Selective reading of the Bible turns Christians against the ERA
Finlator condemns selective readings of the Bible. Some Baptists have used the Bible to support their belief that women should be subservient position, and thus opposed the Equal Rights Amendment on religious grounds. Finlator looks back on the strategy of the ERA's supporters and wishes that they had placed women's rights in an economic context. Had they done so, he thinks, they may have been able to convince more women to support the amendment.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with William W. Finlator, April 19, 1985. Interview C-0007. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JAY JENKINS:
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The Equal Rights Amendment was another of your concerns. Did you see that
in the context of civil rights?
- WILLIAM W. FINLATOR:
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Yes indeed I did. And this was something that used to worry me (and still
does) about my Baptist people. They go to the Bible to justify their
position on keeping women "in their place." And they
remind us that St. Paul says it is wrong for a woman to speak in the
church, and that man should be in control of the household and woman
should be subject to man. Like women to men, the church should be
subjected to Christ. All this is in the Bible. And they justify their
opposition to ERA biblically because all of us have a tendency to read
the Bible selectively and we find in the Bible something that justifies
what we already believe. And then we give our beliefs Biblical sanction.
And the Bible says many things. St. Paul also says in Christ
there's neither male or female. In the early church women
were deacons, leaders. So that there's the other picture.
And so in fighting for ERA, you have to fight the church because the
church stands in the way—it often
stands in the way—of simple human justice. But we saw, and
vividly see, that the Constitution must really mean women but it
doesn't say women. And we know that when Thomas Jefferson
went home from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to tell his
family about the Bill of Rights and the new Constitution, it
didn't mean poor people, black people or even Thomas
Jefferson's wife. So that through the years we have tried to
indicate that the spirit of the Constitution has got to include those
poor people, all women, and all ethnic groups. And the only way we can
do that … after the Civil War we adopted amendments which
talked about race, previous condition of servitude, that meant
black—though we had never put women in there, is to put women
in the Constitution; hence, ERA.
And in the civil liberties movement we found out, Jay, it's
incredible … We found out there was law after law, statute
after statute passed to keep women from being full citizens in this
country. And I thought about those words of the great Samuel Johnson,
they kept coming to my mind: he said somewhere that God had given women
so many natural endowments superior to men, that men had found it wise
legally to restrict her. And so we founded this country legally
restricting women. And the simple ERA statement means that you just
can't do that. But we were not quite prepared to find so many
women in opposition to ERA and we made a mistake
in not trying to understand why women oppose ERA. And we were not able
to persuade them to see that it was an economic issue as much as a
social issue and we tried to talk of the feminization of poverty. If ERA
was passed … think about all the women at work, particularly
the women who are the leaders of the household whose numbers are
increasing, who are rearing the children. They are the poor people. The
children will be poor until women have equal economic treatment with
men. This is simple justice, fairness, kindness. And we are just
saddened that women don't see it. We understand why economic
powers don't want it because they'll have to pay
out more money. You can't pay a bank teller woman one salary
and a man on the way up another salary when this comes.