We'll Just Relieve You of Those, Sir

News Flash, from the Center for Biblical Equality, courtesy of blogger Kamilla. Eunuchs, say the conferees, have something to teach the Church. The Church, that old gal in lavender print, has labored under the quaint misconstruction that God created man in the beginning, and male and female he created them. Not so, say the gelders and spayers at the Center for Biblical Equality. There’s an intermediate class of people, once known as hermaphrodites or androgynes, possessing the sexual characteristics of both sexes. So it is as David Mills commented, a birth defect is elevated to the status of the normal, just so that we can tear down the whole idea of the normal.

The point is not to ensure that men and women will be regarded as equal. For the very word “equal” implies distinction. If two things are identical, we do not say they are equal, unless we are dealing with mathematical objects and speaking somewhat informally. Back in high school we were taught trigonometric “identities” -- for instance, that the square of the tangent was the same as the square of the secant, minus one. We say “equal” but what we really mean is “identical”: they are in fact the same thing. But when we are not talking about identities, an assertion of equality is an assertion either of some measurable quantity, or of some metaphysical characteristic. So what must the equalitarians be talking about?

Not some measurable quantity. It is abundantly clear that males and females are not the same. It’s what a member of an alien race would notice first about us. It’s the first thing we notice about someone we meet, and the last thing we forget. They are not, as groups, quantitatively or qualitatively the same in height, muscle mass, vocal pitch, hairiness, bone density, adrenal performance, and age and pattern of maturation to puberty. Their wrists are different, their larynxes, their teeth, their skin, their hair, their reproductive organs -- as someone ought to point out, perhaps with helpful diagrams, to the people at the Center for Biblical Equality. They use different areas of the brain to do things as simple as come up with rhymes, remember names, or total up a list of numbers. They laugh differently, and at different things. One could spend all one’s life studying and appreciating these delightful differences. Indeed, plenty of poets and artists have done just that.

So it must be a metaphysical characteristic, then, that makes men and women equal in any meaningful sense. What might that be? Well, all Christians have affirmed that men and women have been created in the image and likeness of God, and while some medieval thinkers suggested that perhaps the man was a closer image of God than the woman, that idea is about unheard of now (unless I am mistaken, it was never popular in the East, for instance in Gregory of Nyssa). Rather, Pope John Paul II has suggested that man would not, alone, have constituted a being made in God’s image and likeness; it is precisely in the complementarity and union of male and female that mankind mirrors the Trinity. Be that as it may, there is no controversy whatever, on this score, between the equalitarians and, let’s say, faithful Catholics or Orthodox or Protestants who take seriously the distinctions between men and women as they apply to order in the family and the church.

What’s left then is not so much an assertion of equality as an assertion of indifference. Let’s say I have two cars, one red, one blue. They are not the same car. They are not “equal” in a quantitative sense -- not even if they are the same make and model. But, for the purposes for which I require the car -- I want to drive to the local pizza place and pick up a couple of pies for supper -- the cars should be construed as equal. That is, it simply makes no difference whether the cars are red and blue, or Ford and Chrysler, or Fiat and MG. Well, maybe it would make a difference if the car were an MG; there is a significant advantage to having a car whose engine will turn a drive train connected to axles and wheels, so that it will, to use the technical term, “go”. Otherwise, the characteristics are no big deal.

We are to believe, then, that all those things that make men recognizably male and women recognizably female are matters of indifference. For some practical purposes, no doubt some of them are. If you want to twirl an uncooked pizza crust, it will hardly matter if you have a baritone voice (though it might help to have big hands, and a knack for juggling wouldn’t hurt, either). If you have to lull a baby to sleep, it will hardly matter if your hair is glossy and fine (though it might help to have a gentle voice, and an instinct carefully attuned to the needs of small things like babies). But the pavers at the CBE are not thinking about those unimportant things. They are probably not even thinking about toting a rifle and ammunition, or hauling an unconscious adult out of a burning building and down a ladder. They are thinking about such prestigious things as being presidents and priests and generals and chiefs. If you assert loudly enough that sex is a matter of indifference in a priest or minister, then the congregation will themselves treat it with indifference. Here we agree, though not in the way the CBE folks would expect. The congregation do eventually treat it with indifference. Then they indifferently walk away, or never show up to begin with. David Blankenhorn, that liberal Democrat who champions the case of fatherhood in America, discovered this very indifference among men he interviewed. They most positively insisted that a woman could be a perfectly fine head of a household, no question about it. They were also most positively in prison when they said it.

What most intrigues me about the recent frisson at the CBE, though, is that even indifference will not suffice. We cannot say that maleness and femaleness do not matter. After all, so long as we say that, we are continuing to notice maleness and femaleness, and we might come under their spell. We might conclude that wonder and reverence, and reveling in inequality (and this works both ways), are just a lot more fun and a lot more, well, realistic than indifference. So we have to efface the very notion of maleness and femaleness. We have to do the same thing there that homosexual activists used to do with sexual propensities: we place them on a sliding scale, so that nobody is really anything in particular.

At which point I fail to see why we should retain any categories of being at all. I’m reading an excellent introduction to the Renaissance philosopher Suarez, by the Catholic philosopher A. J. Freddoso. Over and over he returns to the contradictions inherent in contemporary empiricism, its “epistemic despair,” and its lapsing into absurd violations of common sense. For just as the CBE trowel-wielders want dearly to reduce talk of men and women to matters of amendable convention, so the contemporary empiricists have no sensible way to talk about what in everyday parlance are called recognizable “things,” without reducing them to aggregates of inherently meaningless matter. In other words, if we can’t talk about men and women, why should we hold our incapacity at that line? What sense can it make to talk about human beings at all, especially when technopolitan hybrids are looming on the horizon? Why not have a sliding scale there, too?

That’s probably not on the CBE radar. Why it’s not, I don’t really know. Scientistic atheists these days have come to admit that even though there are no such things, in actuality, as definably human beings, we should act as if there were; even though the notion of a free will is incomprehensible to materialists, we should suppose in our laws and customs that there is such a thing; even though there is no such thing as a “thing,” properly speaking, it would make life impossible for us if we abandoned that common sense position; we should even, according to a review of the atheist Alain de Botton in the recent issue of First Things, have cathedrals and holy days and feasts dedicated to secular heroes, even though religion itself makes no sense. We are to live in a meaningless world as if there were meaning. The CBEans take the argument in quite the opposite direction. We are, in the instance of man and woman, to live in a meaningful world as if it were meaningless.