well seem a
logical conclusion to the lifelong celibates luxuriating in the Vatican.)
Today's "gender-blurring" agitation for equality is not only making men feel
all wiggly and "antagonistic," the Inquisitors say, it's also having "lethal
effects on the structure of the family." 

And you probably thought that wife-beating, child neglect and all the single
mothers living in poverty had something to with men abandoning their
responsibilities. You probably thought that family breakdown had something
to do with the systematic destruction of community ties, local economies,
stable employment and social programs by corporate power and its government
toadies. But no, it's all the fault of those brazen hussies, same as it ever
was: "She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her
husband, and he did eat."

This unctuous moralizing about family life and sexuality is pretty rich
coming from a gang that has presided over the most widespread, elaborately
concealed child abuse scandal in the history of religion. But then, rank
hypocrisy has never been a bar to militant self-righteousness. Witness John
Paul's fellow public scold in Washington. Not content with the pope's merely
rhetorical flourishes, Bush takes a more pre-emptive approach to
inconvenient women -- condemning thousands of them to gruesome, entirely
preventable deaths with a simple stroke of his pen.

Just days before JP pitched his holy hissy fit, Bush quietly performed his
now-annual gutting of appropriations aimed at helping the world's most
vulnerable women gain a bare minimum of reproductive healthcare. For the
third straight year, Bush cut $34 million of Congressionally approved money
for the UN Population Fund, which runs maternity hospitals, provides family
planning advice and dispenses sterile emergency birth kits for refugees and
other destitute women in developing countries.

The fund is not involved in abortion in any way, but because it has a tiny
operation in China -- trying to stop the dwindling practice of forced
abortions there -- it has been damned to hellfire by the hard-right
Christian culture warriors now in charge of U.S. health and social policies.
Bush has not only anathematized the fund, he has also cut off all U.S. money
for private women's health groups with even the slightest, indirect
connection to the "tainted" UN agency. 

The centers operated by the fund and the other Bush-banned groups provide
the only maternal and postnatal care available for millions of
poverty-stricken women and their children. They are the only place where the
world's most downtrodden and uneducated women can receive information about
reproduction and birth control, or treatment for AIDS, genital mutilation
and rape. Starved of U.S. funding by Bush, many clinics have already been
forced to shut down; dozens more will close or be decimated by this year's
cuts. The result, of course, will be more women dying in childbirth, in
illegal abortions, of untreated disease, violence, malnutrition, more
infants and children dying of birth-related illnesses -- an annual death
toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Guess that'll teach them gals not to get above their raising -- or subvert
the "natural order" by seeking control of their own bodies, their own
fertility and sexuality. 

Of course, it's true that giving women in the developing world a few more
choices on childbearing and sex -- and enough health care to overcome the
ravages of disease, neglect, poverty and violence -- would actually
transform the repressed, miasmic societies where terrorism now breeds so
prodigiously. For female emancipation leads inevitably -- if slowly,
painfully -- to new economic, political and social freedoms throughout any
society where it takes hold. You'd think someone genuinely interested in
ending terrorism -- as opposed to, say, milking it for crony profits and
political advantage -- would support such efforts. Instead, Bush has taken
sides with his supposed enemies -- Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the whole sick crew -- in throttling the freedom of half the
human race.

This president-pontiff routine is drearily familiar. The pope has long
fought to roll back the bodily freedoms won by Western women, while U.S.
leaders armed, trained and financed the virulent fundamentalists who
destroyed all traces of the budding secularism in Afghanistan -- and have
since taken their show on the road. Islamic extremism is thriving everywhere
on the bloody chaos created by Bush's invasion of Iraq, as societies under
threat rebel against the "Western values" his murderous belligerence claims
to represent. 

But this doesn't matter to our fine Christian mullahs; they share the
extremists' sanctified misogyny: Eve plucked the apple, and her punishment
is eternal. Upon this altar of willful ignorance, millions of women are
being sacrificed.