Jimmy Carter Cites Religion As A Root Cause Of Violence Against Women

Jimmy Carter is attacking violence against women and blasting the people who use religion to propagate it. Calling the the physical and emotional abuse, subjugation, trafficking, and inequality of women the “worst and most pervasive and unaddressed human rights violation on Earth,” the Democratic former U.S. President is out with a new book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power.

In a weekend interview, Carter, a Georgia Democrat, told NPR that “you can pick out individual verses throughout the Bible that shows that the verse favors your particular preference, and the fact that the Catholic Church, for instance, prohibits women from serving as priests or even deacons gives a kind of a permission to male people all over the world, that well, if God thinks that women are inferior, I’ll treat them as inferiors. If she’s my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I’m an employer, I can pay my female employees less salary.”

This is a long-running focus for former President Carter, who served in the White House from 1977-1981. In 2009 he left his Southern Baptist religion, writing that “carefully selected verses” in the Bible were used “to justify the superiority of men.”

A review in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette describes the “scope of the material” in Carter’s book as “astounding.”

He begins with the problems in his own denomination concerning women in leadership roles in the church (he and his wife, Rosalyn, left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2009 over this issue), and then outlines the litany of abuse that women suffer, often through the misplaced and misinterpreted concepts that are based in various religious worldviews: women in prisons, sexual assaults and rape, sexual assaults in the military, women victims of war, lack of education and the spread of diseases, the genocide of girl fetuses, female circumcision (genital cutting), slavery, the spread of AIDS in Africa, honor killings, “dowry deaths” and sex trafficking.

The notes from Carter’s new book state that President Carter’s “urgent report covers a system of discrimination that extends to every nation.”

Women are deprived of equal opportunity in wealthier nations and “owned” by men in others, forced to suffer servitude, child marriage, and genital cutting. The most vulnerable, along with their children, are trapped in war and violence.

Think Progress notes that the “World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one in three women around the world is subject to sexual violence at some point in her life. In many parts of the world, women still aren’t receiving adequate health care and education. Every year, about 14 million girls under the age of 18 are given away as child brides, and an additional 4 million women and girls are bought and sold into slavery. And according to the United Nations, at least 125 million girls in Africa and the Middle East have undergone female genital mutilation.”

Carter spoke with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell in an interview that aired Sunday:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/nbcNewsOffsite?guid=mtp_07_carter_140323

Hat tip: Think Progress