In his observations of Hillary Clinton, sexism, and the Bible, Jack Kerwick makes assumptions that gloss over the complexity of arguments and situations he regards as black and white.

A society's gender attitudes are not fixed but mutable. Social evolution, technology, and reproductive control have provided greater and greater opportunities for women. In the spectrum of gender equality, so-called feminists push against what society at any given point finds acceptable and shift that point incrementally closer to the end goal - gender equity. Yet feminists, like conservatives, cannot be summarily lumped into one category, their beliefs labeled and then dismissed as Kerwick has done.

It's not enough to say that women are "denied the equal treatment in America that has always been accorded men." Every woman understands that her gender role requires a lifetime of compromise; career accomplishments such as making partner or being granted tenure fall within the timeframe of a woman's childbearing years. As medical advances make pregnancy possible for females into their forties, a working woman is now able to establish herself professionally and delay motherhood and have the best of both worlds -- career and family -- if she's up for the juggling act between the two.

It's not equal treatment that's the issue - it's the fact that men don't have to ask themselves, "Do I become a father first or a partner first? Do I sacrifice one for the other?" They can enjoy the privileges of both without worrying that having a child is like applying a brake to the forward momentum of one's career.

Sexism isn't "a grave moral disorder" - it's a condition of society that has been improving over time. Few question Clinton's candidacy today as they might have a generation ago; her presidential campaign has made the idea of women running for high office much more acceptable.

Thus Kerwick's "grave moral disorder" argument makes a mountain out of a molehill. Women take gender bias in stride every single day, as they've always done, and those not averse to risk continue to push against what's socially acceptable for women and move that point further along the spectrum, thus benefiting us all.

The Bible's attitudes towards women are a snapshot in time, based on prevailing social mores and conventions that were in place during the period of history it was written. Simple common sense says that arguments as to whether or not the Bible is sexist is a non-issue; for individuals of faith, to not follow its teachings because of gender-specific language in use at the time is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Clinton's "judgment on the 'sexism' of the Bible" is about as necessary to our understanding of her as a potential leader of the free world as is Obama's judgment on racism at the time the U.S. Constitution was written. Amendments to the latter spell out where we stand today as a democratic society; and although the former does not come with a set of amendments forged over the centuries to ensure its relevance today, those men and women who head up our congregations and spiritual communities cite its most pertinent truths and leave fallow that which has little practical contemporary application to our lives.

We've had Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Jews run for the presidency who have felt it necessary to delineate how their personal belief structures would not affect their ability to govern a nation of diverse religious practices. In comparison, the standard-issue Protestant-inspired thoughts and ideas of what may be the nation's first female or first black president - both more theologically similar than dissimilar - don't warrant Kerwick's level of panic or paragraphs of philosophical concern.

To say it simply, it's a non-issue.