In Part 1 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I covered how the Bill Barrow at the Associated Press covered the religion-based aspects of former President Jimmy Carter's speech at Carter's Mobilizing Faith for Women conference yesterday in Atlanta. Carter characterized certain religions' failure to allow women to be priests as examples of "oppression," and seemed to consider them as worthy of mention as far more serious and oppressive problems, among them female mutilation, child slavery, forced marriages of young women, and gender-selection abortion.
In this part, I will cover what Bill Barrow had to have heard but did not report. Specifically, he did not mention Carter's series of apologies for U.S. actions over the past 60 years and other supposedly oppressive conditions which still are present in America. The text which follows the jump is transcribed from the video of Carter's speech at the conference's web site.
As painful as it will be, readers should go to the video points identified to see the smug self-satisfaction this man displays each time he takes shots at his own country (bolds are mine):
(at the 7:06 mark)
And we know that even in the most advanced countries, women are deprived of an equal opportunity to serve in their government. We now have the highest number of women serving in our U.S. Congress in history -- and we're up to 18 percent ... (Audience chuckles) ... of the members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate who are women.
Well, I won't belabor this point too much, but let me take another Article 23: "Everyone without any discrimination has a right to equal pay for equal work." And the employers of America lookin' at their religious ordination that women aren't equal don't feel constrained to pay women equally for the same work as me do. In our country, women get an average of 70 percent as much pay for doing exactly the same work as men.
(at the 11:50 mark)
Another very important factor in the world that contributes to women's abuse is the ordination or approval of violence as a way to resolve differences in our society.
We in this country, in my country, have been guilty of almost constant warfare for the last 60 years, beginning in ... beginning in North and South Korea and then into Vietnam and then Bosnia-Herzegovina and more recently in Iraq and Iran. But in between, in almost every country where there's been an altercation, we have decided to go to war instead of negotiate peacefully to resolve disputes.
And there are some countries assembled here who still permit the horrible abuse of executions, of the death penalty.
No Western European country has a death penalty. Only one country in Eastern Europe, and that's Belarus, has a death penalty. Canada doesn't have it, and so forth.
The United States does. Our country and three other countries are one of the four nations on earth that have the most executions in the world.
Well, when we take war as a legitimate way to resolve disputes, or when we excessively use violence as a punishment for crimes, this kind of says that violence is okay. And that's another factor that hurts women.
If you missed our war against Iran, trust me, you're not alone. All I remember about U.S. troops in Iran is a tragically failed helicopter mission to try to rescue U.S. hostages Iranians supported by their government held captive at the U.S. embassy there from 1979 to January 20, 1981, the day some guy named Ronald Reagan became President.
I feel like a complete chump for having supported Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. I thought then that it was a reasonable reaction in an attempt to possibly prevent us from getting involved in a war. In retrospect, it's obvious that this man wouldn't have gone to war for any reason. Since that's so, his disruption of the athletic careers of so many thousands of athletes was inexcusable. It also explains why the Soviets were totally unimpressed and continued their war in Afghanistan, which they fortunately lost.
Carter's central premise is that wars, largely perpetrated by the U.S., and death-penalty executions, which are also disproportionately done in America, have created and continue to foster a more accepting climate for worldwide violence against women.
You've got to be kidding me.
On other matters, no one is stopping any women from running for poitical office these days, and equal pay for truly equal work is not only the law, it's the overwhelmingly predominant current condition in the U.S. today.
Maybe the AP's Barrow felt sorry for the old guy and didn't want to embarrass him by exposing his loathing of our history and current conditions accompanies by incoherence. If this were a private, mostly family gathering at Carter's home that Barrow happened to attend, that might be one thing. But this was a public event to which the press was invited, and it's not his job to cover for the guy.
Barrow should have reported what Carter said in disrespect to his country's history and current situation.
Try to imagine the AP cutting George W. Bush a similar break. Neither can I.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
