The world is not black and white. It is filled with rainbows of color and nuance. The Southern Baptists have taken a first step to joining this world. They fired their long time misogynist president who considered women to be less than human and treated them as such. This giant step of acknowledging the wrong could be religion shattering.
With the admission that the church has been wrong in its attitudes towards women has opened the door to equality of the sexes. Not all men will step through that door, but enough will and things will change. Indeed they must.
The statistics are staggering. Every day in the US alone, three women are murdered by their husband, boyfriend, or estranged husband or boyfriend. By contrast, five men out of every 100 relationships are murdered by their female partner in a year.
Today a Republicon man is running for public office on the platform that the woman should meet her man at the door with his slippers in her mouth. Okay, his rhetoric is not quite so drastic, but it’s degrading at best and inhuman at the most basic level.
More than a million women are abused by their partners each year in the US. Statistics are not available for worldwide abuse, but it occurs everywhere to greater or lesser degrees. And unlike any other type of crime, the victim is blamed. “Why didn’t you leave?” is often the first question asked. For too many of these women (often with children) who do the “right” thing and leave, the greatest danger occurs then. Of those “three women a day” murdered, 75 percent are killed after they flee their abuser. On any given day, there are 10,000 more women with children seeking shelter than is available.
A major Christian attitude seems to be that you can do anything because Jesus died for your sins. The Baptists are changing those dynamics by saying abuse is wrong; abusers and their enablers will no longer be tolerated. Whether the members of the church follow through will tell us how far we still have to go.