Obama’s Kind of Feminism Horrifies Pope Benedict XVI

“‘Women are already serving in combat [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and the current policy should be updated to reflect realities on the ground,’ said Wendy Morigi, Sen. Obama’s national security spokeswoman. ‘Barack Obama would consult with military commanders to review the constraints that remain’.”

In the same Pittsburgh Post-Gazette internet article of October 13, 2008 (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08287/919582-470.stm?cmpid=elections.xml), Obama highlighted: “There was a time when African-Americans weren’t allowed to serve in combat…And yet, when they did, not only did they perform brilliantly, but what also happened is they helped to change America, and they helped to underscore that we’re equal.”

Comparing sex to race is like comparing apples to oranges. Whether black men perform as brilliantly as white men on the front line is not the same issue as whether men are abdicating their roles by advocating for women to fight on the front line. Is our culture diminished by asking women to be front line killers? Women killing as well as men is not a promotion of real values and equality, nor does it underscore equality. It is as bad as advocating that abortion is good for women. Misled by seemingly Marxist egalitarian principles, Obama’s advocacy for women in combat roles demonstrates it is an issue just as far above his pay-grade as whether human life starts at conception. He should get straight the right-to-life, the foundational issue, before pretending to understand subsequent issues like women in combat.

Obama Should Learn from Ratzinger

In his God and the World interview Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) comments: “Personally it still horrifies me when people want women to be soldiers just like men, when they, who have always been the keepers of the peace and in whom we have always seen a counter-impulse working against the male impulse to stand up and fight, now likewise run around with submachine guns, showing that they can be just as warlike as the men.  Or that women now have the ‘right’ to work as garbage collectors or miners, to do all those things that, out of respect for their status, for their different nature, their own dignity, we ought not to inflict on them and that are now imposed on them in the name of equality.  That, in my opinion, is a Manichaean ideology that is opposed to the body” (p.82).

In other words, bodily difference of male and female are not insignificant factors.  The difference represents authentic diversity which should be respected as providing real complimentarity for fruitful relationships and enriched societies.  Beyond any doubt there have been abuses where the gifts of women were overlooked or suppressed in society, but denial that “persons are their bodies,” Ratzinger comments, is “a kind of egalitarianism that does not exalt women but diminishes their status.  By being treated as male, [women] are dragged down to being undistinguished and ordinary” (p.83).

Obama has said he knows how to treat a woman, as he jokes about ice cream dates with his future wife and comes across as a very likeable guy.  Deep down he seemingly knows women are special and to be treasured.  Why then the rush to send them in to slaughter and active combat?  Why the militant-feminist national security spokeswoman?  Why not advocate for men to respect women and to prefer that men should be willing to sacrifice in place of women?  Why not ask men to be men instead of asking women to be men?  Additionally, if he is going to advocate for women, why not advocate for a more just society within America and speak out against depersonalizing women… just using them for sex and putting them in that dangerous circumstance of pregnancy outside of wedlock, where children are fortunate if they are not painfully shredded in abortion by women who have been depersonalized, too?

Time to Resist the Culture of Use and Death

Instead of speaking in favor of sending women into active combat, why not speak out against a culture of pornography and fornication that puts women in compromising circumstances?  Besides being unfashionable, is it now un-American to speak out against fornication.  Does the American man equate American culture with the freedom to use women for sex?  Is this why ‘egalitarian’ men do not mind putting women in situations like combat since they already don’t mind seeing them in situations like fornication?  If we are going to compromise their gift of fertility, why not their lives?

Even were women as capable as men at wielding arms, we are lesser men for asking them to do it for us; just as we are lesser men when we willingly abandon them to raise our children without us.  Because women are not ordinary, but represent authentic diversity in the unity of humanity, they stand as witnesses to a culture of life.  What a diminishment to their dignity that they should have ever become submachine-gun-wielding poster-pin-ups for socialist guerilla movements!  What a diminishment that women should have been so used by men for sex that they march waving coat-hangers!

Unless marriage and family are respected as instituted by God for the promotion of the human race and real values, society will continue to degenerate in moral blindness and strange advocacies.  Without the light of Christ in politics, living will become more and more about selfish fulfillment and individualism instead of discovering who we are by making a real gift of ourselves for others in the image and likeness of Christ.  Distinction between male and female will be lost more and more as the lust for self-fulfillment will enslave even the light of reason.  Society will grow cold-hearted and incapable of real love.  And it will give women submachine guns to shoulder instead of shouldering its own responsiblity to give them the safety of commitment, homes, and children.

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