Silence!

You don’t normally think of Watertown New York as being in the Bible belt, but perhaps these days the entire country is being squeezed by the Bible girdle. Whatever you call it, it’s tight enough to have squeezed Mary Lambert out of the Sunday school teaching job she has held for 54 years. That’s not because she stole funds or molested children as such a large number of church men and women have done; it’s because she’s a woman and Saul of Tarsus had a problem with women.

That’s not to say that Jesus did, the evidence is otherwise, but the First Baptist Church of Watertown, like many of the increasingly medieval Churches in America prefer to ignore the teachings and adopt an attitude of exclusion, denunciation and persecution of their fellow man.

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." wrote Paul to Timothy (2:12) and despite the fact that the Baptists see Jesus as God and God said otherwise, they choose to listen to the man from Turkey who never met him. The key words are “I do not permit” not God does not permit. Bible idolaters do have a problem distinguishing between men and God or admitting that their Bible is something assembled by human agency.

I continue to maintain that there really are no Christians, only Christianists who seek power and worship their own sanctity, but whoever they are and whatever they call themselves, all that separates them from the Taliban or Wahabbists is the fact that we still retain a legal prohibition against writing their “culture and tradition” into law. At least for now.