That would be the disparity in pay between men and women (said disparity is largely mythical, but stay with me for a moment). Politico reports:
Former President Jimmy Carter says that the fact that women, on average, earn less than men in the workplace is partly because of religious leaders who present women’s inferiority as gospel.So let’s summarize, shall we? Carter contends 1) Roman Catholicism and Southern Baptists teach that women are inferior to men (a statement that is either a deliberate lie or monumentally ignorant); 2) said teaching is expressed primarily by said denominations refusing to ordain women as priests and pastors; 3) that said teaching means that employers tell themselves that they can pay women less because doing so agrees with religious teaching (because if employers want to pay women less, the first question they ask themselves is “what would the Pope do?”).
“In the United States for the same exact work for a full-time employee, women get 23 percent less pay than men. And in the Fortune 500, only 21 of those leaders among the 500 are women, and in that high level, they get 42 percent less pay” than men get, Carter said in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired Monday. “That is really derived, I would say, indirectly from the fact that religious leaders say that women are inferior in the eyes of God, which is a false interpretation” of Scriptures, he said.
He says the treatment of women in the U.S. is comparable to segregation and racism, for which he partially blames religion.
“When they see that the Pope and the Southern Baptist Convention and others say women can’t serve as priests and so forth, equally as men, they, ‘Well, I’ll treat my wife the way I want to because she’s inferior to me. I don’t have any real moral compunction against paying my employees less,’” Carter said. “So women are abused, but men don’t want to really rock the boat because we men benefit from the superiority that we enjoy just like white people did in the segregation days when we benefited from racial deprivation of blacks’ equality.”
