Dear visionaries,
This all-male school board thingy is turning into the Energizer Bunny of topics. Oh, well.
William asked why, given my theology, I would seek a woman’s input or opinion on this or any other matter. Given the rhetorical distance between our camps, this kind of assumption is certainly a natural one, but I do want to do far more than nuance it. If I were to list the top three people I have learned the most from, living or dead, two of them would be women. I have three children, two of them women, and by the grace of God I saw to it that they all got the same (first-rate) education. One of them did her undergraduate thesis on how various forms of mistreatment of women are reflections and applications of various Trinitarian heresies.
And all this is consistent with what Scripture teaches. In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is a woman. The Christian church is a woman, the bride of Christ. In the book of Acts, Priscilla and Aquila take Apollos aside, and together they set him straight in his teaching. And if I began spouting some egalitarian nonsense, I know of a number of modern Christian women who would be happy to do the same for me.
Roger has asked me for two contradictory things. First, he asked me to be “honest and concise,” and I might assume from this that any detailed explanation could be taken as evasive — as me developing my own brand of political correctness. But then he also asks for “all the reasons.”
A detailed explanation could easily grow to the size of a book. But modern egalitarianism is incapable of thinking at the level of foundational presuppositions (as has been demonstrated multiple times in this forum), and “all the reasons” would not be likely to find an attentive audience. In our modern egalitarian setting, any restriction placed on men or women is automatically taken as a bellicose statement of the superiority of one over the other, end of discussion.
That said,
1. Why now? has already been answered, multiple times. The goal is to protect the school from frivolous harassment in these, our PC times.
2. Why at all? is, in my mind, tied in with the first. If we did not live in these times, such a proposal would probably be quite superfluous and unnecessary.
John just simply assumes that such a practice would entail “second class citizenship for women.” But this shows how wildly divergent our foundational assumptions are. I will simply seek to answer this with a poem of Chesterton’s called Comparisons.
If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.
Cordially,
Douglas Wilson
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.