My bad--this was yesterday's Gripe: Where's Hillary Clinton?

Apparently, a Brooklyn-based, 21st-Century newspaper, Der Zeitung,  edited out Hillary Clinton and one other female Obama Administration staffer from the now-iconic picture of the Administration following the raid on the compound of Osama bin Laden. I don't know if this astounds my inner feminist, my inner journalist, or my inner shoestring theologian, more.

My inner feminist is appalled that there should be a policy that eliminates women from view, dissappearing themas if they were of no importance. The claim that male (only) prurience is at cause is appalling--Secretary of State Clinton is as "buttoned-up" as one could be! And don't (hetero) women have prurience? Why should men be excluded from this game of pretending that looking at bodies is sinful?  Why ever show any pictures of anyone at all, if looking at bodies is so wrong? Why don't we all blind-fold ourselves--even better! Then we wouldn't be able to read magazines or newspapers, but we would also not find so many occasions for sin!  Meh. Of course it is the female body that must be disappeared. Because women are not accepted by patriarchal cultures as having power, and by disappearing them from positions of power, the pretense that women can't function as well as men do is conveniently supported--a lie of omission to support a more pernicious falsehood.

My inner journalist is simply tied in knots that the historical record should be tampered with--of course, the Secretary of State was there! Why wouldn't she be? What are you trying to say?

My inner theologian wonders to what extent anyone would want to go to deny the female from recognition as an equal actor in the affairs of humanity. Does the Torah ignore Eve, Sarah, Leah, Rachel, Rebecca, Ruth, Deborah or Judith, because they are female? So why deny Hillary Clinton her place in a moral struggle against a terrorist of no small impact? Or Audrey Tomason, the director for counterterrorism, who was also privileged to be there and was erased? Although female-bodied, are they not accountable for their efforts to do justice as human beings first and foremost--before we even look on them as gendered beings who might incite....?

Nonsense. This is almost wholly about erasing the capable women from a poignant moment in history. I abhor that women are demeaned this way. Of course we should be both seen and heard--and woe to him who thinks evil of it.