How Jesus Began Women’s Liberation
WE can pinpoint the dawn of our civilization. It didn’t come in ancient Egypt or Babylon. It didn’t even occur in classical Greece, although Athens gave us an edge. We became civilized on the day, 2,000 years ago, when an itinerant rabbi named Jesus stopped a mob from stoning a woman to death.
When Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” we began to acknowledge the moral equality of girls and women to men. And so began the greatest revolution in human history: the long transition of females from male property to achieving legal and social equality.
The problem is that it hasn’t yet happened elsewhere. For all of the left’s mendacity about the moral equivalence of cultures, our civilization remains by far the most humane and decent — and the only one where women enjoy fully equal rights under the law.
Elsewhere, the situation remains grim, particularly in the Muslim world, where barbarism reigns. Last week, The Washing- ton Post reported a case in which five Pakistani schoolgirls had been tortured and then killed for the crime of dancing (fully clothed) in a video clip.
Pakistani authorities hushed up the crime, but the facts ultimately emerged. Village elders had ordered the girls’ families to kill them to preserve the honor of the tribe. The local authorities also ordered the extermination of the entire family of a boy who may have been in the room with the girls for a few minutes.
How can we pretend — how can the left insist — that a “civilization” that condones such brutality has the same moral authority as our own?
The truest test of a civilization, the basic qualification, is how women are treated. On that day 2,000 years ago, when Jesus stopped a village honor killing, our Judeo-Christian world changed profoundly.
No, women didn’t attain fully equal rights until the latter half of the 20th century. Yet, there was always a difference. In the West, queens could rule, but there never was a female caliph or sultan. In northern Europe in the Middle Ages, women enjoyed greater legal and property rights than they do in much of the Muslim world today. And rare was the daughter tortured to death for flirting with a boy.
How can the left and its academic commissars regard female genital mutilation as merely “a part of their culture”? How can campus dogooders overlook the Islamwide tradition of honor killings? Or just of refusing to let girls learn to read? (Given their often-colorful personal lives, one suspects that few of our “down with the West” activists would long survive in traditional Muslim cultures.)
Even those parts of the West where an obsessive conflation of female virginity and family honor prevailed — Greece, southern Italy and Sicily, southern Spain — were territories long occupied by Arabs, Turks or Berbers, whose subjugation and sequestration of women infected local folkways over the centuries.
Certainly, not all Muslims treat women barbarously. But we must be willing to call out states, justice systems, religious authorities and the girl-slayers’ apologists who perpetuate the savage oppression of women.
Civilization began with the recognition of female humanity and the revolutionary concept that men were as much to blame for sin as women. When Jesus shamed the local bullies into dropping those stones, suddenly Eve wasn’t always the guilty party.
Jesus “got it.” (In the Gospels, he’s most relaxed around female followers.) One wishes that, as the Christians among us celebrate His birth, the rest of the world would get it, too.
Then we wouldn’t have to read about the ritual slaughter of teenage girls. For the crime of laughing and dancing.