ALTAR GIRLS – YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING, RIGHT?

Religions in general have always relegated women to second class status

When you see women covered from head to toe and totally separated from the rest of humanity by modesty walls and denied even the right to drive, to vote or to have a say in society you question the validity of such practices and the worth of that religion.

The Catholic Church has been a very good example of how not to treat women. They seem to perpetuate all these patriarchal concepts that women are second class and can’t participate even in the most insignificant of the church’s activities: altar assistants.

Traditionally this role has been reserved exclusively for young boys and there have been countless cases where the clergy has sexually abused these cute little angels. If they had altar girls, the question beckons: would priests with heterosexual tendencies also molest and rape them?

Please don’t come back to me and tell me that the Catholic Church has placed importance on nuns and that should be sufficient; no it isn’t…these women “married to Jesus” as they call themselves have been relegated to maids, the janitors and the ass cleaners of the Church.

When was the last time you heard the Pope say that women should be allowed to become clergy? Certainly there are plenty of qualified nuns out there that would do a good job…perhaps a better job than their male counterparts and they would not be likely to rape any altar boys or girls for that matter.

Altar servers kneel during the Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI at the Olympic stadium in Berlin on September 22

Religion in general is on the decline, church attendance continues to dwindle and their influence (other than Evangelical-Fundamentalist, Dominionists radicals in America) keeps waning. The Catholic Church in particular has seen a series of scandals involving priests abusing the altar boys…it goes back a long time…actually nobody knows how long this has been going on. But the Church has had to pay dearly for these priests’ transgressions.

· Organized religion has long tried to keep women in their place, says Roland Martin

· Some Catholic churches are now refusing to let girls serve as altar servants, he says

· Yet were it not for women, there might never have been Christianity, Martin says

· Martin: When churches erect barriers to serving, they're seen as unwelcoming

Roland S. Martin is a syndicated columnist and author of "The First: President Barack Obama's Road to the White House." He is a commentator for TV One cable network and host/managing editor of its Sunday morning news show, "Washington Watch with Roland Martin."

SOURCES: http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/23/opinion/martin-church-girls/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9