Markk wrote:
Good Morning...I am in first puppy bowl mode, then Home depot run, then golf ( have a bet on the tourney), then super bowl....But actually I am remodeling my kitchen still and had some confusing electrical problems. I have a older home and didn't take pic's of my boxes before I took them apart and when I went to put them back together I had a dropped (back fed) neutral somewhere and it took me hours to find it, and about three good shocks. As it turned out it was a original problem that has been there since my home was built in 1960. Also grouted my new tile.
I need to grout my tile. I hate grouting. Hate it with a vengeance. Grout is the scourge of my DIY life. Love it when it's done though. ;-)
I read through a bit and it appears that your question is how were women treated in the Biblical time...why not just tell me your point, wouldn't that be easier? I saw your question earlier and it has not relevance today, 100% subjective to culture, but anyways...
He's got it! You BET it's 100% subjective to culture. That's where we're going.
In different cultures they were treated differently, but generally speaking it was a man's world. It was also class based, a woman in a higher class, had more rights than a man in a lower class. Off the top of my head women bought and sold property, were prophets and queens. There were laws against women that are very degrading, like putting them out to the garage once a month.
Old Testament ^^^^we're not staying there.
This right here is where we're going. The New Testament. vvvvvv
They caused confusion in New Testament church and were told to shut up by Paul, they were cherished by Jesus.
By the time we get to the New Testament we see women who were denied education, right to own property was (if I am not mistaken) was out the door, total discrimination. They weren't allowed to speak (teach) in church. That was left to educated males.
Of course that's not all that was happening at the time, but that's
exactly where intended to land. So thank you for answering the question.
So...you see that a woman's station in life which in the Old Testament was pretty okay in the then Jewish culture...
then turns on it's head by the time we arrive at the New Testament.
Camp on that spot for a while. Stay there think about it. We're talking basically 2000 years ago give or take a few. Fair enough?
Earlier you mentioned slavery in reference to personhood. You mentioned Jewish bloodlines coming down through male lines and how that afforded them a type of personhood.
Where were the women in your thoughts? Did women in the New Testament have personhood as we know it today?
How many hundreds of years has it taken, Mark, for women to be afforded the very same rights that YOU have and your father before you and his father before him and so on and so forth, including but not limited to such things as property rights, the right to vote, the right to birth control, and now finally, the right to choose to what happens with or to the contents of HER OWN body?
Women weren't simply granted those rights. They fought for them, died for them, struggled for them for hundreds and hundreds of years and the ONLY way women achieved such rights was because they were granted to them BY MEN. (I'm not yelling at you).
How many women died on account of "back alley" abortions? How many guys hit and ran? How many girls were yanked out of high school, shamed, sent away to have their babies or be FORCED to put their babies up for adoption or FORCED in to the shot gun wedding that I mentioned previously? (Still not yelling at you). I've seen all of the above and it lends no stability to the life of the child in question the one possible exception being adoption into a loving family.
I am certain that the number couldn't be counted because such things happened in clandestine ways but if we could count them I am sure our heads would explode under the sheer psychological and emotional weight of the total.
Not sure how this ties into abortion but I can't wait to find out . If it is about personhood, I guess culturally it was more like the middle east today and they had less rights, and were certainly less a person in status, and it could be said they did not have "person-hood."
I just told you how. Remember the child abuse case I mentioned previously? It was litigated and prosecuted using the animal abuse laws because there existed exactly NO law protecting
human children in the 1800's.
Here she is. Mary Ellen Wilson (McCormack). PLEASE open the link and if you do nothing else,
look at her face. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_WilsonHer case was mounted upon animal abuse laws because there were no child abuse laws. That is to say, this society protected it's DOGS before it ever protected it's children!
It's impossible to say for sure exactly how it was, but I can't wait to find out what your point is.
I'm making my case right now. Let me continue and see if I can drive my point home, wrap this up, tie a bow on it and deliver my message to you.
It has taken
hundreds of years for this society to protect the rights of both it's children and it's women.
Do I think that child abuse and neglect laws are perfect? No. Do I think that the foster care system is adequate? Hell no.
Likewise am I happy about Roe v. Wade? No, as I indicated in an earlier post I was horrified by it at the time. Positively horrified.
But age, time and experience have helped me to see that every child has a story, every woman has a story, every family has a story, and if we don't allow women
to think and decide for their own selves what does that say about how we view women?
Do I think that abortion is killing a baby? In the simplest of terms: yes.
But I don't believe that I have a legitimate right to force my ideas about that (bad analogy alert:don't say you weren't warned) on a woman who believes differently than I do (Example: It's a clump of cells with the potential for life and that's all it is) than I have a right to make every citizen in the US (believer and non) put their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to the flag one nation under God, or force my Christian belief's down someone's throat and make them walk lock step according to what I believe when half the time I can't even do it successfully myself!
We are a flawed people. Our society slowly changes over time. Our level of awareness morphs and develops. We constantly deal with questions that go well beyond our intellectual abilities to sort them out on a moral or ethical level--removal of life support for example. We know how to keep a person "alive". We don't always know if we should, when we should or when we should withdraw.
I'll leave you with a couple or three stories or whatever flies out of my keyboard is what you're going to get here because I could fill an entire thread with stories. I have shared some of these in much older posts. Going off the top of my head now in no particular order.
1. A child age 2 who came to child care every single day dirty. His teacher quietly took him to the laundry room each morning to bathe him in the utility sink so that he could start his day fresh and feeling cared for. He lived with his mother in her parents home. Mom was a partier and a hard one. By the time that I got him in preschool the situation had escalated to the point where the grandparents issued an ultimatum. She either stopped sneaking out to party at all hours, step up to the plate and be a mother or they'd give her a car and she had to get out.
She took the damned car.
So the grandparents stepped up to the plate, finally got her to relinquish her rights to the child and they adopted him. The other teacher and myself were the only teachers invited to the courthouse that day. We sat there having gone through all sorts of mayhem on account of the mother (who was basically checked out) listening as the judge posed questions, first to the grandfather (a tough old guy from back East. The ONLY adult I ever let swear in my classroom because damn it the guy was golden and the children loved him), then the grandmother (sweetest old woman, caring so kind, so in love with her grandson) and finally the boy. When the judge handed the boy the gavel to close the proceedings my sense of joy took flight and all I could do was cry because there were no words sufficient to express what I felt.
I still see them some times. The boy is in a strong academic program, his future is secure the grandparents having made arrangements for him when they're no longer living. He has been taught values that anyone would admire.
What if the grandparents and the teachers hadn't stepped up for the boy? What if the village hadn't embraced him? He'd have either gone with his mother and been neglected very likely died from some sort of overdose or been consumed by the foster care system and bounced around.
That story has a happy ending any way you look at it. We MADE a village for this child. Follow up--Mom has three more kids now and god only knows what condition they are in. The grandparents took on the first child because that was the very best they could do. And by the way, I'm uniquely proud of the teacher who voluntarily, quietly and unobtrusively lent him dignity by bathing him every morning. Her
mother is anonymously writing this post to you. :-)
2. My aunt. Pregnant out of wedlock by mid-60's. My mother took her and the baby in, welfare and all. I have a clear memory of the baby crying in the crib while my aunt stayed her lazy ass in bed. They moved to North Jersey--I'm talking slums here. She again had a baby out of wedlock, had it adopted out by Catholic Charities in Newark. Then she got married, moved out of state, and had 4 more kids. Sounds good right? Think again.
The woman never worked a day in her entire life. Her children were repeatedly taken away from her by child protective services. She lived on welfare almost all her life. She never had actual food (though there were cans of Campbell's Soup) in the house, but always had beer in the fridge (no milk) and cigs on the shelf. My mother would take me up to visit her with bags of groceries but never gave her money. I found out more recently that my father did the exact same thing. Food, no money. The last time I laid eyes on her, her kids had been taken away because it was reported that her husband had sexually abused them right under her nose throughout their childhood while her drunken ass denied the very truth that her kids were telling her and she was--get this-- living in a junk yard. There are many more stories of her "escapades" than what I've told you here.
Now don't get me wrong, I love those kids. But...the mess their mother made of their lives could have been alleviated had she had legal access to safe abortion because quite frankly the woman was too lazy to use birth control and I'm nowhere close to joking here. There isn't one person in the entire family that doesn't see it that way.
I can't forget the baby crying in the crib, the barefoot kids running on the streets, the empty refrigerator except for beer, and the junk yard. That woman should have never had kids because a dog takes better care of it's puppies than she ever did her own children. Those kids grew up being abused, neglected and bouncing around in the foster care system.
Follow up: I reunited with the baby in the crib about 6 years ago. I came armed with photos of her mother. She asked to meet with me one night. She wanted to know what her mother was like when she was young. The only things I could say were that when she was young she was beautiful, she was a good dancer and had a lot of friends because if I had chosen to tell her the unvarnished truth I would have broken her heart and I couldn't bring myself to do it.
Mark I have hundreds of stories of women and children beginning from my own childhood through adulthood up to and including a mother whom I supported just last year whose daughter was facing this difficult decision. I supported her mother to mother and later supported her daughter's personal goals.
I have seen too much, experienced too much, helped too much, to maintain my original position on Roe v. Wade which as I related earlier to Cam was "You made your choice when you chose to have sex so deal with it."
My attitude today is
embrace the woman. I'll go with you to your prenatal appointments, I'll help you learn to be a parent by teaching you how your child develops and how wonderful and unrepeatable both you and they are, I'll go with you for a procedure to terminate your pregnancy and do my best to tend to your needs, and I'll support you in your personal goals. I'll serve you in whatever way that I can and
love you through your experience and unless and until this society as a whole adopts that type of attitude on a massive scale my message to you is to respect the choices that women make and their right to make them.
Go Rams, Go Napoleon the sleeping puppy, my favorite for MVP, in the puppy bowl. Go Justin Thomas and Rivas, and you go Girl!
I did go! I've got two new purses and an olive wreath to prove it! The purses even match the outfits I had in mind! The town was deserted, the stores were deserted and I was in my element with other non-sporty like minded introverts who just wanted to be left the heck alone to shop!
Half my guts are in this post. I hope you appreciate that and the effort it took.
