[Vision2020] WWJD?

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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April 7, 2012
What Would Jesus Do at the Masters? By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON

THERE was a boys’ club, of course, a band of ardent, jockeying disciples.
But as his fame grew, the messiah was also surrounded by women and talked
about women with great respect. With his father far away, the golden boy
was most influenced by his strong mother and the women in his inner circle.

I’m talking about the real messiah, not Barack Obama, although it applies
to both.

Even as Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, signed legislation
repealing a law that helped women by making wage discrimination easier to
fight, President Obama accessorized with women, trying to widen his
18-point gender gap in swing states.

At a women’s forum in the White House on Friday, the president got personal
about his mother, grandmother, wife and daughters, noting, “For me, at
least, it begins with the women who’ve shaped my life.”

Swaddled by women on stage, he bragged on Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
“Women are not some monolithic bloc,” he said. “Women are not an interest
group. You shouldn’t be treated that way. Women are over half this country
and its work force — not to mention 80 percent of my household, if you
count my mother-in-law. And I always count my mother-in-law.” He even
lamented women’s larger dry-cleaning bills.

It was a blessed moment of anima in a blistering week of GWOW. That’s not a
“Jersey Shore” voluptuary, but the Global War On Women.

Saudi Arabia, which seemed to be inching ahead on women as ultra-Orthodox
extremists in Israel fell backward, dropped its snail progress, refusing to
sponsor women on its team for the London Olympics after intimating they
could compete. “Female sports activity has not existed, and there is no
move thereto in this regard,” Prince Nawaf bin Faisal, the Saudi sports
minister and president of the Saudi Olympic Committee, told reporters in
Jeddah.

How sad that America went to war with Saddam in 1991 — with female soldiers
along — because he had invaded Kuwait and was threatening Saudi Arabia, and
yet Saudi Arabia continued to throw blankets over women, banning gym
classes for girls and sports for women, considering them “steps of the
devil,” as one religious scholar put it.

I know that the International Olympic Committee is another old-boys’ club
and that tyrannies are legitimized in the name of sport. But the I.O.C.
does have a charter that bans discrimination, and it did bar South Africa
from the Games from 1970 to 1991 because of apartheid. So why not resist
the petrodollars and kick out Saudi Arabia for gender apartheid?

It could be part of the continuing penance to be paid for legitimizing
Hitler by granting him — and Leni Riefenstahl — the 1936 Games.

Augusta National Golf Club, which has kept its men-only policy long after
giving up its black-caddies-only rule, should stop emulating the Saudis and
award a green jacket and club membership to Virginia Rometty, the new chief
of I.B.M., a Masters sponsor. You know you’re in trouble when Rick Santorum
is urging you to be more progressive on women.

“The thing about Augusta is, it’s not just another golf club,” said David
Israel, who was a sports columnist with me at The Washington Star. “It is
the most famous private golf club in the world. It should be leading and
opening doors and minds. Instead, it chooses to venerate a venal and
exclusionary past, an idyll of segregation. Revering its lost traditions is
like wistfully remembering Lester Maddox’s ax handle.”

Rometty and other female executives should persuade their companies to cut
connections with Augusta until equality blossoms like the course’s azaleas.

Finally, in the perverse pantheon of reactionary men in robes, we have
God’s Rottweiler, as Pope Benedict is known. He welcomed Easter by sitting
on a golden throne and denouncing the “disobedience” of Catholic priests
who want the decaying, ingrown institution that sheltered so many abusive
priests to let in some fresh air and allow female and married priests, as
well as Holy Communion for Catholics who have remarried without an
annulment.

“It seemed like a bitter statement,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of
“Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American
Nuns.” “It further erodes, almost tragically, the respect for the papacy
because it looks like what you want is institutional conformity rather than
obedience to the Gospel.”

The message of Jesus, after all, is not about exclusion, but inclusion.

Briggs said that most American Catholics will never go along with
retrogressive dictates of the church, like the one against artificial
contraception. “God,” he noted dryly, “only had one son.”

The Rev. Alberto Cutié, the handsome Miami priest who defected to become an
Episcopal priest when he fell in love and married a woman from his parish,
found the pope’s timing ironic.

“They say women can’t be priests because Jesus only called men to be
apostles,” he said. “But the women close to Jesus were the first witnesses
of the resurrection. When the men were afraid and hidden, the women went to
the tomb and said, ‘Jesus is risen!’ If Easter is the most important part
of Christianity, the first to proclaim the message were women. Who could
make more effective preachers?”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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