The right-wing is up in arms over DOD calling Bible sexist

Google “deomi sexism bible” and you’ll find a huge number of right-wing news sites and blogs expressing horror that the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI), a group within the US Department of Defense (DOD), has a course on sexism that points out the self-evidently true fact that the Bible, US Declaration of Independence, and US Constitution all allowed, if not outright sanctioned, treating women as second-class citizens. Not surprisingly many of the blogs I read also used rhetoric consistent with the MRA (mens rights advocacy) movement.

Here is a representative assertion from one of the articles you’ll find with this Google search:

It doesn’t matter that Christ, Moses, or the Founding Fathers were not in the least hung up on sexism.

Yes, I’ll grant you that those groups were not “hung up on sexism” in as much as they thought it the natural order of things that women were not equal to men. You would be hard pressed to find an individual man in any of those groups (by which I mean Jews, followers of Jesus, and people living during the time when the USA was being formed) who actually thought about their attitudes towards women and whether those attitudes might not be justified. So, sure, they weren’t “hung up on sexism”. But that misses the point that they were sexist and the documents they wrote enshrined the idea that women are second-class citizens.

All of the outrage boils done to one, if not all, of these ideas:

  1. How dare anyone imply the Bible is anything other than a source of perfect morality and rules for living.

  2. How dare anyone impugn that the US Constitution is the perfect template for running our affairs today. It does not require any interpretation or adaptation to our current world.

  3. How dare anyone question the behavior of US military personnel who pledge to uphold the US Constitution (unlike that Kenyan-Muslim-Communist-Socialist-Atheist elected to be our current president).

My mind boggles at the willful ignorance and stupidity on display.

P.S., This came to my attention via an email from Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, representing the FRC, titled “Help Us Stop the Battle against Our Armed Forces”. The title is interesting in that it implies that the US military is above reproach and is being undermined (by ungodly, leftist, members of society).