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So God
created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them. – Genesis 1:27
In September I had the
honour of speaking at the Conservative Caucus Constitution Day
commemoration in Annapolis, Maryland. As a side benefit of the
trip, we toured Annapolis beginning at the statehouse and old town,
ending at the US Naval Academy.
Our guide remarked that his
son and daughter-in-law had both graduated from the academy, and
blathered on as if there were nothing unusual in that. Among my fellow tourists was
a graduate of the US Military Academy who had been a senior when the
Academy was “co-educated” in 1976. He had some enlightening
words on the subject.
Our tour ended with the noon formation, where 4,000 cadets
form up, strut, and then march off to dinner.
From its architecture out,
the Naval Academy bespeaks empire. None of that republican
spareness about its buildings like Virginia Military Institute. No, Annapolis is empire,
training its future proconsuls.
PERFECT EQUALITY
Laying that aside, I found
watching the formation deeply painful and poignantly disturbing – to
see women so deeply disjointed and debased. What hurt in watching the
female [better the technical word here] midshipmen [here
an impossibly oxymoronic noun] was not that they were women
among men trying to be men, but that they were women stripped of
womanhood. This painful
travesty makes a man involuntarily reach out to cover them. Yet even as that thought
crossed my mind I knew that these poor denatured women would
manfully shove aside any such sheltering arm.
WHERE DOES IT
START?
Many people complain that
our society and culture is being feminised, but that complaint misses the starting
point. Are men becoming
less manful, or are women being stripped of all womanliness? Are men being feminised, or
women being masculinised? Everything masculine is forced upon them,
while they are denied everything feminine. The masculine is exalted,
the feminine debased.
In the outcome all the world is disordered, and neither sex
knows how to behave – a bewildered, androgynous
ramble-scramble.
THE UNIVERSAL ORDER – OR
DISORDER
No wonder that turning women
into men turns men into women.
The ensuing confusion explodes the universal order -- the
created organic polarity between man and woman, the cosmic dance of
complementing and
completing male with female. The roots of this dance
reach to the depths of the love that binds the Trinity to itself,
the deepest framework of the universe. It does not overstretch to
call that love The Only Motive. Whenever we fail to observe
it, it will wreak its vengeance, working itself out it the teeth of
all efforts to oppress it.
The flinty courage peculiar
to women is not the same flinty courage of men, yet both are
courage. What fills up
the destiny of woman differs from the fulfilment of man, yet
together – only together -- both fill up perfection. The naked glory of the
Rockies is not the shrouded glory of the Smokies, yet both move us
to their Creator’s awe.
So the beauty of a woman is not the beauty of a man, but one
without the other is only half beauty. Without the Beloved, the
Lover must remain empty.
Any attempt to exchange one for the other, to reduce them to
equality, to deny their necessary mirroring, to set one above or
against the other, or to confound their forever-separate natures,
destroys and denatures both.
Under Annapolis’s hot and
silent sun I watched black uniformed midshippersons march smartly in
their rows, while inwardly I mourned.
-- F. Sanders
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