Maureen Dowd can be irritating, but she gets things right an awful lot of the time. Lately she's been focusing on the Catholic church's cover-up of sexual abuse by priests. Her column yesterday described the flash of insight she had about the whole mess while talking to a group of educated professional women in Saudi Arabia:
I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders.
How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?
I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.
Read it. It's worth a few minutes of your time.
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