In some parts of the so-called advanced countries, it’s becoming almost indecent to suggest that men and women are different. The very word ‘sex’ is hardly used in everyday life and is being replaced by the word gender. Those who do so, seem to live in a world of sexual denial, as they try to treat men and women as if they were exactly the same.
An elite segment of our society aims to deny any distinction between the sexes, and hence between people with different sexual orientations. Equal treatment sounds nice but it does not do justice to call a spade a shovel. We cannot in the name of equal treatment call all birds sparrows.
We are making ourselves willfully blind to basic biological differences under the banner of equality. In the US, where biological differences are done away with, society seems to create a preference for the masculine, and women have to adjust to male roles. Why should the price of equality be that women abandon their femininity?
Such confusion also brings confusion between fathers’ and mothers’ roles. Psychiatrist Kyle Pruett, in summing up his research on the roles of fathers and mothers, says: “Fathers don’t mother and mothers don’t father.” In parenting, men and women have different strengths.
According to Pope Francis, all this confusion amounts to a global war on the family. He says: “If sex is meaningless, and the sexes don’t need each other or have different contributions to make, then why band together?”
If in an orchestra the violin plays the oboe’s part, and the trumpet plays the violin parts, we are going to have music without a melody and breathless players.
A Spanish proverb puts it succinctly: “There will be trouble in the farm where cocks cackle and hens crow.”