First of all, it is literally taking everything within me to refrain from blogging about Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alistair Begg. Sob, I was made for such a time as this. My two youngest children are having to write long paragraphs about the maxim “Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint” and I trust that this will be manifest in my ability to write a post that is not about the most interesting questions of the day.
Македонски: Плачот на Рахела, фреска од Марков Манастир [Rachel Weeping for her Children, Fresco, 14th Centruy.]
Yesterday I said, to quote myself, “Women [in the church] who weren’t trying to be bad, along with men [in the church] who weren’t trying to be bad, crossed various Rubicons…because there was no particularly strong material or spiritual reason not to that they could perceive.” The reader may have thought, ‘hang on a minute, I’m sure some of them were trying to be bad.’ And I suppose that would be a fair point. Certainly, bad people have done bad things in every church in every generation, many of them women, and many of them on purpose.
But I think it is useful to dwell on the word “trying.” Most people, even bad people try to be good. Most of us do wicked things while intending some kind of good, if only for ourselves. If one’s sense of goodness, though, is wrecked by a toxic lie, or by pride and selfish independence, the consequences—though unintended—live long and tragically. What may have seemed a good idea at the time future generations bitterly wish had never been done.
That extremely obvious point being made, I want to pick up where I left off yesterday. The story of feminism, Mary Harrington was explaining, can be seen “less as another step up on some ladder of moral advancement [or devolution, if you are a conservative] and more a campaign to enter the market on the same terms as men.”
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