I’M NOT A FEMINIST.
Not – in the immortal words of Seinfeld – there’s anything wrong with that.
However, I find that if people perceive you as a particular thing, then it becomes harder for them to approach you on certain subjects.
They imagine that is where your interest lies and no matter what, there will be no changing your mind. There may be some truth to that because I’m a Christian and on certain things you’ll not get me to budge.
People realise you are a Christian and immediately they try to come up with new and inventive ways to make you yield to temptation or just try to get under your skin. You cannot begin to imagine the delight some people find in that; really, it can get quite amusing.
Anyhow I was on the feminist line.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column showing that there was biblical support for the complaints of women the world over when it came to relationships with men and the care of children.
I pointed out where in the book of Kings women asked men not to deceive them, and also that when that emergency came up involving the child, the father was most likely to say take the child to the mother.
It was a bit tongue in cheek but I always believe there is nothing occurring under the sun that cannot be found in the Good Book. Name it, relationship problems between mother and children or father and children, it’s in the Bible.
Before there was Dear Christine or Dear Ruth, solutions to relationship problems were in the Bible. Proverbs tells of finding a good woman, but it also says “it is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman”.
Situations where one minute the person is present and then disappears, only to re-appear in another place, are also in the Bible.
My column was not strictly in defence of women at the expense of men, as one man felt. It was meant to show that the problems of today existed yesteryear and where you might possibly find some answers.
So jealous women are found there too and sometimes they can make men commit some unconscionable acts that leave mankind in perpetual conflict.
For example, in the account of Sarai (later Sarah) and Abram (later Abraham) in Genesis, the actions of an impatient and childless Sarai would have repercussions for millennia after she orchestrates for her maid Hagar to become pregnant for her 86-year-old husband.
“Now Sarai Abram’s wife bare him no children; and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing; I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai . . . . And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.” – Genesis 16:2/4.
Of course Hagar began behaving in that superior fashion that many women do when they believe they have the upper hand in a situation involving another woman. But eventually, as is the case in many of these situations, the husband sided with his wife and Hagar found herself on the outside with son Ishmael.
Sarai would eventually go on in her 90s to give birth to a son, Isaac. The prediction for Ishmael was that his hand would be against every man and every man’s hand against him. The prediction for Isaac was an everlasting covenant with God with Sarah as a mother of nations and of kings. The rest – at least for the biblical scholars – is history but very much linked to the present-day Israeli/Arab hostility.
Of course that little biblical diversion was just to point out that women can be just as conniving as men from the time the earth was formed.
I made that point because one man lambasted me for calling on fathers to acknowledge all their children. He asked why I didn’t tell the women to admit when the child was not a man’s, rather than fooling them into supporting the child. That was a fair request.
Women, stop fooling the men and own up to the children’s rightful fathers. You owe them and the men that much.