ISTM (-£-+-¦ -¦-¦-¦-¦-é-ü-Ã…, -ç-é-+) the whole argument hangs on whether Athos is really a separate country, like the Vatican and San Marino are from Italy, or if it’s a part of Greece. (I remember a
New York Times article on it from the ’80s titled, ‘This Corner of Greece is Different: It Isn’t a Corner of Greece’. AFAIK it is part of Greece but enjoys autonomy.) Also, ISTM ironically Athos might be better protected against infringements by the EU if it is in Greece, because my private-club-is-sovereign analogy would hold (if not the separation-of-church-and-state argument). Might a private organization on private property in Greece be free to do what it wants?
Of course, according to this interpretation of "gender equality," the RC and Orthodox Churches will be required to ordain women to the priesthood and episcopate as well, no?
I remember that was what opponents said was the hook in the charitable-seeming velvet glove of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. (IIRC, ‘Congress shall make no law discriminating on the basis of sex.’) To which proponents rebutted: separation of church and state would protect churches in this case. But considering how vehemently anti-Catholic American society is (even more so now than in the ’50s, thanks to PC), I don’t think that promise can be counted on. The
intelligentsia and the media, egged on by the pro-abortion movement, easily could incite the mob to burn down churches again on the grounds that ‘those papists’ (and when they see RCs they see Easterns too) are oppressing women. Just like in the 1840s when churches and convents were torched by mobs partly because of lurid false stories of nuns being prostituted and held against their will (‘Maria Monk’, etc.).
Our view of difference and complementarity of the sexes is going the way of our smells-and-bells religion as being seen increasingly as un-‘Amurrican’ and therefore a threat by the herd, the masses.
