Michael's Tag...

Poor Michael has a tag of his own sort. He asks my take on this article.


Friedan’s feminism was based on victimhood. Housewives were compared to many things, among them animals and Jews in concentration camps. Reaction is a stage, not an identity. (Cloud & Townsend) It can’t last forever and ever, amen.


Today’s feminism is based on the foundation laid by Eliz. Cady Stanton, who viewed the condition of women in society as a result of religious dictates. Her goal was to separate women from their god. It is theologically naïve to claim Stanton was a feminist who was also a friend of women and children, for it does no real service to the heart of what women and children need. Stanton’s goal was to free women and children from the oppression of all religion and to launch them into the freedom of self-determined lives based on choice. Was this not the same goal of another?

The reaction stage is over. The stage of feminism we now endure is more insidious, more pervasive. The stage we are now in could be described as one of accommodated indifference. That is, most people are so indoctrinated with feminism they have become accommodated to it and are indifferent to its influences. Feminism comes to them as easily as breathing. They are not feminist by choice. If asked, they would laugh and deny being feminist, thinking such a thing ludicrous. No way are they “bra burners!”

Yet, when considered in light of scripture, vocation, and the Table of Duties:

1. Name one t.v. show in which the husband is the “Head of the Household.”


2. Name one t.v. show in which the children honor parents and other authorities.

For many households, parenting pertains to the hours involving bedtime prayer, the rush to school, and weekend care. Meals are pick-up affairs, often not eaten by the whole family together. Both parents work, the state is raising the kids by way of education in public schools. For all intents and purposes, by combining the influences of the media and the practices of the dual-income family, Americans are living what Rousseau and deBeauvoir envisioned as ideal: Pop out kids, but let the state raise them.

Feminism complains that it is failing. However, it required 100% co-operation in order to succeed in the first place. Moreover, it was from its inception a wealthy woman’s program. Feminism required a large base of lower-educated, lower-income workers to support the upper-income women in their feminist life style. Childbearing must continue in order for the race to survive, yet who was to provide care for those children? Who would clean houses, cook meals? It was all to be outsourced. Who was being victimized in this little scenario? Where was the liberation for the lower-class women?

Feminism is not so much failing as it is revealing its own logical inconsistencies. There is no such thing as heterosexual sex that does not require the submission of the female to the male, yet radical feminism calls even marital sex rape. Therefore, the new feminist recognizes she must “give up” feminism in order to be heterosexual, or be lesbian. Now who is making a victim of whom?


Feminism is a separator, a divider. It asks questions in such a way that causes the division rather than fosters integrity of thought and life. That is the nature of feminism. Secularism- which is a sister to feminism- convinces us that religion has its place only one hour a week in our lives. With secularism, there is no integration of the sacred beyond the doors of the church. What we see now is not so much feminism among us as secularism. Feminism is to strong a word. It is the “older sister” that cried too many tears over spilt milk. Secularism is kinder, gentler in her ways. She wears crosses for jewelry, has her out-of-wedlock child baptized for the sake of her grandparents, but refuses to attend church. After all, Baptism now saves, doesn’t it? So who needs to attend church after a good wetting? She and her live-in boyfriend aren’t bad people. They’ll get married some day.

Here is real victimhood for you: God invaded our world two-thousand years ago for the sake of His creation. Feminism has difficulties with How God presents Himself, and makes demands on God. She wants God on her own terms. She wants a god in her own image, a dance at the base of the mountain. Baptism is not only the Great Reversal, it is the Great Equalizer. In Baptism Jesus takes all our sins and exchanges them for His righteousness. Yet in Baptism all are one in Him- that is, One Person. He is that One Person. That does not mean, however, that each loses his own unique God-created vocational identity of male and female. Feminism is now realizing its own internal logical fallacy. Male and female are the binary distinctions of being human. They are ways, or modes of being human, and to be either does not negate the equality or existence of the other. For feminism, however, it is the female that must be celebrated over and against the male. Moreover, the victimhood status of feminism is non-redemptive, for is sustains itself on the sacrifice of those lower in the human (so-called, cf. the abortion debate) or economic food chain. This is not the way of Christ, who sacrificed Himself, and only Himself, once for the sake of the redemption of all.