“God is pro-woman”…?

A few weeks after I came out to my parents I was having a chat to my mum. We got to talking about lesbianism and “homosexuality” (not my choice of word, obviously!) And from there to feminism, how women are treated. After a little while my mum said to me that “God is pro-woman; he is hurt by all the rapes, all the incidents of domestic violence…”

I raised with my mum the part of the bible where the punishment for a man raping a woman is that he has to marry her (it’s in Deuteronomy 22 if you’re interested). My mum didn’t have a response to this, but said she’d get back me. She discussed it with my dad, and apparently God set this in place so that the woman wouldn’t have to be an outcast in society!!! As in, she had to marry this man so that he could protect her!!! The man who raped her had to protect her. I was so stunned when she said this, I just couldn’t get over it. I still haven’t to be honest, two weeks later – it just doesn’t make sense.

I tried to raise the alternative interpretation, favoured by all the feminists I know, that actually in the bible rape is essentially theft of a man’s property (either the woman’s husband or her father). There are many other things in the bible which support this, for example, the last of the Ten Commandments lists a man’s wife in the same sentence as his servants and his animals. I haven’t really had the opportunity to bring up all the other intensely misogynistic passages in the bible, and I might wait until my parents bring it up, just because it’s often quite difficult.

I’m currently reading “Right Wing Women: The Politics of the Domesticated Female” by Andrea Dworkin, and it has raised some things about this precisely. Dworkin often talks about male ownership of women, and how this comes from religion. It’s made me think of this again.

I’ve just had a quick look around, googling it to see how people have explained it, and haven’t been able to find a thing about it. Admittedly I haven’t done a comprehensive review of theological literature, but still….

It just doesn’t make sense! I don’t get how people can actually say the bible is the inerrant word of God (obviously some Christians don’t say that, but a lot of evangelicals do) and still say that God loves women and men equally.

There will be more on this soon, I’m sure.

Sam