From the Archives: Former President Jimmy Carter on Women's Rights, Religion and Power

[MUSIC]

Amina Srna: This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm producer, Amina Srna, filling in for Brian today. As I'm sure you've been hearing all morning, former President Jimmy Carter died yesterday. He was 100 years old. We've been reflecting on his long life for over a year now here on The Brian Lehrer Show since he went into hospice care. As I mentioned at the beginning of today's show, Brian was lucky enough to interview Carter several times over the years.

Today, we thought it would be nice to hear an excerpt from an interview he did with Brian about 10 years ago in March of 2014. President Carter talked mostly about his work in women's rights as they relate to religion. You'll also hear him interact with callers and weigh in on the NSA and why he was still a fan of snail mail at that time. Here is former President Jimmy Carter from 2014. This interview has been lightly edited.

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Former President Jimmy Carter has become convinced that deprivation and abuse of women and girls is the most serious and most unaddressed problem in the world and results from a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts. President Carter is here in our studio to talk about that and more, including perhaps why he sends snail mail, not email, to world leaders, which he said on television the other day. You can probably guess why. His new book is A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. Mr. President, an honor. Welcome to our Varick Street home.

President Jimmy Carter: It's good to be with you again, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: You and I have spoken about religion before in the context of your faith and your lifetime of teaching the Bible, so why point to religion now as a prime cause of what you call the most serious problem in the world?

President Carter: Well, religion and violence are the two generic causes of the abuse of women and girls around the world. It's a misinterpretation of some of the scriptures that result in abuse of women and derogation of them in the eyes of men because they are convinced that women are inferior in the eyes of God. For religious people even that are Christians, for instance, we know that Jesus Christ, in His ministry and His words, all the recorded words, He never discriminated against women.

In fact, he exalted women far above what they had ever been previously in history. Even in the New Testament, where St. Paul began to write to the early churches, he wrote to individual, sometimes little, tiny churches that had 20 or 30 members. Some of his verses can be interpreted either way. For the first three centuries, in the Christian church at least, women played an equal role as Paul points out in his 16th chapter of Acts. After that, the men who ran the church began to say, "Why don't we select other verses, which show that women are not qualified to be priests or deacons in the church?"

Brian Lehrer: Can you give me an example of either of these verses on either side of this?

President Carter: Well, yes. In fact, Paul said to one of his small churches that women should always never adorned themselves, that women should be silent in church. There's even a verse that says women shouldn't teach men. On the other hand, he said that in the eyes of God, men and women are equal, as are slaves and masters and are Jews and Gentiles. They are equal in the eyes of God.

As I just mentioned in the 16th chapter that I mentioned, he lists about 25 people who were preeminent in leadership roles in the early church. About half of them are women by name. You can interpret it either way you want to if you have a preference. There are 36,000 verses, more or less, in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew text, and in the New Testament. You can interpret any way you want to.

Brian Lehrer: In today's world, is this mostly a radical Islam problem? Certainly, we can find the conservative Christian and the history you were just describing, or the Orthodox Jewish or other religious practices that are sexist and cause harm to women and girls, but maybe there's nothing like the terrorist attacks and other military campaigns aimed at depriving girls in education and other things, Taliban, things going on in Nigeria, et cetera. A tiny minority of Muslims, we should say, involved in global terms, but still at a unique scale and intensity compared to other religions?

President Carter: Well, I've studied the Koran probably more than most people have in the United States that are not Muslims. When they were holding our hostages in Iran, I really made a dedicated effort to understand the Koran. I had experts come into the Oval Office and teach me about the nuances of it. It's very difficult to find a verse in the Koran that doesn't emphasize the equality of men and women in the eyes of Allah as interpreted by Muhammad.

Obviously, they are interpretations of that by the Taliban and others that deprive women of an equal right. Most of the problems that afflict women and girls are not from religious texts, but sometimes that's the basis for them as I've already mentioned. For instance, I'd say the worst unknown crime against women and girls is the murder little girls by their parents. When a girl is born, they strangle her because they want a boy. Now, with the advent--

Brian Lehrer: For economic reasons?

President Carter: For economic reasons and also because some countries like China and India and others have put a limit on the total size of families. One is best, two is most. If they only have one child, they want to make sure that it's a boy. Also, they don't have Social Security like we do, so they want boys in the family so they can earn a living to support the parents when they're old age.

They look at a family in an area of poverty and they say, "We can only feed two children," so they strangle the rest of them. There's a new movie out called It's a Girl. It was premiered in November. There's a mother in India who very proudly says, in effect, she strangled eight daughters when they were born because she had to have a son. We know that in many areas, if there's only one opportunity to send a child to school, they send a boy. If they have a limited amount of food, boys get first choice.

The other thing is that there are now about 160 million missing girls on Earth because either they baby at birth or the fetus in a selective abortion have been eliminated. This has resulted in China and India, in effect, in a very great shortage of women to be married to men or to satisfy the men's sexual desires in a brothel and so forth. This is another ancillary, terrible problem about it.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is former president Jimmy Carter. His new book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. Am I right that you and Mrs. Carter left your Christian denomination of 70 years over women's issues?

President Carter: Yes. In the year 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention deviated from its previous policy and ordained that women, being inferior, could not occupy the positions of pastor or deacon or chaplain. They also even ordained it in some of the seminaries, which is the higher education level of Southern Baptist Church, that women couldn't even teach boys in a classroom.

Brian Lehrer: It's not even just that they're not coming along as fast as some other denominations. It's that even in the post-feminist era, if you will, they went the other way.

President Carter: They went the other way in the year 2000. My wife and I left the Southern Baptist Convention. We now belong to a Baptist church where I teach Bible lessons every Sunday, as a matter of fact. We've had women pastors and my wife is a deacon, the chairman of our board of deacons. The last time was a woman. We have a majority of deacons who are women. We treat men and women equally, which I believe that Jesus Christ always exemplified and promulgated as His policy.

Brian Lehrer: Gee, if they don't want women teaching men and boys, maybe we can get more males into the teaching profession.

President Carter: Well, you certainly can in the Southern Baptist Seminary.

Brian Lehrer: I guess so [chuckles] if nowhere else. Kevin in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC with President Jimmy Carter. Hello.

Kevin: Yes, hello.

President Carter: Good morning, Kevin.

Kevin: Hi, President Carter. My question is based upon your book and it's based upon, where does the solution begin? Obviously, it's not a denouncing of religion, but it's looking for a change in views and how scriptures are interpreted.

President Carter: That's true, Kevin. I want to point out that in the book, there are 23 different specific recommendations that I give to assuage the abuse of women all over the world. It ought to start in our own country because here, we have a terrible abuse of women and girls, for instance, in our two most respected, I'd say, institutions, the university system and in our military.

That's where sexual abuse is most prevalent and is least brought to the attention of authorities because a college president and the deans of a college, even Emory University where I teach or Harvard or wherever, they don't want to have a reputation in their universities that sexual abuse is increasing. We know that in the year 2000, where statistics have been promulgated, the same thing has applied in the military. 26,000 cases of sexual abuse were finally revealed when the military was forced to do so.

Only about 300 of those resulted in a conviction or punishment of a rapist, which is about 1%. In a college campus, only about 4% of the total rapes are reported to the authorities, which is about 1/6 as much as takes place within the general population. The United States has a long way to go to correct these problems. I certainly don't want to say. I'm a very devout Christian. I think that if we all turn to the teachings of Christ, as I just said, we would be very open and dedicated to the equality of treatment of women and would correct the problem that exists.

Brian Lehrer: Jim in Bricktown, you're on WNYC with former President Carter. Hello.

Jim: Hello, and a great honor to talk to President Carter. Over the weekend, there was, online, a projected piece of legislation in Iraq to allow men to marry girls as young as nine. One of the projected responses was sanctions. I was wondering, well, first of all, Iraq had sanctions between the first Gulf War and the second incursion. Do sanctions work or would they make the country more isolated and culturally backward?

President Carter: Jim, we have had Carter Center programs in 79 different countries on Earth. We've gotten to know what goes on in those countries. Quite often, if there's a local cultural commitment to circumcising girls or mutilating their genitals or to promote multiple marriages or to marry their children, an outsider who tries to make them change, quite often, that's counterproductive.

It's better for them to change on their own. As a matter of fact, there are about 125 million girls who are married at an age all the way from eight years old up to early teens each year. This is accepted in many cultures around the world. I think that this is something that it would not be resolved, to answer your specific question, by any kind of sanctions or punishment from outside to that culture.

Brian Lehrer: Mina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Jimmy Carter. Hello, Mina.

Mina: Good morning and thank you for giving me this opportunity. I'm just calling to really sincerely thank the President for being so active in helping all over the world and also being a superb human being. Thank you for this opportunity for giving to me to express my feeling towards him. I love him. God bless you and keep you safe and healthy for the rest of your life.

President Carter: Well, thank you. That's the kind of question I like.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, you got a big smile out of Jimmy Carter, Mina.

Mina: Oh, I love him. I just love him. Kiss him for me.

Brian Lehrer: I'll let that be a virtual kiss. Maybe I'll give him a hug. Pamela in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Pamela: Hi. Good morning. Good morning, Mr. President.

President Carter: Good morning. Pamela.

Pamela: My question is this. As a humanitarian, I'm wondering how you feel about the law whereby corporations have been designated as people.

President Carter: I don't agree with it at all. I think one of the worst mistakes that the Supreme Court of the United States has ever made as far as political justification and equality in our country is to declare that corporations are the same as human beings. The Citizens United ruling, I think, has been one of the major causes of an almost total deadlock within the Congress when massive amounts of money, some of it coming from overseas, can be poured into the campaigns to be spent mostly on negative advertisements. I think it was a devastating blow to the integrity of our democratic system.

Brian Lehrer: Pamela, thank you. You told NBC on Sunday that you used snail mail, old-fashioned paper letters, to communicate with world leaders because you think the NSA is spying on your electronic communication. Did you think that before Edward Snowden?

President Carter: Yes, I did. When I was President, I was very concerned about the intrusion on private affairs of the intelligence agencies of our country. I knew what was going on as President. I sponsored the passage of the bill known as the FISA act, which meant that the intelligence agencies couldn't interrogate or intercede any sort of communication between two American citizens unless, applying to an individual citizen, they got a ruling from the justices that were appointed that it was necessary for security reasons. Then I think after 9/11, my FISA act was completely distorted and liberalized so that it made possible additional intrusions.

Some of the members of the Congressional Intelligence Committee understood, but most of the members of the House and Senate didn't even know what was going on. I think that NSA and others have gone even beyond that in liberally interpreting the law that did exist. I think that the recommendations of the 40 or so distinguished members that President Obama appointed, I hope they'll be carried out. I noticed that in the news this morning, he's going to stop the recording of almost every telephone call or email message in America, which has been going on and been retained by the NSA.

Brian Lehrer: You would support that, as The New York Times describes it this morning, the President would end the NSA's systematic collection of data as you say about Americans' calling habits. Those bulk records would stay in the hands of the phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. The NSA could obtain specific records only with the permission of a judge using a new kind of court order. Is that good in your opinion? I guess you're saying it is. Does it threaten our national security at all, which is the concern on the other side?

President Carter: I don't think it does. I would go even further than that. I don't think that the NSA ought to record every message even if they turn it over to the private telephone companies. I don't think they ought to record my messages when I want to communicate with my grandchildren or with another politician.

Brian Lehrer: They're not recording the messages, right? They're recording what number called what number, when, and for how long.

President Carter: If they want to go back and get that message, they can tell exactly what you said. I think that kind of thing ought to be severely limited.

Brian Lehrer: Jane in Park Slope, you're on WNYC with Jimmy Carter. Hello.

Jane: Hi. Hi, fellows. Jimmy, God bless you for the wonderful things you've done around the world for over the years. You're going to the top of heaven in my book.

President Carter: [chuckles] Pleasure, Jane.

Jane: Also, especially since you're touching on issues that affect women around the world, I hope that something can be done in Western countries to counter the problems I see, especially for young women that are caused by the media's heavy influence on sexual activity and also the use of younger and younger girls and young women in advertising and pornography.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, forgive me. I'm going to leave it there and get President Carter's reaction to your critique of US media.

President Carter: Jane, one of the things that I haven't mentioned yet that takes place in the United States is a horrible degree of slavery. That results indirectly at least from what you just described. We have a terrible number of young girls that are sold into slavery in this country every year, according to the statistics from the US State Department, about 100,000.

The worst place in America for young girls to be sold into slavery is in Atlanta, Georgia, because we have the largest airport on Earth. We also have passengers coming in from the poorer countries in the Southern Hemisphere, in Latin America and Africa, and so forth. An average girl got into slavery and sold in Atlanta for $1,000. If they come from Europe and so forth, it costs up to $8,000.

The New York Times last week had a report that the prostitution industry in Atlanta alone was $290 million a year. This is what's happening in our country. Slavery now far exceeds what it did in the 19th century as far as the number of dollars involved, about $32 billion, and the number of people who were actually in slavery, which is now about 29 million in the world.

Brian Lehrer: We actually talked about this on yesterday's show with the author, Holly Austin Smith, who just wrote a book about sex slavery in the United States.

President Carter: In the United States, and we could--

Brian Lehrer: Among underage girls, among children, really. When you say "slavery," people will think of the plantation system before the Civil War. What is slavery in 2014 that you're referring to look like?

President Carter: These are people living in bondage where they don't have any control over their own activities. They're forced by a master who dominates them.

Brian Lehrer: In the United States?

President Carter: Yes, in the United States and around the world, of course, but I'm talking about the United States right now. A woman, a young girl, who's sold into slavery has no control over her activities. She's a victim of a brothel owner or a pimp. She's also a victim of the male customers who frequent her and pay her to do it. There's hardly a whorehouse or brothel in America that's not known by the existing authorities. The mayor, the city council, the policemen know when a house of prostitution exists.

Quite often, the policemen in charge of that particular block or street, they either get paid a bribe or they look the other way, or they are given sexual privileges, free. This is something that we need to do. In America, we were particularly vulnerable because 50 times as many prostitutes, the innocent girls, quite often are arrested, as are brothel owners or pimps or male customers. In other countries like Sweden, they now do not ever arrest a prostitute, but they do arrest male customers as well as pimps and brothel owners. That is really working in reducing the level of prostitution.

Brian Lehrer: One more call to wrap it up. Don in New Milford, you're on WNYC with President Carter. Hi.

Don: Hello, Mr. Lehrer. Hello, Mr. President.

President Carter: Good morning, Don.

Don: It's a wonderful opportunity, President Carter. I voted for you. I think you're a wonderful person.

President Carter: Thank you for that.

Don: The things you do for people are amazing. Your naval service, I always get very interested in that. What years did you serve in the Navy, President Carter?

President Carter: I served in the Navy from 1943 until 1953. I was on battleships and three submarines. I spent the last part of my career as a submarine officer.

Don: I have one more question, President Carter. Did you once say that you witnessed a UFO in Puerto Rico?

President Carter: I witnessed a UFO in South Georgia, but it was an unidentified flying object. I've made reports on that a lot of times. It was just a light in the sky that looks about like the moon that changed colors and then disappeared. We never did identify what that object was, but I don't claim that it came from outer space. I don't claim that it was a vehicle or something like that, but it was unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object.

Brian Lehrer: October 1st this year will be your 90th birthday. Considering the seriousness of the problems you document in your new book, do you think humanity has made real progress during your lifetime toward becoming a race of just and merciful beings or are we simply who we are, no more compassionate, no less warlike, because that's human nature?

President Carter: I think there are more wars going on now, either bilateral wars or ones quite often initiated from America, than there were before the United Nations was formed. I also think that the selective abortion of girls has resulted in a much more wide death rate among little girls than it was, say, 50 years ago. In some areas, we're making progress, obviously. More equality of treatment, but I don't think that the world in general has improved itself on the treatment of girls and women.

Brian Lehrer: Former President Jimmy Carter, his new book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power.

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.