On March 22, NPR flagged this comment by Jimmy Carter:
“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 is my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I’m an employer, I can pay female employees less salary.”
Carter said practically the same thing on Charlie Rose on March 24 (it was reaired last night), and on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on March 24.
Bill Donohue commented today on Carter’s accusation:
So many women have been beaten, gang raped, tortured, and murdered in Islamic nations—it is a daily occurrence in the Sudan—that it would take the most advanced computers to run a tally. Moreover, there is no penalty for doing so. The barbaric practice of female genital mutilation—nowhere sanctioned by Catholicism—has been visited on hundreds of millions of Muslim women. Why is this so? Because the Catholic Church doesn’t ordain women.
Carter’s scorecard on women appointees, it turns out, stinks to high heaven. When he became president, he appointed 13 cabinet officers; three were women. He appointed 18 women to cabinet and cabinet level positions; his predecessor, Gerald Ford, who was in office for only two-and-a-half years, appointed 22 women. Of the 5 members of Carter’s White House staff, one was a woman. He appointed 259 judges to the federal bench, and 15.8 percent were women.
So according to Carter’s logic, if the Catholic Church is responsible for women being abused across the globe because it doesn’t ordain women, then he is a co-conspirator in these crimes. Which raises the question: Why is Jimmy Carter walking around a free man?
