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Does
This Woman Have Anything to Teach Us?
Thursday, March 13, 2014
“You
have heard the commandment that says, ‘You must not commit
adultery.’
But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already
committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Matthew 5:27-30 (NLT)
"Don’t be concerned about the
outward beauty of fancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful
clothes. You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes
from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is
so precious to God”
1
Peter 3:3-6 (NLT)
“Second read the following comments on
Muslim and Christian commonalities by Robert P. George, Professor of
Jurisprudence at Princeton University.
It’s a good challenge from a conservative to other
conservatives to see open our eyes to ways in which Christians and
Muslims can and sometimes do stand together.
“I
am a Catholic. My Church teaches me to esteem our Muslim friends and to
work with them in the cause of promoting justice and moral values. I am
happy to stand with them in defense of what is right and good. And so I
stand with the young woman in the above video in defense of modesty,
chastity, and piety, just as I stand with Muslims like my dear friends
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Dr. Suzy Ismail against the killing of unborn
children and the evil of pornography, and with my equally dear friend
Asma Uddin of the Becket Fund in defense of religious freedom. In the
great document Nostra Aetate, we Catholics are taught the
following by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council:
The
Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is
one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven
and earth, who has also spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves
without reserve to the decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself
to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims link their own. Although not
acknowledging Jesus as God, they revere him as a prophet; his virgin
Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they
await the Day of Judgment and the reward of God following the
resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright
life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, almsgiving, and
fasting.
Over the centuries many quarrels and dissensions have arisen between
Christians and Muslims. The sacred Council now pleads with all to forget
the past, and urges that a sincere effort be made to achieve mutual
understanding; for the benefit of all men, let them together preserve
and promote peace, liberty, social justice and moral values.
Let
us heed this teaching. Let us, Muslims and Christians alike, forget past
quarrels and stand together for righteousness, justice, and the dignity
of all. Let those of us who are Christians reject the untrue and unjust
identification of all Muslims with those evildoers who commit acts of
terror and murder in the name of Islam. Let us be mindful that it is not
our Muslim fellow citizens who have undermined public morality,
assaulted our religious liberty, and attempted to force us to comply
with their ideology on pain of being reduced to the status of
second-class citizens. Let all of us—Christians, Jews, Muslims, and
people of other faiths who “esteem an upright life” and seek truly
to honor God and do His will—embrace each other, seeking “mutual
understanding for the benefit of all men [and working] together to
preserve and promote peace, liberty, justice, and moral values.”
Through the great work being done by my friend Jennifer Bryson—who is
a devout Christian and a great American patriot who spent two years as
an interrogator at Guantanamo—I have met hundreds of religiously
observant Muslims over the past several years and many are now my close
friends. They are among the finest people I know. Like faithful
Christians and Jews, they seek to honor God and do His will. They work,
as we do, to inculcate in their children the virtues of honesty,
integrity, self-respect and respect for others, hard work, courage,
modesty, chastity, and self-control. They do not want to send their sons
off to wars. They do not want their children to be suicide bombers. They
do not want to impose Islam on those who do not freely embrace it. They
thank God for the freedom they enjoy in the United States and they are
well aware of its absence in the homelands of many of those who are
immigrants. It is not right for us to make them feel unwelcome or to
suggest that their faith disables them from being loyal Americans. It is
unjust to stir up fear that they seek to take away our rights or to make
them afraid that we seek to take away theirs. And it is foolish to drive
them into the arms of the political left when their piety and moral
convictions make them natural allies of social conservatives. (A
majority of American Muslims voted for George W. Bush in the 2000
election. A majority of the general voting population did not.)
I
admire Muslim women and all women who practice the virtue of modesty,
whether they choose to cover their hair or not. There are many ways to
honor modesty and practices vary culturally in perfectly legitimate
ways. Men and women are called to serve each other in various ways, and
women who refuse to pornify themselves, especially in the face of strong
cultural pressures and incentives to do so, honor themselves and others
of their sex while also honoring those of us of the opposite sex. They
uphold their own dignity and the dignity of their fellow human beings,
male and female alike.
I have no doubt that in certain cultures, including some Muslim
cultures, the covering of women is taken to an extreme and reflects a
very real subjugation, just as in sectors of western culture, the
objectification of women (including the sexualization of children at
younger and younger ages) by cultural pressures to pornify reflects a
very real (though less direct and obvious) subjugation. But, of course,
we are in the happy position of not having to choose between the
ideology of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and that of Hugh Hefner.
Of course, defenders of pornification claim that they are “liberating
women” and “celebrating female beauty.” The liberation claim is
the very reverse of the truth. As for “celebrating female beauty,”
let me ask you this: Is there an actress in all of Hollywood who when
appearing at one of these absurd awards shows dressed in a see-through
gown, bra-less and wearing a thong, can compare with the beautiful young
Muslim woman in the video I posted? I submit that there is none. Oh,
yes, to be sure, the actress will appeal to something in her male
viewers. (I’m a man. Take it from me.) But it will not be their sense
or appreciation of beauty. It will be something much lower and brutely
appetitive. Their experience will be one in which who she actually is as
a person is utterly submerged. The men viewing her will not be drawn in
to wonder about her thoughts and feelings, her experiences of joy and
sorrow, her strengths and vulnerabilities—the things that actually
make her the unique person she is. Their experience will, quite
literally, be an experience of de-personalized desire—the very
definition of lust.
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