No girlz allowed--the Bible says so!

Everyone by now has surely heard of the case of Mary Lambert, 81, fired as a Sunday school teacher "for being a woman," at least as the New York State North Country Gazette reports it. Both the pastor of the Watertown, New York Baptist church and its deacon council (whose members are 55 percent women) insist there are other reasons Lambert was fired after 54 years--but they still come back to 1 Timothy 2:12: "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent." Just how did the pastor convince those women to go along?

You know, this just makes all Christians look stupid, especially when applied so inconsistently, even at the First Baptist Church of Watertown, where more than 80 percent of the Sunday School teachers are women.

Then again, we Catholics are no better. At least Tim LaBouf, the pastor in question, has a Bible passage expressly forbidding women from teaching. The Catholic scriptural argument against the ordination of women rests on the assumption that there were no women at the Last Supper, accounts of which mention both the "twelve" (Matthew and Luke) and "the disciples" (all four gospels), and at least that latter group included women.

Oh well, I guess we all use scripture when it suits us...