Another reason the Creation is so damn important

I was reading an essay on how different religions mistreat women by Annie Laurie Gaylor while in the bathtub, where I do my thinking, and I came to a throwaway part where she noted that the story of Adam's rib is a neat trick the Bible pulls to deny something that seems self-evident--that women, not men, are the source of life. (Of course, it takes two to tango, but hey, women do most of the work bringing babies into the world.) That woman comes from man is a huge crutch that patriarchal religions have leaned on forever, and still do to this day, to justify women's inferiority. Sort of like Bill Cosby's joke about threatening his kids by reminding them that he made them.

That women are nothing more than overgrown male ribs that belong to men as much as your ribs belong to you, is something feverently believed to this day by a lot of Christians. I remember in high school a young woman insisting to me that men actually have one less rib than women. I poo-poohed her assertion but she kept making it, and as we had no anatomy textbook on hand, I made a male friend bend forward so we could count his ribs and then I did the same, proving that yes, men and women have the same number of ribs. The girl was crushed, but facts is facts. It was a lunchtime version of the Scopes trial. (Small town kids are very, very bored is the other moral of this story.)

That little story there is a small-time demonstration of how science is putting the screws to religion and thereby also putting the screws to religious justifications for male dominance. (Among other things. I certainly don't think that desire to keep women down is the only motivation for teaching the Creation to kids in school.) If we all evolved from animals then there's no way to justify women's inferiority, despite the noble efforts of a few evolutionary psychologists coughing up theories that women love nothing better than tending the hearth while their man goes out to fuck other women, a theory that is easy to disprove with little effort by laymen. (A loud guffaw will do.)

As I've said before, I agree with a lot of wingnut conclusions, I just don't agree with their value judgements. For instance, we both agree that rock music often endorses sexual freedom, rebellion, and open-mindedness, but I just happen to think that's a good thing. And I agree whole-heartedly with them that if humans accept that we evolved from animals and we are just another animal, then that will cause certain beliefs to fall by the wayside. One of those beliefs is that god made women as the handmaids to men.

If humans are just another species of animal, then I am no more a servant to my man than Katy is a servant to Max. (They have a relationship, by the way, we should all aspire to. Affectionate, playful, egalitarian, and unconditional. Max doesn't care that Katy's fat, and Katy doesn't care that Max is rambunctious.) If there's no bullshit story about how man actually birthed woman that we all have to profess we believe in, then we are free to open our eyes and see that it takes men and women both to make men and women, and oh yeah, women do the actual birthing. Most importantly, without a god decreeing from on high that men shall dominate women, there is no outside force that determines what our values should be, that those values come from human society and therefore can be changed to better serve all the people in it.