Fighting Hate with Hate

My daughter Marie attended the 3rd annual National Young Women's Leadership Conference sponsored by the Feminist Majority Foundation in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, March 21-22.

To start the conference on a lively note, three young conference organizers ran up and down the aisles leading the 600 attendees in various chants, which included:

Racist, sexist, anti-gay:
Born-again bigots, go away!

Pro-life, that's a lie.
You don't care if women die!

Gay, straight, black, white,
We unite for women's rights!

Having attended a church youth group where born-again Christianity was the norm, Marie was dismayed by the anti-Christian slur but didn't say anything.

Her non-Christian friends, some of whom are Jewish, were the ones who first voiced their personal offense at these chants.

Then the whole group of eight students attending from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, discussed the problem.

As leaders of their campus Feminist Coalition, they didn't like hearing these complex issues reduced to "us and them" dualism.

They felt that even the labels "gay" vs. "straight" and "black" vs. "white" left out a lot of sexual and ethnic identities.

Marie is a Gender Studies major and was raised by a born-again feminist pro-choice mother. She grew up helping me sell my pro-choice book on abortion that aims for dialogue with pro-lifers, not hatred.

"All of us are politically liberal but were upset by continual inferences that conservatives and Republicans were the 'evil other,' " she comments.

Eleanor Smeal and others in the Feminist Majority have spent years in oppositional politics and have been wounded in the process, so their stance is understandable.

However, they need to understand that slurs against "born-agains" can offend other Christians who do not identify with the right-wing politics associated with many born-again believers.

After all, being born a second time--spiritually--is a central Christian teaching, taken from The Gospel According to John, chapter three.

Jesus tells Nicodemus, "...no one can see the kin-dom of heaven without being born from above."

Nicodemus objects, "How can anyone enter the second time into the mother's womb and be born?" and Jesus explains that he's talking about being "born of the Spirit."

Many feminists are trying to move beyond "us and them" thinking.

At the Women-Church liturgy I attended on Sunday, we discussed the human tendency to create separate circles, the inner and the outer circle.

We read together a "Liturgy of the Circle of Love" taken from Miriam Therese Winter's Women Prayer/Woman Song as adapted by Diane A. Ward:

Whenever there is alienation,

Whenever there is misunderstanding,

Whenever there is insensitivity,

And a hardening of the heart...

We must work to become a single unbroken circle,

A wide open, welcoming circle.