An evangelical author, Letha Dawson Scanzoni argued, gently but persuasively, that the Bible considered women equal to men, inspiring a wave of Christian feminism and, perhaps inevitably, a backlash against it.
In books like “All We’re Meant to Be” and “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?” she used the Bible to challenge beliefs that women were inferior to men and that homosexuality was a sin.
Bay Area Reporter :: LGBTQ CA archives start to reopen ebar.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ebar.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I read it voraciously, passionately. I all but memorized it. To this day, I can recite key arguments that leapt off the page and into my adolescent life. “Jesus boldly pictured God as a woman.” Genesis 1 is not a prescription for female and male identity; it is a description of the world men and women inhabited.
Mollenkott was an evangelical, and so was I. This label allowed her into my life. In a world that divided people into safe and unsafe, us and them, she was one of us. But in truth, there was nothing safe about Virginia Mollenkott.
She was born into a Plymouth Brethren family, and when she fell in love with an older woman, her mother sent her to a Christian boarding school to end the relationship. Later, at Bob Jones University, she continued to struggle with her sexual identity and self-understanding. She confessed to a professor that she loved women; the professor urged her to get married right away. She obeyed. The marriage did not last, and during the 1970s, now Dr.