Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Church Fires Woman for Being A Woman



In what appears to be an accidental push to persuade yet more women to free themselves from the misogyny of old time religion, the minister of a First Baptist Church has fired a female Sunday School teacher because 'the Bible tells' him 'so':

Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church" (1 Corinthians 14:34,35).

WATERTOWN, New York (AP) The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on August 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men.

In the olden days when women were routinely told to shut-up in Church, the thinking was not just the Christian misogynistic tenet that women were/are innately inferior to men. It was also well known that when a woman spoke in Church, the attention of the men would be focused upon the woman, rather than the Holy Father God. And as everyone knows, men simply cannot gaze upon women without having [blush] erections. Thanks to the rigid enforcement of the Holy Bible's teachings, uncontrollable men were protected from the horrid sins that resulted from gazing upon the over-sexed bodies of wanton women.

Mary Lambert has been teaching at this man's church for 54 years.

Fifty-four years of unbridled male erections is enough!

Thankfully, Rev. Timothy LaBouf has taken a bold step toward correcting the problem of rampant erections in churches and, no doubt, he has his own private unbridled reasons for doing so.

Interestingly, this sign of a thriving Christian Taliban in the USA did not occur in the red state of Tennessee, but rather in the blue state of New York.

Not that we are gloating.

What I want to know is how many wanton women and uncontrollable men will come to their senses and leave Rev. Timothy LaBouf's Church?

via Feministing and reader, Mike Stevens.

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"The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to woman is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Free Thought magazine (November, 1896), quoted from Freedom From Religion Foundation, "What They Said About Religion" (Nontract #4)

"All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from Ira D. Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

"The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eight Years and More (1898), p. 26