I blame creationism for everything I don't blame corporate media for in my ongoing attempts to come to terms with what is wrong with the world of the 21st Century.
But something I hadn't previously put on the creationist list was oppression of female women. Fundamentalist religious oppression of women, yes, of course, just a tautology, but here I'm focusing on the creationist and women.
If you really understood that humans, male and female humans, have equally evolved from male and female earlier humans, and they in turn equally from male and female great apes, then the idea of oppressing the female portion of Homo sapiens sapiens would strike you as both laughable and obscene, depending upon mood. But then I saw a creationist questioning the other day how the first "male dog" that evolved could have found a mate, so the depths of incomprehension are truly great.
These are people who believed that a "god" created woman, demanded that their bodies be totally covered (could have created them ready made with a covering, but hey, mysterious ways, right?) in order not to inflame the sexual desires of men which he had created to be totally uncontrollable, ready to be set off at the merest distant glimpse of female lock of hair, ankle, hand, eye (again, mysterious ways), I mean, yeah, you set out to create a sexually reproducing organism and that's the way you would do it.
But at what point in an evolutionary development from apes to humans does the need to cover up the possessors of two X chromosomes arise? And at what point in the social development from hunter-gatherers to early farmers to city states does human nature suddenly evolve from one that deals quite comfortably with near nudity (male and female) in Australia and Africa and South America to one that doesn't in the Middle East?
In Victorian times it was the Christian fashion to cover the legs of furniture with draped fabric in order not to excite the menfolk (LEGS, get it?) and I don't know how we drifted away from this very good procedure, which should certainly be reinstated, as a matter of urgency. But I would like to take it further. I think all the female great apes should be completely covered up with fabric. It will not only stop the uncontrollable impulses of the great ape males, but prevent any impure thoughts among the human males that see them.
God should have seen to this himself with an edict somewhere in the good book, but I guess he just forgot, a lot on his mind telling people not to use their god-given impulses in relation to sex and food, but to follow strict recipes in both. And equally unaccountably the fundamentalists, following so blindly the letter of the laws, have apparently not noticed the temptations of the female great apes.
So, ever helpful, I have taken it upon myself to make the suggestion. Don't thank me. Just doing my job of pointing out where creationism diverges from reality.
Everywhere.
But I converge on reality on The Watermelon Blog.