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Bishop Budde Has Her Say

Writer's picture: Jan CollinsJan Collins

The country sat up and paid attention on Inauguration Day when the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, looked Donald Trump, the newly installed President of the United States, in the eye and asked him to be merciful.


“I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she preached from the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral.  “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.” 


 The “vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” the bishop said.   They are “good neighbors” and “faithful members” of religious communities.


Trump was not amused, but he shouldn’t have been surprised.  After all, it has often been the women – strong, brave women -- who have stood up to him.  


There was Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who had agreed to serve as vice chair of the special House Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it.  She is a Republican, like Trump, but she became a fierce critic of the once and current president and supported his impeachments. “Donald, this is not the Soviet Union,” Cheney posted on social media recently. “You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us.”


For her principled opposition, Cheney in 2022 lost her seat in Congress, where she had represented her home state of Wyoming for the previous six years.


There was Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California who served as the powerful   Speaker of the House of Representatives during Trump’s first term and led two successful efforts to impeach him (although he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials.)


There was E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who sued Trump for sexual abuse that she said occurred in the mid-1990s.  A New York jury in 2023 awarded her $5 million in damages.  In 2024, another jury ordered Trump to pay an additional $83 million in damages to Carroll for subsequent defamatory statements about her. 


There was Cassidy Hutchinson, the young former White House aide who testified in front of the House January 6 Committee, calmly relating what really happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the Capitol was being attacked in 2021. 


It’s fascinating to me that it’s women like Cheney and Pelosi and Carroll and Hutchinson who so often are the truth-tellers in the political and corporate worlds.  Go back awhile and you’ll find many others, including Erin Brockovich, the   environmental activist who helped build a case against Pacific Gas & Electric Company involving groundwater contamination in California.  She was later portrayed by Julia Roberts in the eponymous 2000 Hollywood film.


All of these examples beg the question:  why do the women so often stand up to be counted, no matter what the cost?  Are women more virtuous, more ethical, than men?


There are studies that back up this contention.  Francine Berman and Jennifer Lundquist of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst found that “women, more so than men, are associated with lower levels of corruption in government and business.”  This might have to do, they suggest, with the fact that men and women are socialized differently regarding gender roles in society.


I’d suggest there is a second component, too.  Women, by definition, aren’t “good old boys”.  We are often marginalized and viewed as outsiders.  Why then, when we see an ethical or moral problem, should we feel obligated to turn a blind eye to those who are doing the marginalizing?


Finally, a third component. Women are socialized to be nurturers, to be kind and empathetic.  As both a woman and a Christian cleric, Bishop Budde’s plea to Trump for “mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now” fits into that paradigm. 


  But while many women and girls are socialized to speak quietly (or perhaps to not speak at all), 65-year-old Bishop Budde, as the first woman to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, had long ago broken that mold.   So, on January 20, she spoke up, splendidly unafraid to speak truth to power.


A role model for us all.




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Jan Collins is a freelance writer, editor, and author. Formerly an award-winning reporter and columnist at newspapers in Michigan, North Carolina, and South Carolina, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association.  She is the co-author of “Next Steps:  A Practical Guide to Planning for the Best Half of Your Life” (2009).










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