Chattel. What a word. It does do not roll trippingly off the tongue. There’s a sense of darkness about it. It means possession of something. Cars, cattle, women…
…Today is a wonderful time for Western women. I wouldn’t care to be a Muslim woman in a long black robe–in which she can vote with a green thumb–if she can see through the slits. Sharia law? Her hair must be covered and you shouldn’t see her feet, Allah commands. What’s the guy got against hair and feet?
In America many women are speaking out. Seems to me they’re more concerned about the future–the children, the environment, the health of the planet–than men.
Women on Kauai are vocal in complaining about GMOs, air-borne toxins, over-crowded, wrongly sited milk factories, more cars, more highways, more suburban sprawl, tourists, global warming and CO2.
I love articulate, intelligent, out-spoken women. I love their involvement in the goings-on. “This world crisis came about without women having anything to do with it. If the women of the world had not been excluded from affairs, things today might have been different.” That’s Alice Paul before the passage of the 19th Amendment. I suggest you find the film Iron Jawed Angels. Watch it. Share it. We owe so much to this courageous young woman. We need more like her. If you must identify with a female figure, identify with Alice.
Today, of course, women often play important roles in politics and law. Think of Sarah Palin. An example of female evangelism gone wrong. Trying her hand at public office. She’s baaaccckkk. Slithered in with Trump. What a pair. Hope you watched her exorcism ritual on the tube. Bishop Thomas Muthee, Word of Faith Churches in Kenya. It’s an insult to human intelligence.
Which brings us back to chattel.
Biblical quotes work here. Ecclesiasticus 25:18, 19 &33. “And a man will choose…any wickedness, but the wickedness of a woman…Sin began with a woman and thanks to her we all must die.”
Really?
The history of women as chattel is woven into many legal codes and cultures. In the Old and New Testament as well as the Quran. Women are property. There’s a world- wide dominion over women. In fundamental patriarchal religious societies that live by the word women are valued as objects. A husband owns his wife…
…and she better shut up and do as told.
A quote from Augustine Aquinas is enlightening: in Summa Theologica, he wrote, “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex, while the production of a woman comes from the defect in the active power…”
Augustine is a Catholic Saint so I assume he resides in a Catholic heaven. As a devout non believer, who does not believe in either heaven or hell, I pen a brief note:
“Dear Auggie, to spend all eternity with you would be hell.”
What do you think?
bettejo 
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