hasidic romance

On Saturday, I started and finished Pearl Abraham's The Romance Reader. It's a wonderful book, sad and beautiful at the same time. Abraham describes a Hasidic girl's struggle to find some way she can be independent of her parents and the expectations the Hasidic culture places on her as a woman. But as I was reading it, I couldn't help focusing on how much organized religion can and often does hurt people. Orthodox Judaism in no different than Orthodox Christianity or Islam. Women are subjugated, told not to use their minds (which were surely given them by God!) and to obey their husband. Men are hemmed in as well, even if they are in a more privileged position.

Religious people are no stranger to power abuse and distorting things to fit their own agenda. And that hurts me and sometimes makes me want to give up on religion. I don't know how the christian call to "love thy neighbor" got turned into "judge everyone and make life difficult", but I'm hoping it can be reversed. Religion, when practiced right, can add meaning to lives and do wonderful things. But when done unwisely, it has the potential to ruin people's lives and do so much harm. Let's just say I understand why some people are atheists, and that it often has nothing to do with God.

from abstinence to saddlebacking

One of the blogs I read is Debra Haffner's "Sexuality and Religion: What's the Connection?". Friday, she wrote about President Obama (how I still love saying those words, even as he has become less a dream or a hype and more a reality to me and others) 2010 budget outline. To address teenage pregnancy, the budget "supports state, community-based, and faith-based efforts to reduce teen pregnancy using evidence based models. The program will fund models that stress the importance of abstinence while providing medically-accurate and age-appropriate information to youth who have already become sexually active".

That seems to me to be a very good idea. For a lot of people, abstinence is the only way to go. I respect that, I think it actually might be a good idea to wait (it's the "till marriage" part I'm not sure about - I'd rather see people wait till they're really ready for all the emotions and responsibilities that come with that terrain). But I also think it's important to be realistic. We know a lot of young people aren't waiting, and don't know the first thing about keeping themselves safe and healthy and pregnancy-free. So give them the message on abstinence, but also teach them their options.

The abstinence-only policy has resulted in some weird practices, including the phenomenon of (Christian) teens enthusiastically saddlebacking. I hardly think that was the intention..