So my advice to women is this: If a man ever tries to use the Bible as a weapon against you to keep you from speaking the truth, just throw on a head covering and tell him you’re prophesying instead. To those who will not accept us as preachers, we will have to become prophets.
— Rachel Held Evans wrote this in her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master.”
The Bible has been used as an excuse to treat women as second class citizens or slaves since it was created. I submit to you that either God is a misogynist or else the Bible was written by misogynists and a deity had nothing to do with it.
In the Old Testament the punishment for a rapist was to pay the victim’s family a dowry and marry the victim. In the New Testament Jesus never made a woman an Apostle or instructed one to preach, and the epistles all treat women as inferiors. And arguably the entire restriction against homosexuality in the both Testaments is that a homosexual man who accepts and pleasures someone’s penis in any way is acting as a woman, and thus violating God’s plan by making a superior man act as an inferior woman.
And of course religions have led the fight against women’s rights. Leaving alone birth control and abortion, even the basic rights to property, education, and voting were opposed by Christian leaders throughout history. As recently as 1910 one of the Popes wrote that woman’s suffrage was an abomination. If the all-knowing deity existed, why didn’t it add a few explicit instructions in the Torah, or the Gospels, or the Epistles to forestall these abuses?
I see her point and admire her attitude, but think it’s probably easier if and when one’s husband tries to use the Bible as a weapon against one to keep one from speaking the truth, to just leave him.
I am reminded of my mother’s 94-year-old friend, who when asked if she had ever contemplated divorce from the man she was married to for seventy years, said, ‘No. Homicide sometimes, but not divorce.’