Buddhism and Women
Women’s position in Buddhism is unique. The Buddha gave women full freedom to participate in a religious life. The Buddha was the first religious Teacher who gave this religious freedom to women. Before the Buddha, women’s duties had been restricted to the kitchen; women were not even allowed to enter any temple or to recite any religious scripture. During the Buddha’s time, women’s position in society was very low. The Buddha was criticized by the prevailing establishment when He gave this freedom to women. His move to allow women to enter the Holy Order was extremely radical for the times. Yet the Buddha allowed women to prove themselves and to show that they too had the capacity like men to attain the highest position in the religious way of life by attaining Arahantahood. Every woman in the world must be grateful to the Buddha for showing them the real religious way of living and for giving such freedom to them for the first time in world history.
Though all of the above is true, the history of women in Buddhism is not quite so rosy, as my teacher has pointed out. - DS
Tulsi Gabbard, Mazie Hirono Break Congressional Barriers for Non-Christians
Tuesday’s election brought some religious firsts for Congress, with a victory for Tulsi Gabbard, who will be the first Hindu congresswoman, and Mazie Hirono, the first Buddhist senator. Both are Democrats from Hawaii.
Source: demnewswire
Today my hometown was struck by a disgusting hardship.
A woman this afternoon was found by a neighbor, bleeding and naked. She was attacked in her home because she was gay. Two or more men broke into her home through the basement and proceeded to tag her basement. They found the homeowner, who is an open lesbian, and stabbed, assaulted, and carved “dyke” into her chest. They attempted to burn her house to the ground, but the gas only sparked. Somehow, this woman (who remains anonymous until she decides to come out on her own time) was able to escape. She was found naked, bound with zip ties, and bloody. She is still alive and in the hospital. A candle light vigil was held in her name tonight, where more than 500 people from Lincoln and surrounding cities and states joined to talk about the hate and to pay homage to the victim.
A recovery fund has been set up to help her cover medical bills and anything she may need. That link can be found here, along with a link from the original news story.
http://starcitypride.org/victim-recovery-fund/
http://journalstar.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/hundreds-attend-vigil-after-reported-hate-crime/article_d0892b58-9ec9-566c-8b66-bb0a032b8e03.html
Notes: Article taken directly from the Lincoln Journal Star website
Pictures are courtesy of Lincoln Journal Star and Steve Andel Photography. I do not own any rights to anything posted.
Crying.
Absolutely terrifying. All my babies please be careful.
The real issue we need to focus on around LGBTQ rights: never having anything like this ever happen again…
Source: loobypls
The 'New York Times' Misses the Mark on Inequality, Marriage
Do we really need a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to tell us that a woman with a college degree and a good solid marriage is better off than a college dropout raising three kids alone? In “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’,” Jason DeParle profiled Jessica Schairer and Chris Faulkner, two white women from conventional church-going Midwestern middle-class families whose life trajectory looked much the same when they graduated high school and set out for college. Jessica, though, got pregnant by her freshman-year boyfriend and was persuaded by him to drop out and start a family. Now she’s raising their children in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by herself, on one income (just under $25,000 for a full time job as assistant director of a daycare center) and food stamps.
DeParle mentions positively Charles Murray’s contention that single motherhood is a “values” issue, not an economic one. Murray means working-class and lower-middle-class white people have abandoned traditional family values (they’re becoming like—oh no!—black people) but you can just as well see Jessica as having too many of those values: she rejected abortion, she stuck by her man, she tried too hard to make a family. If we really want women like Jessica to avoid early childbearing and single motherhood, we have to stop promoting outmoded ideas about sex and gender: abstinence-only sex ed, shame that leads to inconsistent use of birth control, stigmatizing abortion, woman’s worth depending on keeping a man, “fixing” the relationship as woman’s responsibility, motherhood as women’s primary purpose in life. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” Jessica says. That’s a very American value right there: if you screw up in your early 20s, you—and your children—are on your own for life.
What would we do if we wanted to help Jessica and her kids, the millions like them, and the millions at risk of becoming them? I was struck by how completely she was thrown back on her own resources: she went to William Penn University, which costs $20,000 a year and has a freshman retention rate of only 55 percent—maybe she and her boyfriend fell through cracks that shouldn’t have been there. She gets no child support, not even a token amount—which is really outrageous, because even if her kids’ father makes very little, I’ll bet he has beer and cigarettes and girlfriends. She has church, but seemingly no help from her parents, and no helpful network of friends.
Her son has Asperger’s—where are the programs for him? Kids’ extracurriculars and camps cost too much for her, although we know they help learning and development—why aren’t they free? If she leaves her too-expensive neighborhood, her kids will be in a worse school—why? Believe it or not, most Western industrialized countries do a far better job than we do of giving kids a decent childhood and of sustaining their mother too. It does not have to be that if you can’t afford to live in the right neighborhood, your children get a bad education. That is a social and political decision that we have made.
And then there is Jessica’s job. Although she earned a degree from community college and is a highly regarded employee, she is still on an hourly wage of only $12.35. She punches in and out, and she gets no paid days off—even when she was recovering from an operation for cervical cancer. When she took a day off to chaperon a school field day, she lost a day’s pay. Message to Anne-Marie Slaughter: this is how we treat “family balance” in the regular world of work, and this is how we treat skilled, experienced management-level employees in the childcare field. Taking care of children is women’s work, after all, and women are supposed to have Kevins, not family-size paychecks. Why does it seem like a reasonable policy suggestion to tell Jessica she needs a husband, and pie in the sky to say she needs a union? Or a national day care system like the one in France, where teachers are well-paid, with benefits?
Jessica Schairer is doing the best she can. In fact, she is pretty heroic. It’s the rest of us that are falling short.
It is illegal for women to go topless in most cities, yet you can buy a magazine of a woman without her top on at any 7-11 store. So, you can sell breasts, but you cannot wear breasts, in America.
