Probably more significant than the superficial ones I wrote about already, is the Church has promulgated teachings about the proper relationship between males and females, and thus promoted women by teaching the truth about them.
In terms of “equality” I’d say they are equal in that their roles are important.
I hesitate to believe they are “equal” in the sense that other than a few physical body parts they are interchangeable.
For example, I highly doubt men and women can be “equal” in leadership positions, in that their very sex has an affect on their identity, and how they view their relationships with every single other person on the planet.
My spiritual director told me that a complete person has six main components, and if any one suffers in can interfere with the others:
physical
mental
spiritual
social
emotional
sexual
Out of those six, he noted that the sexual component is the one that is most intimately connected to a person’s sense of identity. (Gosh, I suppose one of the first remarks I made about my own children is whether they had an inny or outy, so to speak.)
How many of those above do we
really think are equal in men and women? Obviously the physical and sexual is different?
That is not to say they can’t be equally or more
effective based on sex to be able to perform a certain task to a certain set of criteria. In other words, all other qualifications equal (and let’s even allow policital strategy to be taken into account) should we hire a man or woman to lead the company to record profits next quarter? Who knows? I’m saying there is some difference in the way they will handle things; whether that is a good or bad thing I care not opinion except in specific situations.
I’m taking a variation from “equal but different” and instead I assert “unequal, different, but both important and useful”
My view is that men and women are complimentary in more ways than they combine to procreate. Whether do to nature or nurture or some combination, by the time they get to the age of reason they do, in fact, think about things differently, have different emotions, and some of these are directly related to biology such as the hormones that are present in the blood.
Now, as far as being married, I’ll put it this way. When I buy a pair of shoes, I want neither two left feet nor two right feet. I plan to make one “body” which is called a marriage and which in my own case has born six delightful children who love me and their wonderful mother. If I had deformed feet, I suppose I’d have to see how to get the shoes made special but we are blessed to be a complete pair.
Our intuition, or thinking, and everything else is different, and since we love to compare notes on our differences as much as our samenesses (and that goes for physical too
) we end up having the synergistic effect of being greater together than the sum of us each separately.
That’s what gender is about. You do some things better than me, and I do some things better than you. Let’s combine forces and do many things well!
I think with the help of our SD, many good friends, four years of intense searching full time for truth, and a lot of great advice from this forum and other good friends, ya da ya da ya da, our marriage is so perfect that I can’t imagine it any other way.
Not that I can blame homosexuals for not being attracted to the opposite sex. The physical attractiveness is nice, but those other differences often manifest themselves in ugly conflicting scenarios. Thus, diversity if not handled right creates strife rather than synergy. Maybe one male plus one male equals two males, but I don’t think they can have that synergy to bring God into their relationship, by which one male plus one female equals on complete set of happiness factor.
There. Don’t know if it’s “learned” but I have thought about these things a lot, and come to the point where my imagination of the greatest marriage possible is still catching up the reality of the great marriage I already have. Every day I discover new and wonderful things about my wife and the way she thinks and acts, that prove we weren’t cut from the same mold. I don’t think it all has to do with body parts.
Alan
Thanks for pointing that out because it might not have been clear from my post, although if you saw any statements contrary to this in my post I’d appreciate you letting me know here or pm.
