It also included the
rigorous subordination of women, which may explain why this statement, uniquely among NCC documents of recent years, does not mention sexism.
Accepting the feminist criticisms that the ideology of love as self - sacrifice has played a role in the
systematic subordination of women's needs and abilities, they define love between husband and wife primarily as mutuality.
They have used this revised doctrine of God to argue for
the subordination of women to men in the present, in a manner that has at times had terrible pastoral consequences.
With the fall,
the subordination of woman to man becomes a reality, the first example of exploitation in human relationships.
If
the subordination of women to men is, in fact, a human ordinance, we deny the principle of justification when we turn it into law.
Mesmerized by current trends, Porter turns patronizing when the Scholastics seem to her to get something like
the subordination of women within marriage wrong, noting that they «did not have the kind of historical / critical perspective on Scripture that would have enabled them to relativize these precepts.»
The Holy Father, by contrast, says we must look to our theological pre-fall history — a history that does not involve
the subordination of women to men — in order to understand the relationship to which God calls men and women.
This union is neither a revocable contract between independent and equal parties nor mandated by an unchanging divine law which legitimates
the subordination of women.
For too long the Bible has been used to perpetuate the silencing and
subordination of women, and the fact that only 10 percent of U.S. pastors are women makes complaints about the supposed «effeminization of church» infuriating.
Jerome Murphy - O'Connor, I Corinthians, NT Message, 10 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1979), thinks that Paul is not addressing
the subordination of women but the distinction of sexes: «Women should be women, and men should be men, and the difference should be obvious» (P. 106).
It certainly forbids divorce except in the case of adultery (and remarriage even then), but has no objection to slavery; and appears to support
the subordination of women.
Taking an ancient heresy of the church and transforming it into the ultimate theological trump card for
the subordination of women?
Thus, when men employ these liberties socially to deny women their rights, a human rights violation is not seen to be committed.21 History dictates
the subordination of women to men and thus women's «enforced inequality» 22 is a reality of which is mirrored in domestic and international law preventing the protection of women in conflict and peace and the pursuit of accountability.
A human rights framework recognises that across the world some traditional, religious and cultural practices have been used to justify
the subordination of women and violations of their human rights.