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By Root 1231 0

extremely influential and popular tome Malleus Maleficarum —which in 180 years went through thirty-five editions in four languages—detailed many of these crimes. Women were murdered, for example, because they did "marvellous things with regard to male organs." It goes on to tell us that women "collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report." According to the women's executioners, these women copulated with devils, traveled on clouds, stole milk, rode atop he-goats or broomsticks and so should be tortured and killed— remember my father never beat anyone without good reason.

Not only women have suffered at the hands of Christians. As mentioned before, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples everywhere have been tortured, mutilated, and murdered to further the glory of Christ. "They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [Indians] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. .. .Then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive." The same is true, in smaller numbers, of the Christian treatment of Jews. Inquisitions, pogroms, and mass exterminations are Christian traditions as well and deeply celebrated as communion. Muslims, too—no mean misogynists themselves—have fallen before the avenging sword of Christ Our Savior. In order to free the Holy Lands of the unworthy, Crusaders repeatedly pillaged their way across eastern Europe and into the Middle East. To bring this discussion full circle, back to a Christian hatred of women, because non-Christian women were at the time of the Crusades considered particularly vile (sexual contact with them causing "an enormous stench to rise to heaven"), and most especially because defeats on the field of battle were inevitably attributed to a lack of chastity on the parts of Crusaders, rape played a smaller role than it normally has in the forward march of civilization. Instead, the Crusaders, as after the battles of Antioch, "did no other harm to the women they found in [the non-Christians'] tents—save that they ran their lances through their bellies."

The belief that men own women continues to permeate our culture. Even today politicians and others cite the Bible frequently to support their view. Recently the local newspaper ran a multi-page profile of a young woman who, according to the profile's first sentence, is a "role model for the entire city." This is not only because as a Christian she decided to abstain from sex until she married, but because she decided until that time never to be alone with a man. When the man who eventually became her husband asked her father, a Christian pastor, for permission to court his daughter, her father refused. The suitor took her acquiescence to her fathers wishes as a positive sign: "I knew that how she respected and honored her father was how she would respect and honor me." He asked again in six months, and this time her father agreed to turn his daughter over to the clearly like-minded suitor. After the article ran, the newspaper received many letters praising this woman and her family. Not a single letter commented on the woman's ownership by successive males.

More recently, a drunken woman was raped by two men after having danced an impromptu striptease at a party. The newspaper responded with an editorial entitled, "Act provocatively and you provoke," with the subtitle, "Sometimes, women lead men into temptation." The primary author of the editorial was a self-described fundamentalist Christian. The editorial's last line is, "If a woman demands the right to be a promiscuous fool. . . she shouldn't expect society to embrace her as a victim when she gets burned." The newspaper also published a rebuttal by a solitary dissenting member of the editorial board. Although his editorial did not ascribe blame to