The Problem of Women

Women pose a problem for politics. If women were not permitted to vote or work, contemporary political thought would look a lot different. As it stands, we are. In the pageant of world history this is a fairly new Act. It seems to me that with this new voice comes a certain responsibility.

To be a human being is to be given a gift. It is to be endowed with the ability to reason, to imagine, to have a sense of the future, to love, and to be redeemed. It is also the awful power to dominate. For better or worse, Man rules over Earth and Animal.

Men and Women are consequently given gifts respective to their sex. To be a woman is to be given the gift of womanhood. That sounds ridiculously simple and I think it is. Women are not men.

But both are human beings with unique powers over each other. As is often the case men are more powerful and sometimes fool themselves into believing their ability to dominate is a right to dominate. This is called the oppression of women, and it is ugly wherever it is found. Read the U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women here. It is a sobering snapshot on the status of women in countries where women pose a political problem simply because they are women.

And it got me thinking.

It would do us well to remember, and I include myself here, that America is a place where women pose an equally complicated political problem: We are permitted to exert our unduplicated power over a fully-equal, less strong human being. Our child.

A pro-life feminist at a small college called St. Hyacinth summarizes. “Pro-abortion feminists open themselves to charges of crass hypocrisy by indulging in the very same behavior for which they condemn men: the unethical use of power to usurp the rights of the less powerful.”

Either this usurpation of rights, demonstrated by man or woman, is always wrong, or it is not.