Female priests and mullahs

The head of Scotland's National Arts Agency, Ben Thomson, has just called (in a personal capacity he says) on the Scottish Executive to compel religious organisations to end gender inequality. So he wants Roman Catholic female priests and for here to be female mullahs. Needless to say his remarks have not had a warm reception from either RC or Islamic authorities in the country. I can't see this going very far in the immediate future. The article is front page in the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times newspaper:-
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/snp-faces-call-for-female-priests-an...
but I'm afraid that may be behind a pay wall. So far it's gathered about 9 comments mostly positive. (but I did like the one which suggested as a "luvvie" he should stick to colouring in). He laso links the lack of female leaders to paedophilia, sexual-grooming, and FGM.

I don't understand the comment you say you like nor why you like it. I take it you don't want to end gender inequality in organised religion?

One salient feature of women-led mosques is that they tend to be inclusive of gender, sexual orientiation, even faith:

California mosque led by women opens doors to all

Women lead Friday prayers at Denmark's first female-run mosque

Muslim feminist plans to open liberal mosque in Britain

It'll be interesting to see whether liberalism can hold this bridge or not. Already it's almost common wisdom on the left that a state policy of freedom of speech is passé, and indeed injurious to minorities. Freedom of religion is, I suspect, next.

>4 timspalding:

I think your characterisation of the discourse on free speech "on the left" is a bit of a caricature. While there is legitimate concern about certain aspects of hate speech and incitement, that is very different from free speech being "passe". And Europe, "left" and "right", has long had a more nuanced attitude towards unlimited free speech than the USA.

>2 LolaWalser:: A bit OT but the comment you don't understand is here in full:
"Seems the Head of the Scottish Arts Agency has fallen into the Luvvie trap of thinking he's such a tremendously important person that his views on matters he is ill informed about should be taken seriously because he's an artist darling. Stick to the colouring in sweetheart."
My liking it was more to do with my views on quangos which swallow untold amounts of taxpayers money than gender inequality
As for the last sentence of your post the Church of England has many female priests and quite a few bishops which doesn't really upset me. Whether the Scottish Executive should try to enforce this on an unwilling church my answer is "no".

As to Ben Thomson's assertions about paedophilia and sexual grooming I was talking to my wife last week about how many teachers accused of sex with children in their charge have been woman schoolmistresses entering a relationship with teenage boys at their school.

>5 John5918:

http://crookedtimber.org/2017/04/27/on-liberals-the-left-and-free-speech/

>5 John5918:

First, while Europe does have a different history around this thing, it has a different relationship to liberty generally, and different rules have long obtained for both speech and religious freedom. Nazi speech was banned. But it was fine to have a state church, state support for some religions, discrimination against religious minorities, etc. Both are contrary to the American tradition.

In either case, we aren't seeing the spread of European attitudes, but something different--the rise of an ideology which sees "free speech" arguments as the little more than a cover for patriarchy, racism, fascism and so forth. The shared justification is that discriminatory or offensive speech is not speech at all, but actually violence. This was not how European free-speech laws were justified. Nor are the targets the same. European law generally restricted itself to a few extreme topics, such as defending or denying the Holocaust. Today on the left side of US social media, one regularly hears the charge of "violence" directed at views and expressions held by large numbers of Americans, or even the majority.

As an example, take this YouTube video, which argues that "misgendering trans people" (e.g., calling a trans woman "he") "is an act of violence" . I link to the Everyday Feminism framing of it, as a demonstration this is not a fringe view at all--Everyday Feminism is not a fringe outlet. https://twitter.com/EvrydayFeminism/status/863425171964690432 Like it or not, this is not like prosecuting some unrepentant Nazi on a lecture tour, based on laws erected when the continent lay in Nazi ruins.

Lastly, and critically, the notion has jumped the political divide, giving new currency to anti-free speech thought on the right wing. As I often argue, the left should be careful what it wishes for; the intellectual and legal tools created to fight oppression can all too easily turn around. Already we have that creepy NRA ad calling for the "fist of truth" against the "violence of lies." (about). Although the right trails in assembling a complete ideology here, language equating speech, especially journalism, with violence and harm is now standard, and a crucial part of its', and Trump's, increasingly scary war against the press.

>7 PossMan:

I was talking to my wife last week about how many teachers accused of sex with children in their charge have been woman schoolmistresses entering a relationship with teenage boys at their school.

Yeah--how many? How many "woman schoolmistresses" compared to the thousands of "man schoolmistresses" and priests sexually abuse children?

Whatever the numbers—I can find no good ones—female teachers that have sex with students are punished far less than male teachers.

It also appears reporting is lower. Society tends to see a male teacher having sex with a female student as despicable abuse, while the reverse appears more in the light of a doomed love affairs for the teacher, and a manly accomplishment for the child.

See http://campbelllawobserver.com/hot-for-teacher-gender-bias-in-sentencing-of-teac...

Sounds like a student may be more at risk from male teachers and from classmates than from a woman teacher?

Statistics on Perpetrators of Child Sexual Abuse

Offenders are overwhelmingly male, ranging from adolescents to the elderly (page 171).
Some perpetrators are female. It is estimated that women are the abusers in about 14% of cases reported among boys and 6% of cases reported among girls.
Approximately one-third of offenders are themselves juveniles (page 172).
23% of reported cases of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by individuals under the age of 18 (page 3)
Only 14% of children who suffered sexual abuse were violated by an unknown perpetrator (page 172).
60% of children are sexually abused by someone in their social circle. Hence, the phrase “Stranger Danger” is misleading (page 172).
Meta-analysis estimates that 14% of sexual offenders commit another sexual offense after five years, 24% after fifteen years (page 172).
Child Maltreatment 2010 reports that 6.2% of child abusers sexually abused a child (page 77).
40-80% of juvenile sex offenders have themselves been victims of sexual abuse (Advances in Clinical Child Psychology, page 19).

http://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-abuse/statistics-on-pe...
___________________________________________________________

Re doomed love affair for woman and manly accomplishment for child, this must be highly unusual ending but French President Macron fell for his wife--a teacher at his Jesuit school--when he was 15! Apparently same age diff between Trump & Melania and Mr & Mrs Macron, but somehow more socially acceptable when the man is the December? Less approved when man is 90, say, and wife is 25 or 30--she's seen less a trophy wife and more a gold-digger? Interesting how we perceive these age differences either way, but we do notice them, don't we? (A nephew of mine is still happily married: his wife ~16 years older, is now ~65, I think. He was in early 20s when they met. As with Macron, his mum was NOT pleased.)

How French President Emmanuel Macron, 39, seduced gran, 64, who he fell for at FIFTEEN
Martin Phillips | 7th May 2017
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3406171/emmanuel-macron-seduced-gran-brigitte/

>9 timspalding: the rise of an ideology which sees "free speech" arguments as the little more than a cover for patriarchy, racism, fascism and so forth. The shared justification is that discriminatory or offensive speech is not speech at all, but actually violence.

Do you think speech cannot be used to commit violence?

>13 southernbooklady:

Depends what you mean by "used to." Speech can be a tool used in violence ("give me your money or I shoot you in the head"), to incite violence ("In that church are 100 Hutus. Kill them!"). And it can cause other harms which the law should take notice of (libel, fraud, etc.). I can even appreciate--even I ultimately disagree--with policies that ban certain speech because it's somehow harmful or unhealthy, alongside the 95% of prohibited things that are judged that way, but aren't violence. But while speech can be used in violence, it is not itself violence.

As the director of PEN America put it in the WashPost:

"But the power that speech holds to visit serious harm does not make it, in itself, violent. It is risky even to make this comparison, because it helps give cover to the idea that noxious speech may be answered with brute force. When Republican Rep. Chris Collins of New York blamed James Hodgkinson’s shooting rampage — at a congressional GOP baseball practice — on Democratic “rhetoric,” citing “the tone and the angst and the anger directed at Donald Trump,” he signaled (without evidence of a causal link) that these words had led to violence. Similarly, some protesters at Middlebury and Berkeley argued that an assaultive rampage was warranted to silence speakers whose viewpoints some regarded as intrinsically violent. Deeming speech the equivalent of violence may be intended to call out and deter harm, but it can instead beg violent confrontation by casting it as an inevitable, or at least understandable, response to speech."

Or as the Atlantic put it:

"Feldman Barrett used these empirical findings to advance a syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.” It is logically true that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. But following this logic, the resulting inference should be merely that words can cause physical harm, not that words are violence. If you’re not convinced, just re-run the syllogism starting with “gossiping about a rival,” for example, or “giving one’s students a lot of homework.” Both practices can cause prolonged stress to others, but that doesn’t turn them into forms of violence."

>12 margd:

I don't doubt that the numbers skew strongly toward older male abusers. But there's also some bias in the numbers, because abuse of this sort isn't as easily reported. I don't stand by it, but I previously read that the average age of reporting for male victims is much older than for female, which goes to hidden numbers.

French President Macron fell for his wife--a teacher at his Jesuit school--when he was 15!

Exactly. France is different®, but even in the US, that's the overall framing.

If a foreign leader had seduced his wife when he was a 39 year old teacher and she was a 15 year-old student, he wouldn't be a leader in any western country, and if he were, there would be protests at every airport every time he set food in the USA. Instead, we have Macron the Romantic, with a (usually unspoken) undercurrent of "what a chivalrous gentleman, willing to put up with an old wife, when he could have some 20-something model."

I should add that the fact that Brigitte Macron was a teacher at a Jesuit institution only deepens the point. While things were different then®, if this happened today, she'd be banned from working for any church body whatsoever, and we--and especially Lola--would be talking about this as typical church abuse.

>12 margd:

Ordination of women has a bright future if gender propensity to sexual abuse is to be a factor in deciding who gets the privilege of leading the churches.

>10 LolaWalser:: Yeah--how many? How many "woman schoolmistresses" compared to the thousands of "man schoolmistresses" and priests sexually abuse children?
I imagine those first 3 words are US-speak for "I don't believe you". Well I don't have those figures. But my comment followed a newspaper report the previous day about a female teacher before the courts. And there had been several such cases reported in the press. Of course reported cases in the press may not relate to actual cases. Perhaps the press are now more willing to report when the perpetrator is female. And my memory still tells me that my comment about female sexual relationships with pupils was right.

EDITED ON WEDNESDAY TO ADD: Lo and behold another case crops up in todays "Times". A female teacher banned from teaching in England and Wales indefinately (but can appeal after 5 years). In this case a sexual relationship with a girl pupil. No mention of any criminal proceedings.

>11 timspalding:: while the reverse appears more in the light of a doomed love affairs for the teacher, and a manly accomplishment for the child.
I agree. There seems in some quarters to be an attitude of "lucky boy. What's he fussing about?"

A fictional look at the schoolmistress/schoolboy theme is in Tampa but there are no doubt many others.

>16 PossMan:, >17 PossMan:

Why are you wasting time imputing unwarranted motivations to a simple question? I asked you how female sex offenders againstb children ("schoolmistresses" as you specified) compare numerically to male ones.

You don't have to prove to me or anyone female sex offenders exist.

What I'm curious about is what their existence has to do with female priests and "mullahs". If child sex abuse is bothersome to you, then you should welcome female ordination because women sexually abuse children much less than men do.