The Defense Department has opened a criminal investigation into a "secret online Facebook group of active-duty and veteran Marines (which) shared thousands of naked and private photos of Marine Corps women....The invitation-only group, called 'Marines United' and made up of more than 30,000 active duty Marines and veterans, built on-line dossiers on Marine women WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT, (caps mine) LISTING DOZENS OF WOMEN'S NAMES, RANKS, SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES AND WHERE THEY ARE STATIONED."
As if that weren't enough, one woman, who had photos taken from her Instagram account - nothing scandalous, just her saying "good morning" - and posted to the group, was sickened by the screen shot sent to her by friends: "But the comments went just as far toward sexual assault and rape and degrading as your imagination can go."
She isn't the only woman who has felt violated by the stolen photos and comments:
"In one photograph, surreptitiously taken in February, a female corporal from Camp LeJeune...is shown bent over from behind. The image, once posted online, was flooded with derogatory comments, including suggestions that she should be raped."
Predictably, one of the Marines belonging to Marines United, who has said that he "played no role in posting, organizing, or disseminating the photographs, argued that people were overreacting. 'It was just nudes...I scrolled past it...I don't feel that it's right, but...there are other groups, and many are civilians, that are the same way."
Of course this Marine is right that there are plenty of other groups that are the same way: morally reprehensible and sexist. But - over-reacting? I don't think so. Since when are women over-reacting when men seem to think that dominating women and 'controlling' their bodies and/or images of their bodies is their divine right?
And "divine right" is not an over-statement. For centuries women have struggled against discrimination and domination because of their gender, and much of it has stemmed from misguided, and yes! evil - misinterpretations of Scripture. Internationally known theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, in her book "Quest for the Living God," observes
"Despite women's identity as human persons and the rich range of their gifts, their worth has consistently been subordinated and demeaned in the theories, symbols, rituals, and structures of both society and church, most of which they had no part in shaping."
She continues,
"An early Christian hymn declares that the waters of Baptism make people into a community of brothers and sisters bonded in mutual love: 'there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3:28). Despite this theology rooted in the ministry of Jesus and the ongoing presence of the Spirit, and despite the irreplaceable participation of women in the founding and spread of the church, women were marginalized once the community became somewhat established. Barred from governing, women have for centuries had no voice in articulating the church's doctrine, moral teaching, and law. Banned from pulpit and altar, their wisdom has not been permitted to interpret the word of the gospel nor their spirituality to lead the church assembled in prayer.
"The sheer fact of the omission of women from the public sphere led to the assumption that men have a privileged place before God. In this milieu theology developed grossly misogynist views of women's very nature."
One of the third century church thinkers, Tertullian, viewed every woman "as a 'second Eve'; just as she softened up with her cajoling words 'he (Adam) against whom the devil could not prevail by force,' so too all women are the 'gateway of the devil'; they tempt men and because of their sin the Son of God had to die." (Johnson)
Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas defined woman as a "defective male,' misbegotten when the man performs with less than perfect vigor during intercourse." (Johnson)
"In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther taught that a wife must live in obedience to her husband; while he goes off to the affairs of business, she is to stay at home 'like a nail driven into the wall,' minding the house: 'In this way is Eve punished.'" (Johnson)
If women are second Eves, needing to be punished, the gateway of the devil, and defective males, is it any wonder that men, believing themselves to be in a privileged place before both God and others, also have believed that they have the divine right to subjugate and dominate women? That they don't need women's consent to do what they want with women's bodies? Doesn't this history help us to understand why even in our most respected Marine Corps there are men who feel they don't need a woman's consent to view nude photos of her or even to write about raping her? Or that a President makes no apologies for talking about sexually abusing women, dismissing his attitude as "locker room talk"?
When, in the 1960's and 70's, the women's movement "galvanized women to analyze the causes of their subordinate situation and to strategize for change...this spilled over into women's religious lives, leading to something akin to a spiritual uprising." (Johnson) What had all these centuries' worth of misinformation and derogatory comments about who women are in men's eyes and God's eyes done to women's self-understanding and estimate of who they are? What they are capable of becoming? The damage was - and is -incalculable, a damage that has affected not only women but their communities. What have the communities lost because mutual love and respect was lost between God's equally loved sons and daughters?
What could communities accomplish internationally if women were not so illiterate and under-educated? If women and their children were not 80% of all refugees? If women's work was valued financially on an equal basis with men's? If women were not abused, raped, and murdered on a regular basis? If women were respected, loved, and whole? If women realized that, contrary to what they've internalized, they have inestimable worth in the eyes of God?
"Imagine what seven billion humans could accomplish if we all loved and respected each other. Imagine."
Current theology - much of it developed by women theologians - proclaims the truth of God's relationship with women:
"God loves women and passionately desires their flourishing. When violence is done to women, to their bodies or their spirits, it is an insult to divine glory. When liberating advances are made that overcome bias and promote the dignity of women, it is a victory for the reign of God, Struggling to claim their human dignity on every level, women find the God of life walking with them and supporting their efforts, for the Holy One who sprung the slaves out of Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead is unrepentant in siding with those deprived of fullness of life." (Johnson)
Women have also discovered that in their spirituality and prayer lives, they can expand the number of words used to describe God. To use only male images to describe God not only limits the reality of Who God is, but reinforces an unequal relationship between men and women by describing God exclusively as a ruling man. God is pure Spirit, love, compassion, and mercy, Whose all-embracing love liberates women into their own freedom. God is power and strength within women, giving them courage and creativity to use their gifts, even rebuild the world. God is Holy Mystery, Who cannot be confined to one set of images or names, but Who transcends them all.
""By giving rise to the unwarranted idea that maleness has more in common with divinity than femaleness, exclusively male images imply that women are somehow less like unto God." (Johnson.)
There is, for example, a cluster of images for the divine in Scripture that center on women's experience of mothering. "In the Bible a number of texts, especially of the prophets, depict the Holy One of Israel as a woman who is pregnant, crying out in labor, giving birth, breast-feeding, carrying her young, and nurturing their growth. The underlying point always seeks to convey the unbreakable compassion of God for the covenanted people:
"Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." (Isaiah 49: 15)
Pope John Paul 1, that deeply spiritual and short-lived Pope, said in 1978, as he compared war to a fevered illness: "God is our father; even more God is our mother. God does not want to hurt us, but only to do good for us, all of us. If children are ill, they have additional claim to be loved by their mother. And we too, if by chance we are sick with badness and are on the wrong track, have yet another claim to be loved by the Lord." (Osservatore Romano, September 21, 1978.)
Women, so often used, under-appreciated, and abused, need to take ownership of themselves as truly beloved of God. When their identities are firmly centered in God's love of them as equal daughters, their whole lives can change, grow, expand, with incalculable richness!
"In a dramatic play about the dilemma of being black, being female, and being alive, Ntozake Change captures the dynamism of this new religious experience. After roiling adventures of prejudice, hurt, and survival, a tall black woman rises from despair to cry out, 'I found god in myself and I loved her, loved her fiercely.'" (Johnson)
May you find and love God fiercely within yourself, a God Who answers to a variety of names and images because God is compassionate, Holy Mystery, transcendent and beyond our ability to imagine God. God is responsive to all our love words! God holds each of us in a tender embrace both paternal and maternal; God desires all of us to get beyond the sinful sexism that pits men and women against each other in a desperate battle, on women's part, for autonomy, respect, and equality - a desperate battle for men not to call women's cries for self-determination and respect for their bodies and souls as "over-reacting."
Today, on International Women's Day, women, made in God's Image and Likeness, stand at the doors of society and church in every nation, asking for equal access, and crying out "See us for who we REALLY are!"