Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, in his latest book, turns his attention to the unfair way women are treated.
Distorted interpretations of certain sacred texts are partly to blame, Carter writes in “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power.”
Consequently, he said, women are relegated to inferior status and disproportionately bear the brunt of poverty, see fewer education opportunities, and experience greater violence and discrimination.
“There’s nowhere in the Bible where Jesus Christ even insinuates inequality between men and women,” Carter, who still teaches Sunday school, said in a phone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “In fact, he was a champion for women.” Women once held high positions in the modern Christian church, but that ended, Carter said, when men wanted to control the church.
He has also studied the Quran extensively and said there are very few places where “it’s not absolutely clear that men and woman are equal in every way.”
But some use false interpretations of those texts to justify poor and unequal treatment of women, Carter said. If women are not qualified to serve God in an equal way as priests or deacons, he said, then it fosters a belief in the secular community that women are somehow inferior.
“A husband says, ‘My wife is not equal to me, so I can mistreat her,’ ” he said, or an employer can pay a woman less than a man.
Carter also looks extensively at the issue of sexual abuse, including rape, female genital mutilation, sex trafficking and child marriages.
He turns his attention to rapes that happen during conflicts as tools of war, but also here in the United States.
For instance, there were 26,000 incidents of sexual abuse reported in the U.S. military, yet only about 1 percent of accused abusers were punished for the crime and just 4 percent of rapes on America’s college campuses are reported, he said.
At the end of the book, Carter recommends ways to address the issues, including encouraging women and girls to speak out more forcefully and be protected from retaliation; pressuring nations to end human trafficking; and strengthening laws to end female genital mutilation and child marriage.
Carter, 89, is always one to speak his mind.
During a recent interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he also weighed in on other issues, including his efforts to circumvent any interest the National Security Agency might have in monitoring his emails.
The nation’s 39th president said he goes low-tech to communicate with other world leaders because he worries that his emails might be watched.
“When I was president I was very careful not to let the intelligence agencies spy on people,” he said. “Now, of course, the NSA is well-known. They record almost every telephone call in America, and every cellphone call and email. I think they’ve gone to extremes to take advantage of every loophole in the law. … In the last two or three years when I want to write a very private message to someone and I don’t particularly want the U.S. government to know about it, I just handwrite it and mail it.”
As for the current tension between the United States and Russia, Carter said he thought it was “inevitable” that Russia would take over Crimea.
“No one could have prevented (President Vladimir) Putin from taking over Crimea, no matter what kind of sanctions or threats we made,” he said. “Crimea has always been considered as a kind of an integral part of Russia. But I think we need to stop Putin at that border, and we need to take very stern warnings to him that we will carry out if he goes any further and I don’t think he will.”
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