Amy at Texas Faith: Hillary, hormones and the presidency
Question by Joel Thornton
A Dallas marketing and PR executive was blasted with criticism recently when she wrote on her Facebook page that she would rather live in Canada than remain in the U.S. if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
Cheryl Rios gave religious reasons for not wanting a female commander-in-chief. She said she backs “equal rights,” but told KTVT-TV (Channel 11) that “there’s an old biblical sound reasoning why a woman shouldn’t be president.” She didn’t point to any specific scriptures but did mention “different hormones.”
As Hillary Clinton tries to become the first woman president, she will run into much, much more criticism – a lot of it based on political differences, but a lot based on gender.
For people of faith, is it right to use religious beliefs or scriptures to try to make the argument that women aren’t fit for the highest office in the land? Does your faith, 
denomination or house of worship support leadership positions for women or not?
Read the Panel
AMY MARTIN, director emeritus of Earth Rhythms:
Can we assume that Rios doesn’t realize that Hillary Clinton is well past menopause? Even so, looking at the state of the world today, a result of over 4,000 years of male leadership, an infusion of estrogen can only be a good thing.
Yet female hormones are far less unstable than our limbic juices such as adrenaline, dopamine, and so on. These hair-trigger hormones that both sexes share, once essential in the eat-or-be-eaten caveman era, fuel the oppositional thinking that permeates our modern society. Let’s worry about that.
If a person wants to justify prejudice, bigotry or depersonalization of women, or any other group, plenty of sacred texts can be tweaked to do that. But not the Tao Teh Ching. The curved halves of its yin-yang symbol are a balance of male and female, yin and yang. The dot of white in the dark half, and vice versa, counsels us that there is no pure state of either sex.
To diminish women is to be out of Teh and counter to everything in the natural world, thus assuring endless foment and misery. Are we willing to live in peace yet?
