Beyond the Veil| This website has never made any pretense regarding our feelings of the patriarchy. I’ve connnected ancient culture, religion, and human sexuality dots with every step of our content evolution.

Our focus on burqas last summer came at the same time I had nightmares, seeing First Lady Michelle Obama in this photo at the Vatican.

Learning yesterday that America has six Catholics on our Supreme Court left me speechless. My digital fears about the Vatican’s Catholic representatives camped out in Nancy Pelosi’s office are justified, and I make no apologies for being terrorized about my future as an American woman.

NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd is never shy. But in writing this weekend’s Worlds Without Women, Dowd is consciously or not joining an international wakeup among the world’s women.

The premise of Anne of Carversville is that all women should be united globally against the religious patriarchy.

Religious books have rewritten women’s place global history, with rules against women not reflecting life for Catholic women at the time of Jesus or Muslim women at the time of Muhammad. Women had lost many earlier rights under the patriarchy, but history hadn’t yet declared us the scourge of the earth, our sexuality the great temptation that brought humanity to its knees.

Remember also, the Eve ate the apple. Eve ate knowledge. At least let’s get Eve’s original sin straight in our minds. Eve exercised her sexy mind, making her a Smart Sensuality woman.

Feminism has all but died in America, as our women make less progress than females in other countries.

American women are moving to the pack of the bus — good girls not wanting to make a fuss as the Catholic bishops and their Commander-in-Chief Pope Benedict tell us to get in line. The Vatican is investigating American nuns for being too independent, for heaven’s sake. And that’s before they stood up to Rep Stupak.

Global Wakeup Call for Women

Around the world, our cell phones are beeping. Text messages say read me, engage, respond. Facebook and Twitter send international quickies to both sexes, passed on defiantly as we all challenge patriarchal institutions, whether they are the Vatican or a military dictatorship in Africa.

I’ve been a public sceptic until now, that we could actually put feminism front and center again. American women don’t have the stomach for these kinds of fights, torn as so many are between religious mandates from men in power like the pope and our desire to be loved, respectable women in the eyes of our communities.

Personally, I don’t blame American husbands, many who agree with us.

Everywhere there are signs that I’m wrong in not believing that American women can push back against these patriarchal, conservative trends. Remember, thought, it was women — lead by Phyllis Schlafly — who said that American women didn’t deserve an equal rights amendment.

Our men would take care of us, as they see fit and fair. The state of Texas just wrote up Schlafly as a great American hero, to be entered into our textbooks, while Thomas Jefferson is diminished. I have no problem with Phyllis Schlafly being in text books for defeating the ERA and launching a moral crusade in America. She’s entitled, but not at the expense of Thomas Jefferson.

This morning Maureen Dowd’s lightbulb moment, comparing women in Saudi Arabia to herself, could be a game changer:

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.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity.

I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.

I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity.

What were those famous words from American patriot Patrick Henry: ‘Give me liberty or give me death?’ Anne of Carversville declares that the fourth wave of global feminism has officially begun. Thank you, Maureen Dowd.

Doing a quick Google search of the term ‘fourth wave of feminism’, the neocons want to claim the term, in what is frankly the ultimate insult to all women in the world. The patriarchy’s women friends want to claim the term ‘fourth wave feminism’.

This is mental masturbation of the worst kind, and if American women don’t get off our glorious butts and move into action, Scandinavia will become our new home.

An international girl’s club has been born, led by Hillary Clinton, Queen Rania, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Carla Bruni, Madonna, Shakira, Angelina Jolie, Lubna Hussein, Molly Melching, Sarah Brown, and endless numbers of women demanding a new world of women.

This is not an example of America’s Christian women trying to convert women in developing countries to their religion. American women have our own problems to worry about. The vast majority of women in the world have the same issues in varying degrees.

First and foremost, the fourth wave of feminism is based on female-centric principles and it’s not run by men of any party. There are milliions of enlightened men who support these changes.

The fourth wave of feminism is a shared power situation and women are not stopping until the crusade is won — not with promises and assurances of women’s importance in other areas of life — but with reality that our elected leaders and rulemakers are women who represent our requirements as citizens.

If you think six Catholic American Supreme Court justices won’t be receiving private calls from the Vatican regarding sex-cases before the court, then you are far more trusting than I am. This is not the America Patrick Henry had in mind when he said: ‘Give me liberty or live me death.’

Let the current evidence about how the Vatican operates behind the scenes, speak for itself. I do not want them, or their fundamentalist friends, running America. Anne

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