Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 415 | Europe's Migration & Misogyny Problem | Guest: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Women are bearing the unintended consequences of a completely mismanaged mass migration system in Europe: a sexual assault and harassment crisis. What is the way forward, and how can this crisis be stopped? Today we are joined by human rights activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali to talk about her new book, "Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women's Rights," and why she's so passionate about being a clear voice of morality and truth in this time of cultural relativism and postmodernism. --- Today's Sponsor: ExpressVPN keeps your data private when you go online — and it's easy to use too! No matter what device you're on — phone, laptop, or Smart-TV — all you have to do is tap one button to get protected. Go to ExpressVPN.com/Allie to get 3 extra months free! --- Show Links: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation: AHAFoundation.org Buy Ms. Ali's latest book, 'Prey' --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hello, hello, welcome to Relatable. Today, I am having a wonderful, fascinating interview with a wonderful, fascinating person. And that is Ayanne Hersey Ali. You've probably seen her before. She's been on Fox News. She has been an author and in the public arena for a very long time. She is an author, a refugee and she is a former representative from the Netherlands as well. She is an immigrant from Somalia, but she moved to various countries in Europe and lived in the Netherlands. and she actually fled to the Netherlands to try to escape a forced marriage in 1992. She ended up earning her master's there. She got her citizenship. She got her master's in political science. She worked as a translator for Somali immigrants. And from 2003 to 2006, she served as an elected member of the Dutch parliament. In 2005, she was named one of Time Magazine to 100 most influential people.

Today, she lives in the United States. the Hoover Institution Research Fellow. She also has a foundation that raises awareness about female genital mutilation that's happening is in Islamic communities, not just abroad, but also here in the United States. And so today we're going to talk about her new book, how immigration, in particular, in Europe is leading to a rise of assault on women. These immigrants are mostly from Muslim majority countries just like Anne Hershey Ali. And so this is a conversation that honestly a lot of people don't want to have because in the West, we are afraid that criticizing other cultures or criticizing other countries is seen as bigoted or racist or wrong. But as we will talk about

today, that actually blinds us to reality. And it makes us unable to see right from wrong, good, from that and it prevents us from being able to protect victims of violence. And so I'm really excited for you to hear the insight that she has to give today. Without further ado, here is IAN Hersy Ali. Ms. Ali, thank you so much for joining us. I think most people listening or watching have been following you and probably have read your work for a while. But just in case there are some people who haven't, can you tell us who you are and what you do? Well, my name is Ayan Hershey. I was born in Somalia, and I've been in the United States since 2006.

I lived in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, in Kenya, and in the Netherlands. And I have written the details of my autobiography in a book called Infidel, and I think most of your viewers will know this. And right now, I work for the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I am a research fellow there, and I work on the issues of Islam, immigration, women's rights, and the council culture now. So now taking part in the culture wars. Yes. I think I first heard about you.

It was after you had been writing and working in this field for a while, but I remember Linda Sarsour, who is a left-wing Muslim activist. She tweeted something about wanting to, and pardon my French, for a lot. everyone listening, take your vagina away. And I think there was someone else that she said that about too. What was that reaction? And why do you get that kind of vitriol from left-wing activists? Well, Linda Sarsua is right now, yeah, she mixes that far left conviction with also her convictions that Sharia as a system of law is superior. And so if you have that kind of, um, If that's your worldview, then I don't think you will like me because my world view is the opposite. I've been campaigning against Sharia law for as long as I can remember and campaigning right now against far left accesses,

such as this woke or cancel culture. It goes by many names. It's called critical theory, critical race theory, critical justice theory. But, you know, the general public, they know it as woke. Yeah. And so I campaign against that. obviously I'm not one of our favorite people on the planet. And there have been feminists who are kind of in her arena or in her realm who also,

they don't like you or they push back against you. And I guess it's for what you said because you're, you know, you're against kind of the woke social justice mob. You're against a lot of the tactics of the left. But you also consider yourself a feminist or a champion of women's rights, correct? Well, I do. But I mean, when I, I've just released a. book, Pray that I think we might get to hopefully.

Yes. And that's the kind of feminism I believe in. I'm talking about the safety of women in the public space, and that safety is threatened by a phenomenon that these women can't do anything about, which is immigration from countries that are failed states or failing states. People who are fleeing civil war and economic turmoil who come to Europe. Many of them happen to be young men between the ages of what you call a military age, 15 to 35. And some of those men behave very badly towards women.

And I think if you are a serious feminist, you would bring to the surface such issues, you know, women's safety, things that really affect women in their day-to-day lives. And I, you know, some of the feminists who have gone worse. I don't even regard them as feminists anymore. And I'll give you an example. The author of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, had written about the unintended consequences of four women of the transgender movement. So she's not disparaging the transgender people.

She wants them to live as I do with freedom and dignity. But there are some unintended consequences for children and for women. She raised that and all the feminists dropped her. I mean, when I say all, I mean the woke feminists dropped her. Right. And so for the woke, apparently, if you have to make a trade-off between women's rights and something else, they will go with something else.

Right. And in your book, Prey, you talk about how illegal immigration, in particular in Europe, has kind of led to this rise of sexual assault. of young women. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why you decided to write this book at this time and the problem that's going on there? So I think when we talk about immigration and talk about legal and illegal, that is very much a very American thing because that's what the conversation in America is about. In Europe, the conversation is about asylum and refugees because Europe's neighbors in some parts of Africa, some parts of the Middle East, and this is about

proximity. They come from states like Libya, that's a failed state, Syria, civil war, failed, many other countries in Africa. So the kind of immigration they get is very different from the kind of immigration we get here in the United States. Now, a consequence of that is when you just have masses and masses and masses of people who are displaced from their own. own countries come in large numbers into Europe. What you get, it's chaos, it's mismanaged. Obviously, all of it is illegal. But then the European countries are trying to talk, okay, about asylum, who deserves to come in,

who doesn't. And they've messed up all of that. Some of those people come in anyway, legally or illegally, it really doesn't matter that much anymore. and they find themselves in streets and neighborhoods. They look at women. They have attitudes toward women that are so radically different from the countries where they come from. And then you have this spike in sexual assaults against women in the public space. And some of these countries are overwhelmed.

They're shocked. The leadership has been indulging in political correctness for decades. So they haven't anticipated. the problem or the scale of the problem, and they're failing their women and they're failing the immigrants. Yes, and can you tell us about kind of just tangibly what some of those consequences have actually looked like for young women? Well, it's not just young women.

It's all women. If you read my book, you'll see I don't only collect the statistics that I was able to get from these various governments. I actually also talk to some of the women who have been assaulted, who have been victims of sexual assault by immigrant men, most of them from Muslim countries. And I've collected stories, court cases, where testimonies of women are that have been subjected to this kind of behavior.

And what you find is that the women can be as young children, as young as 11 or 12-year-old, but they can be also in their 70s. So it seems like these. perpetrators are not making a distinction between age or whether the women are, you know, in their countries of origin, sometimes they say, well, she provoked it, she was dressed this way or that, she was a. Here it's just almost like all women. She could be an immigrant, she could be black or white, she could be older or young, rich or poor. It's very, it's bizarre

for young men to walk around in groups and just target any woman they can find and hunt her down and try and rape her. And sometimes they succeed. And that is why I call the book, pray. You have men who look at women and they don't see a fellow human being. They think of themselves as predators

and they pray on these women. And they start behaving like groups of hyenas or other wild animals that hunt in groups. And no one, I mean, very few people are saying, some of the sexual assaults are noted, but then they refuse to take data points such as ethnicity, you know, nationality, religion. And so if you refuse to take those data points,

you wouldn't be able to develop, you know, tailor-made programs, that can help these young men assimilate into the societies that they've come to and that have accepted them. Yes, and obviously we know that men of all different ethnicities and cultures can be predators in rape, but your argument is that this is happening in particular in groups of young Muslim men, that this is part of the culture of Islam, especially in that area of the world. What is it about Islam and kind of their upbringing in their countries of origin that has encouraged them to act like, in your words, like a pack of hyenas hunting prey? So I insist in the book over and over again that this isn't really about Muslims in general.

In fact, I talk to Muslim men who are fully assimilated in countries like Sweden and Denmark and Germany. And they agree with me that not all Muslim men are perpetrators of sexual violence against women. But there is a clash of values when it comes to European values and Muslim majority country, you know, Islamic values. So let's just put it. Let's just say the way it is. And when that last question where you say, what is it about Islam?

Well, in Islam, women are seen as chattel. They should submit to their male guardians. Your male guardian is your father. And when you get married, it is your husband. And there is a code of conduct for women, the modesty code or the chastity code or the virtue code, whatever you want to call it. But that means that you cover your body parts, you stay at home, and you adhere to that code of doing as what your husband or what your father gives you permission to do. Now, the men in those countries are also taught that they too have to adhere to this modesty doctrine which divides women into good women and bad women. Good women are those who behave according to the code of conduct that is called the modesty.

I call it the modesty doctrine. If women don't adhere to that code, then they are fair game. Women in Muslim majority countries have learned how to cope with that when they don't have or can't afford a guardian. They cover themselves, they walk in groups, they don't go out at night. If they do, they go in, again, in groups or in ways that makes them feel. feel safe. The men in those countries, when they find women without guardians who are not protected by their male bloodline, clan, family, tribe, they hunt down those women.

When those women, when those men come to Europe and they find that the modesty doctrine does not apply because in Europe, women, they don't take permission from male guardians. They are considered to be fully equal to men. And so they go about their business like every man would do. They wear what they want. And the public space, at least for some time, it was taken for granted that women are safe there. And that's what we are now seeing. We're just seeing that clash of values on the streets of some neighborhoods. in Europe. And it's women who are, especially women in working class neighborhoods. They're the ones who have to bear the consequences of the unintended, I would say the unintended consequences

of immigration. And it's an immigration system that is totally mismanaged. And do you think that part of the reason that it's mismanaged, you mentioned that when these assaults happen very often ethnicity or immigration status is not noted. Do you think the reason for that is what you kind of mentioned earlier, this kind of critical race theory view of West and white bad, anything not West, not white is good. Anyone who is an immigrant or anyone who is not, you know, a white cisgender Western Christian is on the side of the oppressed. Do you think that that kind of erroneous worldview is part of why these European governments won't take specific action or take specific precautions or make specific programs for these majority Muslim young men?

I think it's a combination of factors. And yes, that narrative of all things West and all things that have to do with Western civilization is bad. That narrative is in your and has been there for a long time among the elites, and it's very strong. So it's part of the explanation, but it is not the whole story. I think part of the story is they do have... So if you look at the United States of America, it's been one nation for at least 230-something, almost 40 years. In Europe, these various nation states have joined... a club called the EU.

So some of their policies are made on the EU level, including immigration, and some of them are made on the national level. And so right there, you have a policy mismatch. You have a good reason for policies to go wrong. So some countries anticipate after an event like the Arab Spring that, okay, watch out, we're going to get a lot of immigrants coming from these countries because those states are going to fall apart. But on the national level, there's very little they can do to prepare for that eventuality, which started to happen in 2015 in a big way. It started in 2011, 2012, 13, but in 15, you had that big influx.

So part of it is practical also. then within each country there is a disagreement on why immigration, why do we need people to come? And so that people there who are arguing, we need immigration, we need immigrants because our populations are shrinking. We need them for the economy. While others are saying, well, actually, this particular type of immigrant costs us, brings us more cost than benefits. And then of course there is the history of Europe. There is a history of colonialism and there's the history of the Holocaust. And part of that history of the Second World War was a lot of Jews were sent to their death

because they were registered not only with their names and other personal identity details, but also their religion. And if that were not the case, many of them would have been saved. And so there is a huge reluctance in some of these countries to take down such details as religion, ethnicity, skin color. Because it's informed, I mean, it's understandable, of course. But you're trying to correct history that went wrong. by doing things wrong right now. Yes. Yeah, I'm trying to be compassionate and empathetic,

and I'm trying to understand. But right now, I think the refusal to note down these details of skin color and ethnicity and nationality are actually going to cause more problems than the other way around. This is different context. It's a different problem. And in this case, we really do need the physical details of the perpetrators,

even if it is only to develop programs of assimilation that will fit that. But if you come from Afghanistan, you come from a different environment than Somalia or Eritrea or Egypt or wherever. So it's important to have these details to be able to develop assimilation programs because that's really the only way for Europe to go

is to assimilate the people that they've allowed in. Right. And I think that part of that kind of anti-West world view that a lot of Westerners have and believe is sophisticated and educated and educated and academic and all of that, it resists this idea of assimilation because we view assimilation or wanting assimilation is bigotry. But as you're pointing out, there can be at times very tangible and dastardly consequences for vulnerable people when, we don't promote assimilation with Western values. I also think it has to do with this kind of morally relativistic postmodern worldview that a lot of elites and people in charge have that, oh, you know, there are just cultural differences.

You know, Joe Biden said this the other day in reference to, you know, Chinese concentration camps of Uighur Muslims is that there are just culturally kind of relative differences. I think that mentality also. can inhibit a government official from saying, okay, you know, this cultural norm is not okay. This cultural norm is actually better or this law is better. And that's not bigotry. That's just to say, okay, we abide by this moral framework.

We believe that this is best for everyone no matter their background. But I think a lot of Westerners are hesitant to say that because they don't want to be called bigots or Islamophobes. Absolutely right in everything you say. And I don't think we should hesitate. to describe what exactly it is that China is doing. China is interning, putting about 10 million people in concentration camps because they're different, because of their religion, which happens to be Islam. And they are forcing women to be forced to be sterilized.

They are raping these women. They are committing gross acts and violations against humanity, and you should just say it as it is, That's exactly what President Biden should do. In terms of Europe, for a long time, they tried to avoid the clash of values, the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, between Islam and Europe. But when you get to a place where there are beheadings, and now we have this spike in sexual violence against women,

where the Jewish minorities of Europe feels so unresolved. unsafe, that they're fleeing to Israel and America, where homosexuals in many European streets either refuse to go to these places or pretend not to be homosexual, so they wouldn't hold hands or show each other affection in public because they're afraid of being attacked. When we get to that place, all these politically correct nonsense, multiculturalism, moral relativist stories, that is not going to cut it. And so what you're seeing now is in many of these European countries, voters are going to populist parties, to far-right parties.

If you look at France, National Front is, they seem to be either very close or leading the polls. And so I think there's a lot of waking up going on in Europe right now, as opposed to America where for some reason we seem to be attracted to this critical justice theory, rubbish. Yeah. And I was going to ask you if you see some of the same problems that Europe is seeing happening here. Obviously, it's different because of a point that you mentioned earlier because of proximity. And so we don't necessarily have the exact same issues,

but you have been an outspoken critic of Sharia and of some parts of Islam. And do you see those things is having a dangerous amount of influence here and in an American politics? So I always make this distinction between Da'a and Jihad. And I don't know if your viewers or listeners know what I'm talking about. Probably not. If you could explain that, that would be awesome. So I think most people are familiar with Jihad because that is when violence is used. It's holy war.

So a terrorist act by a radical Muslim trying to make his point or achieve his objective is called jihad, right? Most Americans understand that. But before you get to jihad, there is the propagation, the teaching, the proselytization, the brainwashing of young people to get them to a place where they think jihad is okay. So that whole process is called dawa. And I think that when it comes to the establishment of Da'a and institutions that engage in Da'a in the United States, yes, we have a problem. We have a lot of mosques and Islamic centers. And they do undertake these activities of trying to persuade Muslims who are not very observant to become really observant and extreme in their beliefs. But they also convert or try to confront.

but non-Muslims into radical Islam. So the Tao activities are something we need to watch out for. But thank goodness in the last few years, we have seen a deep decline in the terrorist attacks. Now, that's not to say they are gone forever, but it's to say, it's just to note that we haven't had Islamist-driven terrorist attacks in America for some time. Yes, I would say that that's a good thing. It does seem like anti-American and anti-Western, anti-democracy, anti-freedom curriculum in schools, even if it's obviously it's not explicitly pro Islam, it does seem like it would have a similar goal, though, to the kind of indoctrination that you're talking about, where it would at least help this kind of anti-American sentiment. Obviously, it's prevalent in a lot of different places.

in the United States, but it's especially prevalent in Muslim majority countries. And so it seems like if you can kind of have that resentment against the United States here in America by American children, that that would kind of help the extremist cause to, and not just Muslim countries, but also, you know, China and the countries that really want to see the demise of the United States, it seems like all of those anti-American forces would kind of work together. That's a very good point. And I think that is one of the most important reasons why we should resist the critical race theory and this, you know, movement that calls itself woke. Because what the woke are telling us is that America is systemically racist, that white people are the oppressors of all people of color,

that the only way to achieve justice is to break down the so-called racist structures, which is to destroy America. And the only way to achieve justice is to take away from the oppressor and then give it to the various factions of victims that they have constructed. Now, any adversary of America,

Islamist, Chinese, Russian, and any adversary of America would obviously exploit that kind of thing. And so a few years ago, we all thought that this whole critical race theory, justice theory, wokeism, was a fringe ideology. It was somewhere, you know, in some corner of the universities, and we thought people who went there would simply outgrow it. And now it's become this mainstream thing. People are being afraid of, people are terrified of being cancelled in universities, in newsrooms, in corporations. It's everywhere. So yes, you're absolutely right.

This homegrown ideology that is anti-American to its core is really right now what we need to focus on and reject the idea that we are systematically racist. And all this. It's pure garbage, but it's dangerous garbage. I'm interested to know just as an immigrant from Somalia yourself, and you have also been in European countries. I think you were in the Netherlands before you came to America. Is that correct? Yes.

A number of countries. So I do have the fortune to be able to compare America to different countries. And that's what I'm interested in hearing. from you. What has been your experience in the way of just opportunity, equality, or assessment of civil rights when it comes to, not just from where you came from, Somalia, but also European countries versus the United States. Is there any credence whatsoever in your experience from your perspective of people who say, you know, America is this white supremacist, endymically racist place where only white people can get ahead? I mean,

And your just honest assessment, is there any kind of accuracy to those assertions? I find it's bizarre when I read some of the works of Ibram X. Kendi, Andy Angelo, and all these other people who are pushing the narrative that we are hopelessly racist and, you know, people are only oppressed here. We do have an inequality between black people who are the descendants of slaves and the, you know, people. general public. And I think that that inequality should be addressed and the appropriate way of doing that is by improving public schools, providing more charter schools, setting aside resources, time and effort and tough love, tough love to bring those people who are left behind into the system not to declare that the system is racist or that the system is structurally against them.

I think that is absolutely wrong. It's wrong and it's proven that that narrative is wrong over and over again because look at the immigrants from other African countries who are doing fantastic here. What about the immigrants from India where they have a caste system? And the Indians who come into the United States, they flourish because nobody cares. about their skin color. They are not outcasts here. They're Americans here.

Look at the Asians, the Chinese, who are not able to flourish in their own country because it's authoritarian and they come here and they love it, they work hard, and they live the American dream. Look at all the Hispanic people who, same thing, come for the American dream

and live the American dream, but also look at the white folks who are poor and many broken families, so many of them dying of drug overdose. If those are white heterosexual men who are addicted to opioids and who are in many ways poor or just as poor as the black Americans, who's oppressing those ones? You know, it is, you can simplify it and say the source of all our problems is race and have yourself talking about race all day long, but that's just a distraction. I'm being charitable.

Right. It's a distraction because it distracts us from some of the real problems that are going on that are not racial issues in most cases. They might be class issues. They might be geographical issues. they could be local government issues. And when we refuse to look at some of those problems, then we are unable to reach actual solutions that could help these groups.

But, you know, I don't necessarily think that that is the point of critical race theorists. I'm not sure that they're actually trying to make life better for particular groups. I think it's more of an academic theory and ideology that they're hoping they'll be able to kind of just project onto the world to create, I don't know, some kind of socialist dystopia.

One day, it's kind of hard to know ever where progressives want to land on things. Well, these people, the ones who are pushing for critical race theory, it's very clear what they want. They want power. And they're exploiting these vulnerable groups that they have set, you know, black people, women, homosexuals, or LGBTQ.

They are using these vulnerable. vulnerable minorities exploiting their situations to get themselves into power and stay with that power. They're not interested. If you look at that website of Black Lives Matter,

they are not interested in black people. They want to redistribute wealth. They are getting, by the minute, wealthier because people are throwing money at them out of guilt, but they're not taking that money to inner city Chicago or inner city Atlanta. And if you ask them, where are you taking that money?

They'll just call you a racist. Right. So they do have an agenda. And their agenda is to get rich and it's to get powerful. And it's very absolutely clear that they do not care about the vulnerable groups that they say they care. It's very cynical. Yes. And, you know, this kind of has to do with what we're talking about.

But it was something that I meant to mention earlier and ask you about. and now I want to bring up. And that is this issue, this terrible ongoing problem of female genital mutilation that is happening, I think, more prevalently than most people, the most people know about. And the reason why I think it connects to what we were just talking about is because it interferes with this critical race idea of the only people who do the oppressing or these white Western people and everyone else are just oppressed. But unfortunately, in many areas of the world and in some cultures, young girls are being subjected to this kind of mutilation. And many so-called feminists here, Western feminists, certainly don't talk about it. So for people who don't know, can you just talk about what this is, what's going on, and if it's something that's happening here in the United States that we should know about?

So FGM stands for female genital mutilation. So little girls between the ages anywhere from four years, five years, six years, they have their genitals removed and the vaginas son shut. I've started a foundation here, the AHA Foundation, which is an acronym of my name, IAN Hershey. And they have been very active. Our foundation has been very active in trying to bring awareness to Americans about the fact that this takes place here in America. And the reason why it does is, look, if 100% in some countries, 90%, 97%,

if populations come from countries like that, where it's the norm, and you come to America, you don't stop doing it just because you got off the airplane. And we've, we've, we succeeded in trying to bring one case to court, didn't go anywhere, there's another one that's ongoing. I think I'm not allowed to talk about it yet because I don't want to frustrate prosecution. But yeah, it's going on in America. And feminists, why are they silent on it?

If you're a woke feminist, you believe that only white men engage in oppression, so you're not going to talk about other cultures and you censor other people from talking about it. So we are now in a place where, Our society is divided into groups depending on their skin color and their religion and their gender and other immutable traits. And only individuals within those groups are allowed to talk about their problems. And that's terrible.

That's tribalism. It's actually reverse racism. Yes. It's all very crazy. But yeah, if you are woke, you won't talk about female genital mutilation. you're not going to talk about honor killings, which is another, in Europe they've now started calling it femicide, killing women who violate your honor as a family.

You are not going to talk about any kind of misogyny or cruelty that is perpetrated in the name of Islam or in the name of an Indian culture or the name of a Chinese culture or in the name of anything that is non-white, if women are badly treated when those other cultures are invoked, our feminists, if they're not going to talk about it because that goes against their narrative. Yep. Moral relativism, cultural relativism, postmodernism, all these ideas have consequences.

They have very serious consequences, which is why it's so important for you to be this clear voice of morality and this clear voice of right and wrong and truth in a time when a lot of people don't want to hear it. So I'm very thankful for you. I'm thankful for the books that you write, for the work that you do. Can you tell people, one, where they can buy your book and two, how they can support you and the foundation

that you just talked about? Well, the foundation, please go on the website. It is called the Ayanheirsi Ali Foundation.org or the AHA Foundation, aHA.org. There it is, the AHA Foundation. AHAFoundation.org. And the book is pray. I don't know if I'm holding it.

Yep. Is that better? Yes, that's in the frame. So for people who are watching this on YouTube, the book is called Prey Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights. And so we'll make sure to put the link to that book in the description of this,

podcast episode so people can just click on it and go ahead and order it. Thank you so much. And I think you can find it on Amazon and any of your closest bookseller. It's now out and out and about. Well, perfect. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time and thank you for all of the work that you do. Thank you so much. And thank you very much for having me on. And thank you for taking on the walk culture. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Bye. Thanks. All right. So I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation.

And I just wanted to, I just wanted to note at the end of this, something that I was thinking about when she was talking about the way that Islam treats women and regards women. If you read Love Thy Body with us as a part of Women's Book Club with Ali's Ducky on Facebook, then you read how Nancy Piercy describes how the Christian church has been a refuge for women throughout history. You know, some people, especially progressive, see Christianity as this oppressive force against women as this oppressive patriarchy that basically is the same thing as Sharia law and basically regards women as the same as Islam does. And nothing could be further from the truth. Remember, we're not morally relative. We're not culturally relative. We don't believe that all religions

are the same. We don't believe that all morality is the same. All values are the same. as Christians, we do believe that Christianity is, as Jesus says, Jesus is the way the truth in life and no one comes to the Father except through Him. We believe that Jesus is God and we base our foundation for our faith on Jesus Christ and the inspired and errant word that he has given us through Scripture. And while there have been people who have perverted the faith or have exploited the faith in order to oppress women, in order to oppress vulnerable groups, that is not what the gospel says. It's not what the gospel offers women.

That's not what Christianity and scripture offers women. What we see throughout the Bible from the creation account to the very end is that women are honored by God as people who are made with equal dignity made in the image of God. In Jesus, in how he took the time to befriend women, to look women in the eye, the woman who was caught in adultery, to help the bleeding woman who had been bleeding for 11 years and touched his. cloak and he said, you know, he said, the Bible says that he felt power go out of him and he turned around and he paid attention to this woman and he looked her in the eye and said that she was healed. The way that Jesus honored women, paid attention to women, women who were rejected by society, that is what Christianity is. That's what Christianity has been. And people look at

something like Ephesians 5 that says, wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. And people see that as oppressive. People see that as archaic and wrong and something that has led to abuse of women. No, sin has led to abuse of women, but that passage actually speaks to how much God and how much husbands are to cherish their women because, or to cherish their wives, because husbands are also called in that same passage to lay down their lives for their wives in the same way that Christ laid his life down for the church. And so no other religion gives this kind of, of deference and this kind of respect and dignity to women that Christianity does as people who are made in God's image, people who are given gifts, spiritual gifts, gifts of the Holy Spirit,

women who are equal in the sight of God. That doesn't mean that we have all the same roles. It doesn't mean that we have all the same responsibilities within the church and within marriage. It doesn't mean that we are the same. There are obviously very foundational differences between men and women and always have been since the beginning of time. But as far as equality of worth, equality of dignity and the husband's responsibility to treat his wife with love and respect with sacrificial love and respect, Christianity stands out. And that is why women have sought refuge in the Christian church for all of its history and will continue to.

As we see this sexual revolution and we see this moral revolution. and we see this moral relativism and this cultural relativism make its primary prey women in women's spaces, vulnerable women. Women will still be looking to the church as a refuge of grace and of truth and of protection and of care. And we have to continue to be that. We have to continue to be that. We have to reject this postmodern relativism, which says all value systems are the same. All morality is the same.

It's not the same. our God, the God of the heavens and the earth, the God that we read about in Scripture, the truth that has been revealed to us. He tells us what is good and right and true. He tells us what is right and wrong. He tells us what is true and what is false. And so if we love women, if we love vulnerable communities, then we will share with them the love of Christ and the goodness of the Christian life and the refuge that has been and can be, should be, should be the Christian. church. Unfortunately, there has been victimization within the Christian church. There has been abuse. There has been manipulation. And that is sin. That is Satan. And as Christians,

we should do everything we can to use the gospel and use scripture to push back against that sin and to protect women as much as we can. All right. That's all I wanted to say. I'll see you back here soon.