Tag: Gender

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Manhood Does, Womanhood Is

“Manhood must be demonstrated. It is largely an action. Womanhood is an essence. Manhood does. Womanhood is.” (Qtd by Stanton)

That’s a statement many would challenge today. That there is a difference–and that the difference is significant.

Some might challenge the statement as religious. After all, it is largely in the orthodox corners of Christianity that such discussion happens at all today.

But this statement comes from a secular person–one who did not advocate biblical marriage and sexual purity.

Margaret Mead was a cultural anthropologist and an advocate of “loosening social strictures on sexuality . . . [which]  could lead to more pleasure, and less pain and suffering.”
Hardly a puritanical perspective. Even so, according to Mead, the differences between men and women are innate–born into us; they matter in our daily lives, and they are universal.

“In every known human society, everywhere in the world, the young male learns that when he grows up, one of the things which he must do in order to be a full member of society is to provide food [and protection] for some female and her young. . . .

“[E]very known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men. . . It is the precise opposite for women. They must be ideologically and politically pressured, with great potency, to abandon and ignore their children.”

There is no lack of ideological and political pressure on women to pursue lives that contain minimal involvement with children–especially their own. Our society has few structures in place to support the essence of women and pass on the model of manliness. This passing on of manliness is not religious pablum.

More from Mead:

“[T]his behavior [manliness], being learned, is fragile and can disappear rather easily under social conditions that no longer teach it effectively.”

And no society that works as hard as ours to ignore the differences between men and women can effectively teach manhood.

Teaching manhood requires a traditional view that effectively works in various cultures. We see it in primitive cultures. In the postmodern West, the Christian perspective is a lone voice in a technological wilderness.

The orthodox corners of the Church are where manhood mentoring can and must still occur. Solid families headed by fathers and mothers can pass manhood’s tasks and womanhood’s essence to their own–and perhaps to others around them.

Neither public education nor industry has the impetus nor the freedom to launch such an effort. We in the Church can pass along the truth science now ignores.

Christ calls us to this work in every generation.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Urgent: Male and Female Created He Them

[M]ale and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created, Genesis 2:4 (ESV).

If some in Congress have their way this week (The House is set to vote Thursday 2/25), the terms male and female will soon disappear. First, from the realm of bureaucracy that will continually push itself into our private lives, And second, from the hearts and minds of young people who will grow up learning a language, a way of life, that is blind to biology, scripture, and

In Newsweek magazine, Mary Rice Hasson describes the “Equality Bill.”

“The Equality Act is 31 pages long, and devotes thousands of painstakingly drafted words to prohibiting “sex discrimination.” In all those pages, however, the word “female” never appears.”

. . . .

“Under the Equality Act, ‘gender identity’ determines access to “public accommodations,” a category the act redefines to include just about everywhere. It mandates access to ‘a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room’ among other gathering places on the basis of ‘gender identity.’ Translation: There will be no safe spaces left for females. Support groups for mothers or sexual assault survivors would be forced to accept any male who feels entitled to join (based on ‘gender identity’).”

You may wonder: Can that really happen? It can. And without urging some Democrats to vote no in both the House and Senate, it will.

The White House has already announced it concurs with the goals of the bill.

Niamh Harris explains that there will be no safe haven of religious protection.

“Religious institutions fare no better [than public ones]. Religious schools, adoption agencies, and other charities would face federal sanction for operating according to basic biology and mainstream Biblical teaching on sex and marriage. Outrageously, this act exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

We might well imagine that the act would end up in court within hours of passage. But there is oppression in that too. Litigation takes time and costs money. Just ask the Little Sisters of the Poor.

In the meantime, the doors of ministries would close. Many forever even if there is relief from the courts.

And that might be a big if.

I have a friend who was involved in the pro-life cause before 1973. I was still in high school

She battled against abortion before the Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions. Decisions that legalized abortion until birth for any reason.

Until birth for any reason.

The decisions went far beyond what the pro-abortion side considered to be their wildest dreams.


“We thought we could count on the courts,” she told me shortly after I began my own pro-life efforts in 1979. I’ve never forgotten.

Around the same time I was reading a book whose title and author I’ve lost–but whose opening example has stayed with me all these years.

The author presented an expectant mother determining to never allow society’s gender preconceptions to affect her child. She would raise her child in an environment that would laud feminist ideals.

This child would not wear dresses, would play with both dolls and toy trucks alike. She would give the child a name that did not assume a gender.

She planned. She prepared.

Labor. Delivery. Birth.

The mother’s first words upon the arrival of the child?

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

Why, the author pondered, did she ask so eagerly and so quickly after denying the importance of gender for so long?

Because it matters. Our gender makes us who we are more than this mother had been willing to admit.

People are free today to be openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.

But people must also be free, if they are to remain free, to live out religious convictions, to run ministries accordingly, and raise children with biblical principles in mind.

These freedoms are at risk.

And we may soon have to ask ourselves how to manage in a new dark night of oppression based on our conviction that men are men and women are women.

And that God made us that way.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Trying to Draw the Line that Won’t Stop Moving

In the wake of every modern social movement comes a moment when we think that movement has found its end.

For example, America and much of Europe have instituted same-sex marriage. Where else can the new social line go? Yet it keeps moving.

It shifts to a Big Brother effort to get everyone on board. To make us all believe the same thing about same-sex marriage, about white privilege, about the evils of the patriarchy that wields power unjustly, holding women down. Justice never happens because the line to fairness keeps moving.

In such times, it’s rare to find a book that, to mix my metaphors, puts a finger on the pulse of the constantly moving line in a way no other author has. We see the “great crowd derangement,” Douglas Murray describes, but “we do not see the causes.” He shows us the causes.

I usually wait to comment on books until I’ve finished reading them. But Murray’s book contains a message that is cogent, urgent–and surprising, considering its source.

The perspective in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity is distinctly liberal but at the same time very conservative.

Douglas Murray is gay. He believes the line has gone too far. And there may not be a way to pull it back.

He is honest about his fear that “We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of backlash against all rights advances–including the good ones–grows more likely.”

Murray says, “Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over.”

When Obergefell came down, I thought–albeit briefly–They have what they want now. We will stay in this place. We did not.

Instead, we see lawsuits over wedding cakes, photos, and flowers.

We see, as Murray puts it, that once the “boot is on the other foot” the victors treat the losers the way the losers once treated the now victors.

Murray implicitly makes a case for the Golden Rule and pulls back the curtain on the “gobbledygook” that has filtered into society from liberal academia.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a secular book with more wisdom from someone whose worldview is so vastly different from my own.

I can’t wait to keep reading.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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