With all due respect to Thomas Jefferson, we are not created equal. Equality means sameness, and sameness is achieved when two things are absolutely identical, devoid of any unique or distinctive features. Sameness is a mathematical reality, not a sociological one. Even in mathematics, two only equals two on paper, in the abstract.
In reality, two apples don’t really equal two apples, and two elephants don’t really equal two elephants, because the elephants and the apples are all different shapes and sizes and densities and so on. If you have two apples and I have two apples, one of us has more apple than the other. Parents learn this the hard way, especially parents of twins, because when you give both kids an apple, or a lollipop, or a handful of Goldfish, or whatever, they’ll promptly compare their hauls, and the one who ended up with less, even though you gave them equal amounts, will demand restitution.
So nothing is equal. That’s the lesson I teach my daughter when she complains that her brother got the bigger apple, and that’s the lesson society needs to learn for itself. Nothing is equal and nobody is equal.
In the abstract—spiritually, in this case—you can say that we are all equal in human worth and dignity, but even here caveats are necessary. It is true that all human beings have dignity and worth that should not be diminished or ignored. And it is true that our dignity and worth are not tied to our development, physical capabilities, or participation in the consumer economy. Our souls transcend this physical plane, and one day most of the things that we think set us apart will melt away in the face of our Almighty God.
But I don’t anticipate, when that point arrives, that I’ll be judged as dignified and worthy as Mother Teresa or Saint Paul or Moses, and should I make it to Heaven—a hierarchical place, we should note—I don’t expect to receive quite the same due (2 Corinthians 5:10) as those great and humble servants of the Lord. If I am entirely “equal” in dignity and worth to Saint Peter or Saint Augustine, if I am equal in any way at all, I can’t see how that will ever manifest itself, or what the point is in saying it. It’s clear that all human beings are human beings, but even at the transcendent level, that appears to be where our similarities end.
The only other area where equality even theoretically exists is in matters of law. It’s considered a sacred American principle that all people should be equal under the law, and of course this idea was officially codified in 1866, with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It would seem a heresy to argue against the rather nice-sounding notion that all people should be guaranteed equal protection under the law, but I don’t need to argue against it because it’s not real. Unborn children are not protected by the law at all, much less equally. The tax code treats people differently based on their income and a dozen other things. Obamacare grants deals, loopholes, entitlements, and levies, and it mandates penalties and pardons, based on age, economic status, and a host of other factors. Felons are not allowed to vote or buy handguns, which is a law that doesn’t apply to anyone else. Sex offenders have to register in a database, which is a requirement not currently imposed on anyone else. Kids have to sit at home dejected and bored while everyone else plays the lottery and drinks hard liquor, both being privileges unequally and discriminatorily granted.
I’m not against all of these inequalities, but the relevant fact is that they are inequalities, and I could have listed countless other examples. “Equal protection under the law,” if taken literally, would mean we are all affected by every law in exactly the same way, to exactly the same extent, with exactly the same personal and financial consequences. But that is not how it works, and indeed it could never work that way. The law should not pretend it can’t distinguish at all between one sort of person or the other. That would be madness. It might be equal if the law saw no distinction between you and a serial rapist, but would it be just?
As it stands, the Equal Protection Clause has become an outlet for Supreme Court justices to randomly convert their ideologies into constitutional law. Thus, the court found that the Fourteenth Amendment protects a woman’s right to kill her child, and more recently, that it guaranteed a homosexual’s right to get “married.” Oddly, it still does not protect a child’s right to continue living. This is what we call “equal” in our culture, further proving my point that equality is not a thing that can be found in reality, nor something we should actually strive to achieve. It would be more accurate to say that all people should be treated as people, but not necessarily as the same people.
Beyond the legal and the spiritual, equality most certainly does not exist in any physical sense. Some of us are smarter than others, some of us stronger, some of us wiser, more honest, more disciplined, more talented, more virtuous. You might be a better person than me by just about every measure. Or maybe I’m a better person than you. But what is certain is that you are not the same person as me, and we are not, by any discernible standard, equal. If I compare Stephen Hawking to Steph Curry, I will struggle to find a single area of equality or commonality between them.
It reveals the egotism rampant in our culture that we so breathlessly insist on our “equality” with everyone else. You’ll notice that these claims of equality are almost always wielded as a means to drag another person down, rarely to lift anyone up. You don’t often hear a passerby declare that he is equal to the bum sitting on the curb drinking a 25-ounce can of Natural Ice in the middle of the day. More likely, he’ll save those declarations for his neighbor with a better job, a happier marriage, and better-behaved kids.
This arrogance is what has led to the leveling of society, where the distinctions between class and status and accomplishment have eroded, with everyone consolidating in the center. These days, our poor have all of the vices of the wealthy—greed, materialism, superficiality—and the wealthy have the vices of the poor—crudeness, vulgarity, classlessness. We’ve all met here in the middle, in the name of an equality that has mainly been achieved by adopting all of the worst traits of our neighbors.
This is what the struggle for equality has done. It doesn’t make people better. It makes them afraid to be better, and it makes others jealous of those who are better. If we structured our culture around, rather than the pursuit of equality, the pursuit and advancement of virtue, we would end up with a society organized into classes, but it would be a better society. Or at least it would be a society ordered toward making people better, instead of merely making them the same.
We say we are equal because we don’t want anyone to be treated better or to be seen as better than us. We aren’t quite as concerned about the folks who are treated worse and seen as worse. But, as difficult as this may be to confront, the people in the former camp may actually be better than us. The world is full of war heroes and rocket scientists and abusive deadbeats and soup kitchen volunteers and greedy hoarders and philanthropists and surgeons and saints and villains and martyrs and all sorts of people in between. What it is not filled with—what you cannot find anywhere outside of a math textbook—is equality. And if equality cannot be found between individuals, it surely cannot be found between the sexes.
THE GENDER EQUALITY MYTH
As I’ve taken great pains to establish, one man cannot be called equal to another man, and one woman cannot be called equal to another woman. And if there is no real, substantive, actionable, observable equality within the ranks of each gender, how could we possibly claim that any sort of equality could ever be achieved between them? I am not equal to John, but at least we have in common that we are men. I am not equal to Jane, and we don’t even have that in common.
Men and women are not equal. They can never be equal. It has not happened. It will not happen. It cannot happen. My wife is not and will not be equal to me, and I will not be equal to her. I am a man, she is a woman, and that is only where our vast but complementary (usually) differences begin. If my wife were equal to me, if she were the same as me, I would not have married her. I am already me, after all. What first attracted me to her is precisely that she is very emphatically not me. The last thing I want is to be married to myself. Why my wife desired such a fate is a question I will spend my whole life pondering.
“Gender equality” is a figment of the progressive imagination. It has no bearing in the real world. And the efforts to bring this Orwellian fantasy to life, efforts under way by both transgenders and feminists (I suppose this common but preposterous goal explains why the two have not yet set out to destroy each other), can only result in further confusion and division, ironically creating more of the inequality these groups hope to cure.
Our culture hopes to establish “gender equality” in three areas: legal, social, and physical. We’ve already discussed the freakish and horrifying campaign to render the physical distinctions between the sexes irrelevant. As for legal equality, we’ve seen that the law does not treat men and women the same, and the people who claim to be fighting for such a result are mostly fighting to ensure that women are, like the privileged pigs in Animal Farm, treated “more equally.”
Legal equality between the sexes is a myth. It has not been accomplished, it won’t be, and it shouldn’t be. In order for the law to treat the sexes the same, it would have to pretend that the sexes are the same. This makes about as much sense as drafting a tax code that treats the numbers seven and sixteen as the same, or buying a cookbook that treats T-bone steak and chicken breasts as the same. That’s not to say men should be treated better than women, or vice versa, but that men should always be treated as men because they are men, and women as women because they are women.
I’m not advocating for a return to the Victorian era (although in many instances, it would be an improvement over the current one). I’m simply noting that total and absolute equality under the law—a law that never makes any distinction between men and women—is an absurdity. And the more we try to attain it, the more we end up with laws that put cross-dressing men in the women’s restroom and women on the frontlines of the battlefield.
SOCIAL EQUALITY
Full legal equality will never happen, and physical equality is impossible, but social equality can be effectively achieved, God help us, so long as we continue our collective march into moral and intellectual oblivion. That march doesn’t appear to be slowing down, so the Left’s androgynous paradise may soon be brought to fruition.
We will have so-called social equality when the last vestiges of “traditional gender roles” are annihilated and our society finally treats men and women as totally indistinguishable. A society that desires a social gender equality is a society that resists anything and everything that is uniquely masculine or feminine.
This crusade is often physically violent. So violent, in fact, that when all is said and done, “gender equality” will have killed more people and destroyed more lives than all the wars and tyrants in history. That is probably already the case, when you consider the fifty million children aborted in the world each year. Most of them were slaughtered so that women might be liberated from their own biology and made as barren as men. Millions of children have been cut to pieces and thrown into the trash so that their mothers could spurn motherhood, thereby attaining that fabled equality.
This consuming desire for equality with men has made many feminist women actively hostile even to the idea of children. Feminists lash out angrily at women who extol the virtues of motherhood, as evidenced by the outrage that erupted a little while ago when the pop singer Adele confessed that being a mother gave her “purpose.” Many liberal women were upset at this proclamation, because motherhood is apparently far too feminine for a feminist. To them, motherhood is a very particular and different and unique sort of thing. It is not an expression of “gender equality” but a profound and glorious repudiation of it.
Perhaps this is why President Obama once famously worried aloud that his daughters might one day be “punished with a baby.” Echoing Obama’s sentiments, last year Cosmopolitan printed an article lamenting the fact that the birth rate in Texas rose slightly after stiffer abortion regulations were passed in the state. The magazine tweeted a link to its article with the text “Texas women are having more babies since Planned Parenthood was defunded,” accompanied by a sad-face emoji. In the feminist view, childbirth is an occasion for sad faces. That’s why feminists are a total bummer to have around at baby showers.
If progressive feminists had their way, no woman would ever become a mother again. There would simply be no more children, until—and if—we reach a point where babies can be conceived, grown, and cultivated in petri dishes, and then purchased by a husband and wife, or a single woman, or a pair of lesbians, or a trio of homosexual men, or a man and his octopus bride.
The whole process of conception, pregnancy, and birth is far too specific and exclusive. Far too womanly. Far too unequal. That’s why it must be rejected, and why babies must become collateral damage in the war for equality.
GENDER NORMS
Our culture has convinced itself that “conformity” and “norms” are universally bad things. And in this realm of bad things, we believe that nothing is worse than conformity to gender norms. The propagators of these dreaded gender norms (including, as we discovered, transgenders) pin the label “feminine” on women and the label “masculine” on men, and then ruthlessly restrict each group to its respective area. At least that’s how they teach it at college.
The push against gender norms must necessarily start in the cradle, where parents are encouraged to let children express themselves in whatever way they desire, offering no guidance at all, especially not guidance that directs boys toward boyish things and girls toward girlish things. Children, we’re told, can be whatever they want to be.
So if your eight-year-old boy wants to adorn himself in blouses and fingernail polish, he (or she or xe or whatever pronoun the prepubescent child chooses for himself or herself or xyrself) should not be prevented from doing so. If your teenage son wants to dress like Mary Poppins and flutter off to school, he should not be steered away from this behavior.
The very idea of offering a child direction and guidance is offensive to many liberals. Recently, I gave a talk on gender at a particularly liberal university in California (I’m not sure they have any other kind of university over there). During the Q&A, a student demanded to know what I would do if my son decided he’d like to wear a skirt one day. I said I’d instruct my son not to wear the skirt, and explain why. The student was incredulous.
“You mean you’d tell him no? Can you imagine how that would make him feel?”
I can somewhat excuse the student’s naïveté, considering he has no children of his own, has very little experience dealing with children, and apparently is suffering from amnesia about his own childhood. But any competent parent understands that little kids have to be told no all the time. Every day. Every hour. Sometimes every minute.
Kids are always looking for ways to unintentionally maim or kill themselves. As soon as my son comes barreling into a room, the first thing he thinks is, What’s the most dangerous and reckless thing I can possibly do here? And both he and his sister always find it. Once, not long ago, I left the kids in the living room by themselves for ninety seconds so I could use the bathroom, and when I came back, my son was dancing on top of the radiator and my daughter was running around with the pointy end of a pencil in her mouth.
It’s in these moments that I think my children might actually be insane. But then I remember that they’re children, and that children are insane by nature. They understand very little about the world, and they are hardly concerned at all with ordering their actions by what is safe, hygienic, normal, and reasonable. That’s where my wife and I enter the picture. That’s why we have to be there, literally every second of the day, constantly shepherding them along the right and healthy path.
So that means telling kids no. A lot. And it means teaching them and showing them the sort of things they are supposed to do and the sort of people they are supposed to be. If my wife and I are not willing to do that, then we should have adopted a pair of gerbils instead of conceiving a set of tiny human beings. Kids need guidance and instruction, and that includes guidance and instruction about how to properly express and live out their genders.
Yes, girls can sometimes have masculine traits and do masculine things and boys feminine, but the girl should still be taught what it means to be a girl and the boy what it means to be a boy. Gender norms and gender roles exist to help men and women fit into society in ways that are best suited for them.
We attack the gender norms merely because they’re norms, but nobody ever explains what’s actually wrong with them. Yes, when you’re dealing with such a broad subject, you can always find examples that truly are, as the feminists might say, problematic. But our culture has waged an assault on norms universally, and attempted to throw them all down the garbage disposal as punishment for existing in the first place.
Yet, as liberalism conjures up its various gender theories, I still see, like so many billions of parents before me, a natural inclination in my own son and daughter to seek what is masculine and what is feminine, respectively. And I see masculine and feminine traits, manifested by a budding protectiveness and strength in my son and a gentleness and nurturing in my daughter. I’m told so often that boys and girls yearn for ambiguity, but here are my children, just three years old, already reinforcing gender norms like a couple of right-wing extremists. They need guidance in discovering and becoming themselves, but that guidance should be directed toward fostering this innate recognition that children already possess.
Nobody ever said that girls can’t be strong or that boys can’t be gentle, but there is something automatic, particular, unique, and complementary about the boy’s strength and the girl’s gentleness. And that is good. It’s who they are. It’s who God intended them to be. Liberal parents claim they want to avoid imposing gender norms on their children, but often they end up imposing the opposite of the gender norm. They create a new norm, which is defined only in the negative. The empowered modern woman is empowered not because she’s powerful but because she acts like she’s not a woman. The enlightened man is enlightened not because he’s enlightened but because he’s not masculine.
Our culture doesn’t have any new ideas about genders, just prejudices against the old ideas. All you have to do to prove the point is skim through Google and find feminist mommy bloggers lamenting the fact that their daughters, despite the best efforts of these mothers, still like to wear pink and dress up in tutus. What sort of selfish and arrogant parent goes out of her way to specifically avoid letting her daughter play with “girly” things? These are kids, not experiments in a sociology class. To steer your daughter intentionally away from femininity is not parenting; it’s activism.
Disturbingly, there are many activists out there raising kids, and not enough parents.
Femininity, it might be said, is womanhood’s gift to the world, and masculinity is manhood’s gift. We need men to be masculine and women to be feminine so that women can also have masculine traits and men feminine. If you want to adopt some parts of the Italian culture, the process will be made more difficult if Italy doesn’t have an Italian culture. It’s just like how the pro-immigration types think America should open its doors to everyone, yet they forget that nobody can benefit from being American if America is not American itself. Now I’m getting sidetracked, but you get the point. Women can’t be masculine if men are not masculine, because then there is no masculinity.
This is why it’s advisable for a child to have both a mom and dad around (revolutionary concept these days, I realize), so they can learn about femininity and masculinity, and gradually grow into a personality that’s influenced by both. A girl’s identity will be fortified by the example of her mother, who demonstrates womanly traits, and the example of her father, who demonstrates the masculine. Importantly, she’ll also learn how the two should treat and love each other, and what that looks like in practice.
This lesson will be essential later, when she starts to date. If she has a good father, she can look at her boyfriend and ask herself, Would my father treat my mother this way? If the answer is no, she’ll realize the boy is a jerk, and she’ll drop the loser and move on. On the flip side, if she has a bad or absent father, she’ll ask the same question of the same jerk, come to the conclusion that the answer is yes, and continue dating him.
Gender is not arbitrary or unimportant. Without a proper understanding of it, our children will be confused not only about who they are but about how they should treat, and be treated by, the opposite sex. There is a certain biological and spiritual imperative that comes with our sex. When we teach our kids to reject it, we doom them to a life of failed relationships and internal turmoil.
The social equality movement makes members of both sexes less grateful for the other by convincing each that they can easily fill both roles. It breeds contention in the place of appreciation. It tells a young girl that she can do whatever boys can do, which causes her to see boys as competition—obstacles to be leaped over and knocked to the side on her journey toward success and self-discovery.
As both genders run from themselves, hiding from anything that reminds them of who they ought to be, we finally converge somewhere in the dull, strange middle, where men dress like manicured prepubescent boys who accidentally fell into a vat of women’s clothes on clearance at the thrift store. Surprisingly, we come to understand that the line of distinction between genders is exactly what allows the members of both to express themselves in different and unique ways. Blur the lines, and we all end up faded and dull.