Mobilizing Faith for Womenare many articles in the declaration, but I wanted topoint out these because they are so important to usgathered here.Article 16 says, “Men and women of full age,without any limitation due to race … have the right tomarry and to found a family.” What is the key phrasethere? Of full age! We know that girls of 8 or 10 yearsold in many countries, with the approval of religiousor traditional leaders, are forced to marry againsttheir will with no control over their lives at all. Wealso know that there are some heroes, particularly inSenegal in the area where Tostan works, that havenow persuaded 6,000 villages to agree to do away withgenital cutting, another severe abuse of girls’ rights.“Marriage shall be entered into only with the freeand full consent of the intending spouses.” That’s thehusband and the wife; not just the dominant husband.Article 21: “Everyone has the equal right to takepart in the government of his country.” We knowthat even in the most advanced countries womenare deprived of an equal opportunity to serve in theirgovernments. We now have the highest number ofwomen serving in the U.S. Congress in history, andwe are up to 18 percent of the members of the U.S.House and Senate.Article 23: “Everyone, without any discrimination,has the right to equal pay for equal work.” Theemployers of America, looking at the religious ordinationthat women are not equal, don’t feel constrainedto pay women equally for the same work that a mandoes. In our country, women in the workforce get anaverage of 77 percent as much as men do.Article 25 says, “Motherhood and childhood areentitled to special care and assistance,” and Article26 states that everyone has the right to education.These are paragraphs from the Universal Declarationof Human Rights, and every country is sworn toimplement these principles of equality in their laws,customs, and treatment of men and women, andthey are not doing it. Quite often their excuse fornot doing it is that religious leaders say that womenare inferior.I happen to be a Christian, and I read the Bibleand teach the Bible every Sunday in my hometownchurch. In my church, we have a man pastor and awoman pastor. We have six deacons — half of themare women — and my wife is perhaps the most famousBaptist deacon in the world. But in the SouthernBaptist Convention, there is a policy that womencannot be pastors, deacons, or chaplains. At someof the Southern Baptist university seminaries, it isprohibited for a woman to teach a class in which boysare students. We know that the Catholic Churchordained back in the third or fourth century thatwomen cannot serve as priests. They can be teachersor nurses, but they can’t be priests.“Another very important globalfactor that contributes towomen’s abuse is the approvalof violence as a way to resolvedifferences in our society.”— President CarterThis was not the case in the early Christianchurch. Paul said that there is no difference in theeyes of God between a Jew and a gentile, or betweena slave and a master, or between a man and a woman.And when he wrote to the Romans in Chapter 16, hepoints out the heroes of the early Christian church,almost half of whom were women who were apostlesand priests. Later, when men took over, they beganto express their opinion, which has now becomealmost law, that a woman is not equal in the eyesof God. This leads to much of the abuse of women.In marriage, some men consider their wives to beinferior to them and they, therefore, sexually andeconomically abuse their women almost as slaves. Insome countries — Christian, Islamic, and others — thelaws preclude women from serving as equals. Weknow about Saudi Arabia, where a woman has notbeen given the right to drive an automobile and sofar has not been permitted to vote in elections. That18 The Carter Center
Mobilizing Faith for Womenmight change in the near future; we hope so. Thereis progress being made in the world, very reluctantlyin most cases, but it’s not an all-pervasive change orimprovement. The point is that the voices demandingthese changes are very few and far between. They aresometimes very timid, because people who speak outare considered to be traitors of the male-dominatedpolitical and economic leadership.“When we accept war as alegitimate way to resolvedisputes — or when weexcessively use violence as apunishment for crimes — it saysthat violence is acceptable.That’s another factor thathurts women, because they aremost affected by violence.”— President CarterAnother very important global factor thatcon tributes to women’s abuse is the approval ofviolence as a way to resolve differences in our society.We in this country have been guilty of almostconstant warfare for the last 60 years: beginning inNorth and South Korea and going on to Vietnam,then into Bosnia-Herzegovina, and more recently,Iraq and Afghanistan. In between, in almost everycountry where there has been an altercation, we havedecided to go to war instead of negotiating peacefullyto resolve disputes. Some countries still permit thehorrible use of execution, of the death penalty. NoWestern European country has the death penalty,and only one country in Eastern Europe, Belarus,does. Canada doesn’t have it either, but the UnitedStates does. Our country is one of four nations onearth where there are the most executions. When weaccept war as a legitimate way to resolve disputes — orwhen we excessively use violence as a punishmentfor crimes — it says that violence is acceptable. That’sanother factor that hurts women, because they aremost affected by violence.I think almost every family around here is awareof this problem. When I was governor of Georgia,we had a houseguest who was raped, and she toldRosalynn and me about her abuse. We encouragedher to name her abuser, but when she talked tothe prosecuting attorneys in DeKalb County, theystrongly encouraged her not to do so, to let her rapistgo free rather than submit her to the inevitablederogation of her character and the abuse of the trialthat might be forthcoming. In the great universitiesof Atlanta today, it is standard policy not to prosecutemale students who have raped women; this needs tobe corrected. Atlanta, of which I’m very proud, isalso one of the central trading posts for trafficking inslavery of women.We’ve made some progress, but the progress ishalting and quite often pursued without enoughcourage and commitment. I hope that one of theresults of this conference will be for every one ofus, individually, to speak out forcefully and usewhatever influence we can marshal to bring aboutimprovements in the treatment of women. It grievesme very deeply to see this continue, and I’m veryproud of those of you who are heroes in your owncountries. Child marriage, the physical abuse ofwomen, women’s slavery, and genital cutting are allhuman rights abuses that exist in the world in directcontravention of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights and, in my opinion, in direct contravention ofthe basic premises of every great religion.The Carter Center 19
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