Hugh Hewitt mentions Elisabeth Bumiller's rather noteworthy comments on the finances of T. D. Jakes. I may have mentioned this before, but Bumiller's really the perfect example of a spaced-out journalist.
In her book, May you be the Mother of a Hundred Sons, Bumiller sets out to talk about all different kinds of women in India. She did quite a bit of work and interviewed a large number of people -- including, to my delight, filmi stars who said they hadn't even read the script, but did know they were supposed to go in and have a crying scene next -- but she still comes across as extremely shallow and unintelligent. One of the clearest examples is when she talks about female infanticide. Mention is made of sex-selective abortions, something Indian feminists call female foeticide (this practice disturbs the author as well, but to a lesser extent, because "I have always been pro-choice"). Bumiller interviews several women who admit to what they feel is the unfortunate duty of having to kill their girl babies to spare them lifelong suffering and spare the families pain. The women explain that abortions are too expensive, so it's easier to just let them die after birth. Bumiller's shocked and disgusted by these women, saying, "I honestly don't know if Rajeshwari saw no difference, other than the expense, between abortion and infanticide." She then blames the Indian woman's unenlightened stance on "the harsh economics of her life." "Although killing a baby because she was a girl could never be considered another version of aborting a fetus because it was female, the uneducated people of the valleys..." were doing that, she writes, horrified, before quoting a woman who asks why there should be a moral difference between "killing the child in the womb [and] kill[ing] the child when it was born," as she has done.
Later, Bumiller raises her concerns "about how one controls the practice [of sex-selective abortions] without infringing on a woman's right to abortion." To give her credit, she does seem to have a few qualms -- at one point, she describes sex-selective abortions as "the slaugter of female babies" (not fetuses), and then says, "If I thought of the abortion of a female fetus as 'slaughter,' then what was I to call the abortion of a male fetus?" -- but these qualms don't last long; they last only long enough to give her a sense of self-importance. "It annoyed me that although the feminists were doing the right thing in opposing sex-selective abortion, they were so unaware of the philosophical traps. They tended to be more emotional than rational in their arguments," she writes. "Bombay feminists could freely make outrageous statements that seemed to threaten a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy because the right to abortion was not under siege in India...." She concludes with her own lecture to pro- sex-selective-abortion women in India on how the "choice" in "pro-choice" isn't actually a free choice there, because "'choice' is not made in a social vacuum, and that their 'choice' had in fact been determined by thousands of years of prejudice and discrimination." (Perhaps she should join up with Feminists for Life -- they've always said, as their "founding mothers" said, that a woman who thinks abortion is a good idea is a sign of a society that is letting its women down.) And then a call for raising people's consciousness and enlightening the people she keeps referring to as "uneducated" and "backward."
That's just one chapter. Throughout the whole book, she comes up with a wealth of information, and a huge expanse of ideas and experiences, but she never seems capable of changing her ideas or processing any of that information, and it always comes down to, in effect, "oh, those poor benighted natives, why can't they be as advanced as I am?"
So, in reponse to Hewitt: I don't think "she was trying to say" anything about Bishop Jakes; I think she was just unintentionally revealing her surprise at anything that doesn't fit the way she expects the world to work, as she has done many times before. I'll chalk it up to lack of thought, however, and not to bigoted and politically-biased thought.
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