Grace & Peace!
The difficulty, though, is that the things expected of men and/or women are not universally identical in every culture. What is not present in every instance of a thing cannot be said to be essential to the thing. To the extent to which gender roles vary from culture to culture, that is the extent to which it is impossible to speak of a fundamental right to experience any of those particular encultured expression of that role. I.e., to say that we all have a specific right to a mother’s love is one thing, but what we might recognize as a mother’s love in our particular culture may be more analogous to a father’s love or a sibling’s love or an aunt’s love or a cousin’s love in another culture. We may find some other culture’s notion of motherly love unreasonable and unmotherly. It would be more appropriate to recognize that a child does well to receive a certain quality of love from its caregivers, a quality we have come to call “motherly love” because of the way our particular culture has developed. Which is to say, it’s difficult to see how we can say that certain ways of performing gender are essential to a particular sex or naturally arising from a particular sex if those ways of performing (as well as the sexes that perform them!) vary from one culture to another
It simply will not do to assume that our cultural expectations of men or women constitute a universal law–it is therefore unreasonable to assume that modelling our expectations to a child in our particular cultural way is in any way constitutive of or exhaustive of a child’s right to love and care. If we did make that assumption, we wouldn’t actually be talking about qualities intrinsic to one sex or another that are somehow necessary for a child’s development, but qualities intrinsic to our culture’s understanding of the sexes.
Is there an essential man-ness or woman-ness that is not culturally mediated, that naturally radiates from a man or woman by virtue of their sex and that is necessary for a child to absorb via regular proximity to both a man and a woman, the absence of which proximity constitutes an unjust hardship for the child? Perhaps–and maybe someone could elucidate what those essential,* sui generis* and un-culturally mediated things are. This is not to say that I don’t believe a child does best with both a mother and a father who love and care for it. I do, in fact, believe that a child does best with a mother and a father who love and care for it, and I believe as I do for largely cultural reasons. But it’s also clear that gender complimentarity alone cannot magically lighten the burden of having a mother and a father who are abusive or apathetic or not fit parents. Moreover, the socio-economic conditions of a household may play at least as important a role in a child’s development as the complimentarity of its parents’ sexes (see the “word gap” studies for more info). All of which is to say, in one way or another: it doesn’t make any sense to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
