America has a complicated relationship with religious dogma. It inspires reverence and provokes revolt. The nation's oldest living president, 90 year old Jimmy Carter, embodies this paradox, and it is the focus of his newest book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power . Violence and injustice directed at women– ranging from genital mutilation to sexual slavery– is, according to Carter, "the most important and undressed affliction of human rights on Earth".
Carter tells Boston Public Radio’s Jim Braude and Margery Eagan that this violence is too often rooted in the misinterpretation of Christian, Jewish and Islamic scripture.
Gender equality is not a new cause for President Carter. He emphasized human rights "even when it was unpopular." His White House supported the Equal Rights Amendment, and his administration was noted for its inclusion of women. But for Carter, equality is not simply about politics, but about theology. He spoke candidly about his split with the Southern Baptist church, when he could no longer justify their discrimination against women, and he has written to the Pope, encouraging him to address the absence of women in the Catholic clergy.
The former President also addressed other ways women are silenced. He discussed sexual assault in the military and on college campuses where rates of reporting are grossly below those made in the general population. As a professor of 33 years, and a former Naval officer, the President points out that male deans and commanding officers often have a vested interest in suppressing reports of sexual violence and intimidation. "The commanding officer of a ship doesn't want it to be known that sexual assaults take place…Deans are very averse to it being known how many sexual assaults take place," Carter said.
Sexual violence against women is global, and takes many forms, according to Carter. He cites Mona Elthaway’s New York Times article last Sunday about the 91% of Egyptian women who have experienced genital mutilation. A religious practice that, Carter argues, is drawn from an appalling misinterpretation of both the Bible and the Quran. But, according to the former President, some of the most tragic human rights violations happen in American cities. There are 60,000 sex slaves in the United States, 80% of which are girls, many of whom are bought and sold under the noses of police departments and congregations. In fact, Carter says, The United States makes more money from sex slaves than any other country in the world.
How does he navigate through it all? "I get up early," he shares, "I write a lot. I'm not on corporate boards, I'm not on the lecture circuit." Following his exit from political life in 1981, President Carter and his wife of 68 years, Rosalynn, founded the Carter Center to advance human rights. A Call to Action chronicles a lot of that journey, ranging from campaigns to eradicate Guinea worm in Ghana, to monitoring elections in Egypt: "I decided that Egypt didn’t have the basic principles of democracy" so the Carter Center's election monitoring team withdrew. "We can encourage democracy,: he says, but we can't impose it.
With respect to President Obama's recent decision to return troops to Iraq, Carter has no comment, but he does say that "the right of people to live in peace is one of the most crucial elements of human rights." Going to war, he suggests, should be the last possible option.
>>> To hear our conversation with President Jimmy Carter, click on the audio link above.
