Should Woman Hold A Public Office?

SPIEGEL ONLINE reported last Friday, that Wolfgang Bosbach, a fairly prominent Christian Democrat politician, dared, in the light of the recent arrests of ethnically German-born would-be terrorists, to say that Germany needs to keep a closer eye on their converts to Islam. He said, too, that German converts to Islam seek out contact with violent and fanatic Islamist groups and that this means that the attackers come from the midst of German society. Bosbach said he thought the monitoring of converts should be considered. This, of course, triggered off angry twittering from the most odious of Gutmenschen, bishops of the Protestant church. In this spirit, the Protestant (female) Bishop of Hannover, Margot Kässmann, warned against overreacting because, although converts are often specifically ardent fighters for their religion, "that is found within Christianity as well."


Picture: DPA.
Right, Margot. And now tell me where and when the last Christian bomber, suicide or not, butchered dozens, hundreds, thousands of innocent bystanders.
Kässmann is the bishop whose divorce caused some moderate cluck-clucking in the media and a lot of boring soulsearching and some clever bible-interpretation by her. "Marriage", so Kässmann, "is a good and right institution ... But the bible says, too: 'Whatever you wish to loose on earth will be loosed in heaven (Matthew 16, 19)'". What the bishop and doctor of theology did not say was that this word of Christ has nothing to do with divorce ("If you manage to get a divorce on earth you will be shot of your husband in heaven [Thank God!] as well") but is about the redemption from culpability by mutual forgiveness. She, too, subtly changed the quote. The original quote says 'Whatever you will loose on earth will be loosed in heaven', which proves that she knew what she was saying and is probably cleverer than her simpering (don't I just LOVE that word!) picture suggests.

Kässmann, too, wrote to the pastors of her diocese about her divorce: "It has been an immensely difficult step, which needed a lot of trust in God." Maybe a leading man (excuse me: person!) of the church thinks she HAS to talk such drivel, but I wonder whether one of her pastors asked her why she didn't stick to the biblical command of marital faithfulness in the first place if violating it was so terrifically difficult and needed so much trust in God.

Read the rest at Roncesvalles.