Just as important as my religion

"Women’s rights are very important, just as much as my religion."

These are the words of a "pastor" who just so happens to also be a Planned Parenthood chaplain... who was not admitting to being associated with PP when he said this. He was describing how he was "prolife and prochoice." The full story is at Live Action, but again, I'm looking more at this particular quotation than at the story as a whole.

There are at least three HUGE, GLARING problems with this statement.

Number one:
If anything in this life is as important as following Jesus (or more important), you are not truly following Jesus. You are trying to serve two masters. You cannot follow Jesus and "Women's Rights." Either you will love the one and hate the other, or you will despise the one and be devoted to the other. Trust me, if you are trying to follow something else and Jesus, you will have to choose. And Jesus is the right choice. The only thing one can follow along with Jesus is someone else walking with him--and you must be prepared to leave off following that teacher if he leaves Jesus' path.

Number two:
Christianity is not opposed to women's rights. Because I am a Christ-follower, I believe in women's rights. Jesus was a radical in a time when women were property, could not work, and were considered disgraced if they left the protection of a male relative. Jesus had women who followed Him and His disciples, and told them plainly that their place was learning from Him, not merely housework. Jesus considered men and women equal in dignity, equally clean, equally able to serve God, equally worthy of spiritual and physical healing. Men and women, at least if married, have different roles, and biology dictates some things are reserved for women--but they are always equal in dignity and worth. To pit Christianity against women's rights misunderstands at least one of them. The radical idea that women and men are equal in dignity, in worth, and under the law is a concept that comes from Christianity, at least in the western world--not to mention any dignity and worth children are accorded.

Number 3:
Abortion is no part of women's rights. I am all for women's rights. Killing an innocent child is not a right. If in this day and age, the only way for a woman to be considered equal with a man is to destroy the child growing within her--thus repudiating what makes her different from a man and going against every feminine instinct--then the women's movement has utterly failed. Men don't get to decide whether they are pregnant either. They don't get to decide that the death of their child will open up all sorts of opportunities and make it so. And so long as a woman can only be equal if she is unpregnant--as much like a man as possible--women are not equal in dignity, or even opportunity. Anything I have to kill my child for can't be worth it. And being able to do the same things as a man if I kill my own child doesn't make me equal. It is still saying that I must become like a man to have the same opportunities. No. My fertility, my breasts, my lactation, my pregnancy when I am pregnant, my period are all part of being a woman. How can I be equal unless I can bring the package with me? How can I be equal if I need a surgery to make me equal? Why can't I be equal as I am, as God made me, whole and undrugged and alive? Equality means that I am already equal, have always been equal, and will always be equal, the whole package of me. I cannot become more than I am by taking parts of myself away, and that will only make me equal if I started out greater (which I do not believe I did, but if I were greater for being a woman, why reject that?). Abortion is a great human rights tragedy, often used to abuse and manipulate women--more abortions are coerced than not. And it certainly does not give equality to unborn women, who in many countries are being killed at unprecedented rates for the crime of being female.

So this so-called pastor denies the equality of women by insisting they need abortion; he denies that his religion encompasses women's rights and has given that cause all the progress it has made; and he denies Jesus by setting the idol of "women's rights" on a pedestal beside Him, and choosing that over Him. Pray for his conversion, or at the end he will be worse off than those of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Jesus, in all this, through all this, with all my life I follow you.