JESUS CHRIST OR JUDITH CHRIST
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Bible/judith_christ_bible.htm
TESTING THE FAITH
Was Jesus Christ
really a woman?
New version of Gospels changes gender of 'Son of God' to female
________________________________________
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
A publisher is touting a new edition of the Gospels that identifies Christ as a woman named Judith Christ of Nazareth.
LBI Institute says its version, Judith Christ of Nazareth, The Gospels of the Bible, Corrected to Reflect that Christ Was a Woman, Extracted from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, takes Thomas Jefferson's edited Gospel one step futher by "correcting" the gender of Christ and God.
"This long-awaited revised text of the Gospels makes the moral message of Christ more accessible to many, and more illuminating to all," says Billie Shakespeare, vice president for the publisher, in a statement. "It is empowering. We published this new Bible to acknowledge the rise of women in society."
WND sought comment from the LBI Institute's Stephen Glazier, but he did not return messages.
The new version, according to the publisher, revises familiar stories, tranforming the "Prodigal Son" into the "Prodigal Daughter" and the "Lord's Prayer" into the "Lady's Prayer."
A passage compiled from Luke 2, with corresponding verses at the beginning of each sentence, says: "4 And Joseph went to Bethlehem. 5 To be enrolled with Mary, his wife, who was then pregnant. 7 And she brought forth her firstborn child. 21 And her name was chosen to be Judith."
A passage on the crucifixion, from John 19, says: "17 And She bearing her cross went forth. 18 There they crucified Judith."
A resurrection passage from Matthew 28 states: "1 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. 5 But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Judith who was crucified." 6 "She is not here; for She is risen."
The book's foreword says, "The Jefferson Bible is faithfully followed by the present book, with the corrections in the name and gender of Christ, the gender of God, and some of the parables."
The publisher explains Jefferson used extracts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John rather than the complete books, in order to tell a "linear, complete, organized story" that emphasizes the moral teachings of Christ.
The foreword says, "Events in the Gospel that do not relate to the moral teachings of Christ are often omitted. However, the basic narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection is maintained."
Reader reviews on the book's Amazon.com page included these:
•"One star because there is nothing lower. May the Lord have mercy on the writers!"
•
•"A friend with a Hebrew doctorate noted to me: 'There is no feminine form of the name Jesus (or Joshua). Judith is the feminine form of the name Juda - or Judas.' How perfectly fitting!"
•Reading the other reviews here, I can't believe that this is being touted as being an advance for women's rights. That is just not true. God sent his only SON, not his daughter. It is also true that God loves all of us, male and female the same. He created each of us as we are. We should not strive to become something we are not. This book truly offends me. I agree with the other reviewer, those that produced this book will be held responsible for those they deceive. I pray for each of them.
•May the Lord God punish the author of this translation and its publishers if they do not withdraw this heretic bible from print Amen.
'I will make you a fisher of PEOPLE': New gender-neutral Bible translation angers conservatives
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367570/New-Bible-translation-causes-controversy-addition-women-gender-neutral-language.html
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:19 PM on 18th March 2011
One of America's most popular bibles has caused a stir after bowing to political correctness by introducing women and gender-neutral language in its latest translation.
The New International Version Bible (NIV), used by many of the largest Protestant faiths throughout the U.S., has come under fire by conservative groups who argue the changes to the language may alter the theological message.
For example the 2011 version uses 'people' instead of the more traditional 'men' in some cases.
Controversial: The latest translation of the New International Version Bible has drawn criticism from groups who say the changes alter the theological message
In older prints Mark 1:17 reads: 'And Jesus said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men."'
In the new version the verse reads: '"Come follow me," Jesus said. "And I will send you out to fish for people."'
Similarly John the Evangelist declares in the 2005 version: 'If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar.'
New version: The 2011 NIV version uses 'people' instead of the more traditional 'men' in some cases
In the new translation brother AND sister appears in this verse.
The translation comes from an independent group of biblical scholars that has been meeting yearly since 1965 to discuss advances in biblical scholarship and changes in English usage.
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), an organisation that believes women should submit to their husbands in the home and only men can hold some leadership roles in the church, has decided they would not endorse the next text before it even hit the shops.
In the 2005 version Revelation 3:20 reads: 'If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.
This has been replaced with: 'If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me,' in the 2011 version.
The CBMW argue that 'that person' has a 'very cold, impersonal feel in comparison to both "them” and “him.”
'That is not how we speak when we want to maximise the warmth and intimacy of our relationship with someone in English,' they said.
'“That person” is how we speak about someone we don’t know. '
Similar concerns led the Southern Baptist Convention to reject the NIV's previous translation in 2005.
The NIV Bible is used by many of the largest Protestant faiths. The translation comes from an independent group of biblical scholars that has been meeting yearly since 1965 to discuss advances in biblical scholarship and changes in English usage.
The new version doesn't always use gender neutral language however.
WHAT'S CHANGED?
2005: 'If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.
2011: 'If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.'
2005: 'And Jesus said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men."'
2011: '"Come follow me," Jesus said. "And I will send you out to fish for people."'
2005: 'For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.'
2011: 'For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a human being.'
2005: 'If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.'
2011: 'If any brother or sister sins against you, rebuke the offender; and if they repent, forgive them.'
2005: 'If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues...'
2011: 'If anyone of you adds anything to them, God will add to you the plagues...'
It takes reader sensibility into account by not using inclusive terms for some of the most familiar verses where that might sound jarring.
For instance, Matthew 4:4 is rendered, 'Man shall not live on bread alone.'
This in itself is a change from the previous version, where the same phase read, 'People do not live on bread alone.'
'I think that clause has entered into standard English,' translator Douglas Moo explained of the move back to the more traditional 'man.'
'People know it who don't know the Bible.'
Moo said the translators hope that the phrasing of the new NIV is so natural that the average reader won't be aware of any of the gender language concerns that are debated by biblical scholars and linguists.
The change back to the generic 'man' in verses like Matthew 4:4 is applauded by the CBMW, but linguist Joel M Hoffman, author of And God Said — How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning, said it is simply incorrect.
'Anthropos (the Greek word in the original text) means 'person,' plain and simple,' he said. 'It's as much a mistake as translating 'parent' as 'father''.
He also doesn't accept the argument that 'man' is understood in English to refer to men and women.
'If you walk into a church on Sunday morning and say, "Will every man stand up?" I would be shocked if the women stood up, too.'
The news comes after changes to an updated translation of the New American Bible were announced last week.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said certain words had to be replaced because they had come to mean different things in modern speech.
The word ‘booty’ has been changed to the ‘spoils’ of war in the new version as it has come to mean ‘bottom’ or ‘sexual intercourse’.
'Holocaust’ has also been replaced with ‘burnt offerings’ and 'cereal' to 'grain'.
New Gender-Neutral Bible Stirs Controversy
By Anne Eggebroten
WEnews commentator
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
Many religious women and men herald a new, non-sexist translation of a popular version of the Bible, yet a strong-willed conservative critic cries foul.
(WOMENSENEWS)--James C. Dobson, psychologist and radio personality has come out against Zondervan Publishing House's new edition of its popular New International Version Bible.
The good news is that Zondervan, the world's largest publisher of Bibles, has decided to replace words such as "men," "sons," and "he" (when referring to believers) with "people," "children," and "they" in its new edition, Today's New International Version New Testament with the new language was released this spring and now in bookstores. The complete, inclusive version is expected to be completed in 2005.
The bad news is that Dobson, whose 90-second radio spots are heard on 2,000 stations in the United States, is throwing his weight against these changes. He says they dilute "the masculinity intended by the authors of Scripture" and result in "obscuring the fatherhood of God," as he recently told USA Today.
Actually, Zondervan's is "the last translation to get on the gender-accuracy train," says Mimi Haddad, president of Christians for Biblical Equality, a group working to overcome sex bias in Christian churches. But still the new edition is notable because, with some 150 million Bibles in circulation, the New International Version is second in popularity to only to the King James Version--which reads exactly as it did when it was published in 1611.
Other translations go much further, changing masculine references to God and Jesus--such as "He," "Father" and "Son of Man"--to gender-neutral terms. For example, "The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version," Oxford University Press, 1995, changes the Lord's Prayer to "Our Father-Mother in Heaven . . ." The "Inclusive New Testament" by Priests for Equality, 1994, offers "Abba God in heaven . . ." For "Son of man," the messianic title Jesus often used to refer to himself, Oxford uses "the Human One" and Priests for Equality translates "the Chosen One."
With so many Bible translators and major publishing houses committed to giving the Scriptures a voice that appeals to women today, one wonders why James Dobson is holding out for a male God and men-only in passages that describe the early Christian community. Is the command "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . ." so fragile that it is impaired by loss of the masculine tone?
A look at Dobson's politics provides some of the answers. After the success of his early books, "Dare to Discipline" in 1971 and "The Strong-Willed Child" in 1978, he founded Focus on the Family, a conservative group that teaches parents how to discipline children, maintain strict gender roles and fend off sex in the media. He now has television and radio programs heard around the world.
As right-wing politics gained ground in the 1990s, Dobson became a voice as well-known as preacher Jerry Falwell and conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson. In the culture wars, he and his organization defended "family values" against such "immorality" as divorce, gay marriages, extramarital affairs and legal abortion. Focus devotes over $4 million annually to lobbying and otherwise influencing public policy.
Dobson's fear of neutering the Bible may be genuine. After all, such notable Christians as C.S. Lewis held to a theology in which God's power had some masculine essence, in relation to which all Christians play a passive "feminine" role.
Many thinking men, however--such as scholar Ken Barker, who served on the translation committee for Today's New International Version--feel comfortable changing men-only phrases to more inclusive ones. "We want to communicate clearly God's truth to the people of the 21st century," he says.
Dobson's opposition may lie either in power politics or in the idea that any change threatens respect for Scripture as the inerrant, eternal word of God. He is not alone in this feeling. An Israeli friend tells me, "We can't change one word of the Torah, not one comma"--but at least the Hebrew scriptures are an original ancient text, not a recent translation, as is the King James Version. The Vatican also opposes changing "men" to "people" in Bible translations, though many U.S. Catholic congregations are already using inclusive versions in worship.
But most likely, Dobson's resistance comes from a messy mixture of ideas and emotions--love of the past, inability to abandon eons of entrenched male privilege, fear of empowering women and fear of changing the magical holy words.
When I was mother of a 2-year-old, I bought Dobson's "The Strong-Willed Child" and sought advice on how to cope with tantrums and willfulness. But after some reading, I grew skeptical. His prescriptions for breaking a child's will seemed like boot camp in the Army. For children as young as 15 months, he recommends, "two or three stinging strokes on the legs or bottom" for disobedience. He equates a child's self-will with original sin but somehow thinks that parents, unlike God, should be able to win this battle and produce docile children. Fortunately, I found other books with very different philosophies, and as my children grew older, I began to admire their strong wills. After all, how would a weak-willed child make it in this world? Would he or she become a teen who could "just say no"?
Dobson's books have since gotten more political and polemical. His "Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids," 1990, says we are engaged in a "Civil War of values." He opposes sex education in public schools, childbearing outside of marriage, divorce, homosexuality and gay rights. "When did parents begin to lose control of our children to government bureaucrats and an 'anything goes' culture?" he asks.
While other men grow and learn, Dobson remains stubborn in resisting even an inch of change in Bible translations. His behavior looks only slightly related to deep respect for the Bible. Instead it appears bound up with his other political positions, which are rooted in fear, a sense of losing control and wanting to preserve power.
Anne Eggebroten is author of "Abortion: My Choice, God's Grace," New Paradigm Books, Pasadena, Calf., 1994.
Understanding Feminists and Their Fantasies
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2002/dec02/psrdec02.shtml
The feminist movement has had an immense effect on American culture, laws, education and social relationships. A principal tenet of the doctrine of Political Correctness, feminism is the prevailing dogma on university campuses and in the book industry. The feminists are powerful enough in the media, in schools and colleges, and in politics and government to intimidate most of their opposition, especially men.
The best book that methodically challenges the feminist ideology is Carolyn Graglia's Domestic Tranquility. She does a brilliant job of refuting the feminist ideologues' tiresome tirades. Check out any library under "women" and you will find that Mrs. Graglia's book is pitted against hundreds of feminist volumes. Phyllis Schlafly's The Power of the Positive Woman, published in 1977, is long since out of print and was censored by the libraries when it was in print.
But refuting feminist ideology is not enough. It is necessary to have intelligent critiques of feminist behavior, hypocrisies, language, and political and social activism. We need exposés of the ripple effects of their ideology in the laws that were changed during the last generation, in their proposals that were defeated, in debates in legislatures, in the scripting of television programs and movies, in the social experimentation in our armed services, in day-to-day social relationships, and in the changing attitudes and roles of men and women.
A few brave women have tackled limited parts of this movement; e.g., Suzanne Fields' wonderful columns in the Washington Times, some delicious dissections of feminist hypocrisies by Ann Coulter, Christina Hoff Sommers' dissertations on the feminists' war against boys, and several books exposing the double standards in the military. Criticisms of feminism are conspicuously absent from the writings of otherwise prolific male authors and commentators, and the few who have tried it have suffered career-damaging retaliation.
Years ago, I subscribed to a newsletter of timely jokes written by a successful practitioner of clean one-line comedy. I got tired of the abundance of jokes about dumb wives and wrote the author that I would cancel my subscription unless he gave equal time to jokes about feminists, whose antics and remarks are far funnier. He never answered me -- he didn't dare face the wrath of the feminists, knowing they have no sense of humor.
My new book called Feminist Fantasies (just published by Spence Publishing Company in Dallas) is the first book that tackles the feminists where the rubber meets the road -- on the battlefields of television and radio talk shows, in legislative hearings, and in college courses. The book consists of 92 of my essays on feminism written over the past thirty years chronicling how the feminists spewed their anti-family message in the media, in state capitols, and on university campuses. These essays show how their destructive dogmas took root in our culture and led many young women down the primrose path to a lonely, barren life.
The St.Louis Post-Dispatch ran a four-column news article this year about an aging feminist, a 30-year member of the National Organization for Women, who is still pouting because in the 1960s she was called a stewardess instead of an airline attendant. She showed the reporter her scrapbook of treasured pictures -- not of any grandchildren, but of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Florence Kennedy. Pathetically, she fantasizes that the Equal Rights Amendment will make her happy.
Feminist Fantasies provides a unique look at feminism from the battlefield where the action is -- where I've been for the past thirty years. It takes you inside the controversies of the feminist movement from its heyday in the 1970s through its second and third waves. No other book explains how feminist dogma has been translated into political strategy and tactics, federal and state legislation, litigation to invite judicial activism, movie and television scripts, newspaper features, military regulations, college courses and school textbooks. No other book provides a reasoned criticism of feminist follies in every aspect of the culture.
Feminist Fantasies shows how the feminists captured the media, including its famous talking heads, and converted television into a maker of social trends rather than a reporter or a mirror of real life. I trace the feminist campaign to reinvent the family in their own image through television talk shows and sitcoms, movies made by Hollywood and for television, music from opera to rock, newspaper news and editorials, art, advertising, and business magazines.
Feminist Fantasies tackles the contradictory goals of feminism: equality plus preferential treatment. It explains the feminists' devious devices to achieve power in the workplace through deceitful sloganeering such as "comparable worth" and "glass ceiling." It exposes how the feminists define equality as access to tax-funded abortions and same-sex marriages. It tells about their campaigns to restructure the American legal system, to pursue their global goals, to enforce double standards, and to use academia to locate and train recruits for their cause. It describes the feminists' identity crisis.
Feminist Fantasies should be must reading for every young woman. It's a vaccine against the contagious disease of feminism. I dare the Women's Studies departments of colleges and universities to use it to balance the scores of feminist books customarily assigned to brainwash female students. The foreword by Ann Coulter underscores this book's importance.
This book shows how the longtime feminist goal of a gender-neutral society was the motivation behind the campaigns for the Equal Rights Amendment and for the feminization of the military. Feminist goals are incompatible with the combat readiness we need in times of war, a priority that has taken on a new urgency because of events since 9/11. The brave firefighters who charged up the towers of the World Trade Center, and our Special Forces who dared to enter the caves in Afghanistan, need our help to defend themselves and their work against the feminists who despise macho men.
The feminists' goal is to eradicate from our culture everything that is masculine and remake us into a gender-neutral society. We see their handiwork in textbook revision and in the constant haranguing by the language gestapo to force us to use such gender-neutral idiocies as he/she. We see this in the war on boys through abolishing recess, overprescribing Ritalin, and the zero tolerance policies that forbid them to play cops and robbers. We see this in the sex integration of Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, which was a battle not for sex equality but to eliminate macho men. We see this in the implementation of Title IX, which is used not to give women equal opportunity in colleges but as a vehicle to abolish wrestling teams and other sports in which men outperform women.
The feminists showcased their goal in the New York Times Sunday Style section on November 3, 2002. The headline was "She's Got to Be a Macho Girl," and the subtitle was: "In a role reversal, teenage girls are the aggressors when it comes to boys." The article boasted about "the trickle-down effects of feminism" which have taught teenage girls to initiate sex "in a more aggressive manner." One high school senior pontificated: "No one is a stay-at-home mom anymore. Women don't have to wear skirts. We are empowered and we can do whatever we want."
The feminists constantly intimidate men with their assault on the English language. When Mitt Romney, campaigning for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, called the histrionics of his Democratic feminist opponent "unbecoming," the feminists exploded in tantrums of accusations that he had used a sexist word. Actually, since unbecoming means unattractive and creating an unfavorable impression, the word is most apt to politely describe a feminist politician. As Harry Truman used to say, if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
Feminist Fantasies offers hope and moral support to women who want to liberate themselves from feminist dogmas and build a traditional family. The book does not recite platitudes on how to be a good wife and mother. Instead, it provides intellectual ammunition to help young women refute their contemporaries who disdain marriage and motherhood. My lectures on hundreds of college campuses, which attract large crowds, prove that students have never heard the facts and arguments about feminism that I have the nerve to present to hostile audiences.
Understanding feminism requires knowledge of how the feminists coopted our culture and built their political power. Feminist Fantasies tells this never-before-told history through critical commentaries that contemporaneously addressed feminist issues during the past thirty years. No other book in print deals head-on with feminism like Feminist Fantasies.
How the Feminists Built Their Power
If you wonder how the feminists are able to wield so much clout with politicians, the explanation is in a new book called Guide to Feminist Organizations. As Midge Decter says in her foreword, this book is long overdue, and we thank Capital Research Center and author Kimberly Schuld for providing such a useful tool.
By setting forth the facts about 35 feminist groups, this guide clarifies how the radical feminists built their political power so that they are falsely touted by the media as the voice of "women," even though all polls show that the big majority of women reject the label "feminist." The feminists did it by organization, networking and lots of money, much of which came from leftwing foundations, corporations headed by weak-kneed executives, and grants of taxpayer funds.
The feminist groups detailed in the guide include the noisy activist organizations, the decades-old women's groups that had respectable reputations until they were captured by the feminists, the think tanks that grind out dubious data to fortify feminist follies, and the abortion-propaganda groups masquerading under the euphemism "women's health." Networking keeps them "on message" and well-funded. Feminist organizations even demand that government fund their ideologies and themselves, and transfer to feminists the power they think that men now enjoy.
These groups may appear to have different missions, but they have a common ideology: Women are victims of an oppressive patriarchal society, and all men are guilty both individually and collectively. Women's problems are not personal but societal, and require constitutional, legislative or litigious remedies.
First among these activists is the National Organization for Women (NOW), which spent $5,292,025 in 2000. Loud and brassy, NOW lobbies for feminist and pro-abortion legislation, organizes protest rallies, initiates lawsuits, and always backs Democratic Party candidates and proposals. The NOW agenda supports all abortion rights including partial-birth abortion, gay and lesbian rights, worldwide legalization of prostitution, and unrestricted access to pornography in libraries. According to the guide, "NOW revels in attacking Christianity and traditional values, conservative ideas and men," with Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell and Promise Keepers their favorite targets.
NOW gave unquestioning support to Bill Clinton despite his shabby sexual shenanigans. Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles NOW, spilled the beans about how Clinton bought NOW's support with taxpayer grants for "tobacco control" from the Department of Health and Human Services: "California NOW and National NOW received three-quarters of a million dollars ($767,099) during the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky scandals."
The League of Women Voters abandoned its former credibility and became a federally funded lobby to expand the size of government so that it can accommodate expensive feminist programs. The League, which spent $4,620,246 in 2000, supports gun control, abortion access, universal health care, more environmental regulation, and increased power for the United Nations.
The American Association of University Women turned itself into a vehicle to promote off-the-wall feminist hypotheses that aren't taken seriously even in the academic world. AAUW spent $9,512,044 in 2000.
The feminists use the YWCA to teach radical feminism to the next generation. The Girl Scouts went feminist after they took Betty Friedan on their board; they dropped "loyalty" from the oath, began a condom-friendly sex-ed program, and made belief in God optional.
Most of the activist feminist organizations have 501(c)(3) sister groups with interlocking directors. They pursue the same agenda, including government-funded daycare, paid entitlements for family leave, unrestricted access to abortion, comparable worth, lesbian rights, affirmative action, universal health insurance, and anti-male implementation of Title IX. As the Guide states, "It's hard to see where NOW political lobbying ends and NOW Foundation education activity begins."
Funding for feminist foundations comes from many sources that ought to know better. NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund has raked in corporate donations from a long list topped by ABC, AT&T, American Express, Chase Manhattan, Colgate-Palmolive, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, New York Times Foundation, Revlon, Saks, and New York brokerage houses; from Ford, Rockefeller and other wealthy foundations; and $1,678,252 in government grants since 1996 given by the Clinton Administration. NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund boasted income of $7,318,269 in 2000.
Such vast amounts of money are used to develop political clout and enable the feminists to raise and spend millions of dollars in political campaigns. EMILY's List, which contributes only to Democratic pro-abortion feminist candidates, spent more than $20 million in the 2002 election cycle and is the largest political action committee, twice as large as the union that is second largest.
This political money has translated into a stranglehold on the Democratic Party and sycophantic cheerleading for radical feminist politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and their clones running in 2002. Follow the money and you will understand why Democratic Senators don't dare to cast any vote or make any off-hand remark that could be construed as interfering with the feminist or pro-abortion agenda. EMILY's List website boasts that Tom Daschle said, "The reason I'm here today as Senate Majority Leader can be said in two words: EMILY's List." Rep. Nancy Pelosi said, "I know that I would not ... be the Democratic Whip of the House without the work that was done by EMILY's List."
Hooray for Hootie!
At last we have a real man who can resist the histrionics of the pushy feminists. It's so refreshing to know that somewhere there is an American man willing to stand his ground -- on any issue -- and tell the feminists he is not going to knuckle under to their nagging, extortion, pressure tactics or media tantrums.
William Johnson, known to friends as Hootie, is the president of the Augusta National Golf Club located in northeastern Georgia which has hosted the world's most famous golf tournament, the Masters, ever since 1934. A pushy outfit called the National Council of Women's Organizations (NCWO) has been trying to force the all-male golf club to alter its admissions policy and admit women. The feminists are not appeased by the fact that women can play golf on the Augusta National course; they demand to be members of the club.
Hootie responded by saying the club will not submit to pressure to change its admissions policy from an "outside group with its own agenda." Calling NCWO's tactics "offensive and coercive," he added, "We will not be bullied, threatened or intimidated. We do not intend to become a trophy in their display case."
Bully for Hootie! He probably read the Supreme Court's decision in Boy Scouts v. Dale, wherein the high court upheld the right of private associations to set their own membership rules.
The New York Times says that Hootie "counterpunched with harsh words and a complete resistance to bowing to the demands." The reporter must have been shocked, shocked that any man has the nerve to counterpunch against the feminists (even though the feminists have been claiming for years that they want to be treated like men instead of ladies).
The NCWO manifested its malicious streak by going to Coca-Cola, IBM and Citigroup to demand that they terminate their corporate sponsorship of the Masters tournament unless the Augusta National Golf Club changes its policy. The NCWO got easy help from its feminist friends in the media who then targeted only Hootie, but not the NCWO, as "defiant" and "angry" (words of the Associated Press), and as "defiant" and "combative" (words of the New York Times).
Hootie then announced that the club would cancel commercial advertising on the televised 2003 Masters tournament in order to protect the corporations from the feminists' wrath. The Masters tournament already gets the highest television ratings, and its fans will cheer the delightful prospect of watching a sports event without any commercials.
Maybe Hootie suspected that the corporate executives wouldn't have the stamina to stand up to the feminists. He's probably right. Most corporation executives get wobbly in the knees when the feminists start chanting their mantra "discrimination" and accusing the men of "sexism."
The feminists tried to use Tiger Woods, who won the Masters in 2002 for the third time, as a prop in their publicity stunt to advance their special-interest agenda. When asked what he thinks about Augusta National's rules, Tiger replied with the good sense that has made him a star and a role-model: "They're entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them."
British golfers also kept their eyes on the ball. A spokesman for the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, which runs the British Open at Muirfield where women are excluded as members, commented, "We take the Open to the best links in the British Isles. We don't engage in social engineering."
Under the Clinton Administration, the feminists made athletics one of the arrows in their campaign to emasculate America. They co-opted Title IX for their own agenda, sabotaging its original purpose of ensuring equal educational opportunity for women and turning it into a weapon to force the abolition of scores of college men's wrestling, track and gymnastics teams.
The feminists have been crowing that recent achievements by women athletes are the happy result of Title IX. But when a reporter asked for a comment on Title IX from Jennifer Capriati, one of the best women tennis players in the world, she replied, "I have no idea what Title IX is. Sorry."
The name of the National Council of Women's Organizations is a misnomer because it's not a "women's" council, it's a feminist council. The all-women's organizations I belong to wouldn't belong to it.
The NCWO has typical feminist goals such as Senator Barbara Boxer's current passion: ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). NCWO members are probably hoping to be named to CEDAW's Article 17 Committee of "experts" to monitor compliance so they can harass Hootie with UN backing.
NCWO's extremist feminist goals also include affirmative action for women, ratification of the long-defunct Equal Rights Amendment, pro-abortion and pro-gay rights legislation, government wage control camouflaged as "pay equity," the Clintonista feminists' use of Title IX, and government babysitting services. Its goals parallel those of the National Organization for Women and Eleanor Smeal's Feminist Majority, two of its member groups.
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Phyllis Schlafly, the president of Eagle Forum, was named one of the 100 most important women of the 20th century by the Ladies' Home Journal. In a ten-year battle, Mrs. Schlafly led the pro-family movement to victory over the principal legislative goal of the radical feminists, the Equal Rights Amendment. She is America's most articulate and successful opponent of the radical feminist movement, and she has lectured or debated on over 500 college campuses. She is the author or editor of 20 books on subjects as varied as politics (A Choice Not An Echo), family and feminism (The Power of the Positive Woman), child care (Who Will Rock the Cradle?), nuclear strategy (Strike From Space and Kissinger on the Couch), education (Child Abuse in the Classroom and Turbo Reader). Her monthly newsletter called The Phyllis Schlafly Report is now in its 36th year. Her syndicated columns and daily radio commentaries can be read and heard live on Eagle Forum's website: www.eagleforum.org. Mrs. Schlafly is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University, received her J.D. from Washington University Law School and her Master's in Political Science from Harvard University. The mother of six children, she was the 1992 Illinois Mother of the Year.
The Impact of Feminism on the Family
http://www.jeremiahproject.com/prophecy/feminist2.html
Gloria Steinem sounded the war cry, “We don't just want to destroy capitalism,” she said, “We want to tear down the whole f____ patriarchy.”
As the women's movement turned fanatical and ugly in the 1960s and 70s the focus began to shift from reform and equal opportunity. The feminist leaders - humorless, militant, pugnacious, and angry with their particular lot in life, launched programs that were anti-God, anti-capitalism, anti-family, anti-birth, anti-heterosexual and fostered a virulent hatred of anything having to do with males. They no longer wanted to equalize the status of women, but instead wanted to irreversibly alienate women from men and vice versa.
“The fiction of fatherhood is a giant religion called Christianity.”
-Jill Johnston in Lesbian Nation
Home and traditional family values are no longer accepted answers to the questions, "Who am I?" and, "What am I here for?" The preeminent purpose for some women have become their careers, and they decided against the value of home and family.
Taken over by radical leftists committed to adultery, lesbianism, and the perpetuation of "self" over motherhood and family, the women's movement led by the National Organization of Women (NOW), became an adjunct of the Democratic party. The Democratic Party left millions of evangelicals and pro-family Christians when they lurched to the left under George McGovern and his successors. During the 1970s, the Democratic Party abandoned its centrist pro-family base and became captive to the special interest of the radical left, including the feminists, extreme environmentalists and gay rights activists.
Radical feminists linked all the Marxist causes together by writing, "We want to destroy the three pillars of class and a caste society - the family, private property, and the state." [Peter Collier and David Horowith, Deconstructing the Left: From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, 1991].
To accomplish their goals, organizations such as the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association, and the People for the American Way, the Gay-Lesbian Caucus, and their ilk have arisen to champion unrestrained sex, homosexual rights, abortion on demand, while they attack Christian beliefs, conservative organizations, and all the traditional family structures of America. Feminism is an evil monster!
Dissolving the Family
Betty Friedan, founder of NOW, referred to traditional family life as a "comfortable concentration camp" from which women needed liberation. Sheila Cronan, one of the feminist movements most respected leaders and spokeswomen said, "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking marriage."
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s they launched an all-out assault on our nation's time-honored laws protecting the marriage union. Divorce was presented as an easy way out for the frustrated, disappointed or adventuresome.
Mel Krantzler, writing in Creative Divorce, stated: "To say goodbye is to say hello ... hello to a new life - to a new, freer, more self-assured you. Hello to new ways of looking at the world and of relating to people. Your divorce can turn out to be the very best thing that ever happened to you." That was a widely held professional opinion for almost a decade.
Within a few years, they and their Radical Left allies succeeding in overturning all fifty of the nation's "fault" divorce statutes and replacing them with what is called no-fault divorce. It was understood as an effort to secure for women the economic, political and social rights and protections that men have always enjoyed. A spate of pseudo-scientific studies assured parents that children were resilient and would recover quickly from the effects of divorce.
In their zeal they also stripped away from women, especially mothers with children, many of the economic and legal protections they had historically enjoyed in this nation, thus creating a whole new underclass in American society: the abandoned housewife.
The number of displaced homemakers rose twenty-eight percent between 1975 and 1983 to more than three million women. Another twenty percent increase from 1983 to 1988 brought that number to more than four million. An astonishing sixty-one percent of those women suddenly left alone had children under the age of ten at home. Often without job skills and stranded without alimony or child support, as many as seventy percent of these women make less than ten thousand dollars a year, and fifty percent are employed at minimum wage or less. It is, thus, readily apparent why a full seventy-five percent of all Americans living below the poverty line in the United States are women and their children.
[Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America (New York: William Morrow, 1986)]
Promise Keeping Men are Threatening to NOW
A million men willing to put their wives and families first is very frightening to Patricia Ireland, head of the National Organization of Women (NOW). The men of Promise Keepers promise to love their wives, their children, and their neighbors as themselves, in keeping with the teachings of Jesus Christ, according to the New Testament. Why that should be threatening to Ireland and others of her ilk is apparent. One only has to look at their lifestyles for the answer. Non-Christians have no understanding of God's plan for our lives. What they DO have is a great deal of fear about the subject.
In more recent years feminism has turned more to a fight for abortion rights, lesbian rights, environmentalism and witchcraft. Gone are concerns about equal pay, assertiveness, and expressing one's individuality. In their place are women ensconced in bitterness, hatred, and resentment.
It is frightening for Ireland, and for Karen Taggart of the Washington, DC Lesbian Avengers, who said about the Promise Keepers, " we'll show them that lesbians are everywhere. We'll show them that lesbians have super powers" Taggart is truly afraid that the men of Promise Keepers have tapped into just such a super power that will render her message irrelevant to women.
What is it exactly that Promise Keepers promise that is threatening to NOW?
The men of Promise Keepers promise:
• To honor Jesus Christ and obey His word.
• To pursue relationships with other men, provide one another with spiritual strength to keep his promises.
• To practice spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity.
• To build strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values.
• To support his church.
• To reach beyond racial and denominational barriers.
• To influence the world by witnessing and obeying, loving God and loving his neighbor as himself.
Abortion Kills a Child
Militant feminists searching for power found the absolute best way to exercise their control was in the area of reproduction. Abortion became the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren't necessary. They don't need men to be happy. They certainly don't want males to be able to exercise any control over them.
The real message of the 'Dan Quayle' Murphy Brown episode was that women don't need men. shouldn't desire them, and that total fulfillment and happiness can be achieved without men or husbands. Abortion thus became the ultimate symbol of women's emancipation from the power and influence of men.
With men being precluded from the ultimate decision-making process regarding the future of life in the womb, they are reduced to their proper, inferior role.
Gender feminists rallied in Beijing China in 1995 for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The Beijing document -- the text of which was heavily influenced by Bella Abzug and other radical feminists -- includes over 200 references to "gender" in various contexts, i.e., "gender equality," "mainstreaming a gender perspective," "gender diversity," etc.
However, "husband" and "wife" are nowhere to be found in the 121-page document, and the terms "mother" and "family" were proposed to be changed to "caretaker" and "household." Clearly, the effort to change the semantics associated with the family is the first step in altering the way the world thinks about the family.
The roles defined by nature for men and women had become clouded in feminists minds and has led to all kinds of confusion, suspicion, and distrust between the sexes.
Women were liberated from the home, from their husbands, from their children - from having to bear children at all. Fathers were liberated from their authority. Children were liberated from limits, from rules, even their parents. And the entire population was liberated from moral and ethical standards. Yet it turns out that those things were precisely what held society together. "Family values" have been so scorned that we are left with neither families nor values. What do we have? Rampant illegitimacy and sexual disease, widespread divorce, and a generation of unloved, undisciplined, and uncared-for kids.
