President Jimmy Carter, the Role of the Carter Center

• Citation: Vol. 22 No. 1
• Publication year: 2008
• topic: Civil Rights

THE ROLE OF THE CARTER CENTER

President Jimmy Carter^*

I shall outline for you some of the experiences that I have had in my own life that emphasize the need that the World Law Institute asked us to address tonight.

I grew up in the Deep South in a little town about 120 miles south of here. I lived on a farm. All my neighbors were black, and I experienced the anguish and embarrassment of being raised in a legally segregated society. But, the Supreme Court ruled that powerful white people could property treat our black neighbors "separate but equal." It was a millstone around our necks. I never knew, even when I was an adult, of any organization of lawyers that said, "This has to stop." I never knew of any religious leaders who said, "This is contrary to our faith."

It was only much later when a then unknown woman named Rosa Parks sat in the front part of a bus. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. came forward, and eventually the law was changed by a courageous president, Lyndon Johnson. But the point is, it was not done by religious leaders. It was not done by legal scholars from the great law schools of our time.

So now we have passed that era of legalized discrimination against people because they were black. But we face, I think, an even more serious fact of universal discrimination against women. This is a part of our lives that most of us are willing to ignore or to accommodate. For the World Law Institute to undertake this challenge and to try to do something about it legally is very inspiring, and I'm grateful to be one of its advisors.

One facet of religious fundamentalism, as I expressed in a book that I wrote in 2005 called Our Endangered Values, is the domination of women. I happen to be a Baptist. I was raised a loyal Southern Baptist, but, in 2000, my own denominational leaders decided that legally, in accordance with their rules, all wives had to be submissive to their husbands. And now, under the Southern Baptist Convention rules, no woman can act as a leader of men or an instructor of men. They have even gone so far as to say that no woman who is a Southern Baptist minister can serve as a chaplain in the military services. We accept that with relative equanimity. It's part of our lives, and it's one of the dominant religious organizations in modern America.

In Saudi Arabia, where Rosalynn and I have visited many times, women have to wear veils. They cannot get a driver's license; they're not permitted to drive an automobile. During the last few years, the religious rules have been loosened to permit women to receive education, and now that's prevalent. But we know the horrible example of religious discrimination against women because of the Taliban. The most dastardly and damaging discrimination exists in the poorest nations-the developing nations, where you have all these religious factors that restrict women's freedom and dignity.

And you have a struggle for the basic necessities of life where, in Liberia, for example, half the people live on half a dollar a day. Of the approximately six billion people of the world, more than one billion live on less than a dollar a day, and half the world's population lives on less than two dollars a day. And in these countries, oppression by powerful men is much more disturbing because the poor are struggling for a morsel of food or the last drink of water; it's where the powerful and dominant add an additional source of oppression- poverty-to the plight of women.

The World Health Organization and Amnesty International have exactly the same statistics on another prevalent factor. In the whole world, there are

130 million women who suffer from mutilation of their genitals or female circumcision. Of those 130 million, 120 million live in twenty-eight countries just south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. There are different reasons for this, but part of the reason, obviously, is religion.

Well, at this conference, we're not likely to change religions. We can't change the Southern Baptist Convention's view that women are subservient. We can't change Saudi Arabia's prohibition against women driving cars. We can't change the Taliban's various restraints on women. We can't change the rules concerning female circumcision, which quite often destroys their enjoyment of sex and also debases them.

We need to go to other options, and that's one of the factors that's being discussed in this conference. Can we resort to the law to protect women? The Carter Center, which was headed for many years by Bill Foege, who will speak to you later on, has tried to strengthen the rule of law, although we're not lawyers. But when Meles Zenawi overthrew the communist dictator Mengistu in Ethiopia, he asked me as a friend to let The Carter Center come and help him set up his judicial system and his Supreme Court, write his Constitution, and develop a system by which the war crimes of Mengistu's subordinates could be tried in a way that...