a. The roles of woman, following gospel teachings, combined with some of my own philosophical observations (following George Gilder, to some extent), are:
1. As an indispensible earthly and eternal companion in life, love, child rearing, spritual, psychological, and emotional maturity, and in the bringing to pass of the immortality and eternal life of man, that is, men and woman are inextricably linked to each other in the process of exaltation.
2. Woman have the primary, but not sole reposnibility for the raising and nurturing of children. This is an emphasis, not a dichotomy between men and woman.
3. Woman exert an inherant civilizing role on men, both because of their inherant feminine nature and qualities but because of the direct causal link between sexuality and childbirth (and therefore family and posterity). Woman exert a natural domesticating and civilizing effect on men such that many of the inherant male tendencies that would otherwise run amok and turn to social pathology are controlled, channeled, refined, and matured within the context of a role as provider, protector, teacher, and leader of a family.
I used to have an old paparback book called
The True Believer. On the front cocer was a guy holding a flag carrying the flag through a breach that had been made in a wall, obviously the wall of a foriification of some kind. The man was blindfolded.
How much more appropriate could this symbolism be?
Hers's what I wrote:
As an indispensible earthly and eternal companion in life, love, child rearing, spritual, psychological, and emotional maturity, and in the bringing to pass of the immortality and eternal life of man, that is, men and woman are inextricably linked to each other in the process of exaltation.
Harmony interprets the meaning of this entire paragraph in the following manner:
Wife
I will leave for minds that must be far vaster and more potent than mine to make heads or tails of this. Or, we could just turn this around and go the other way. We could first state "wife" and then proceed to define "wife" as:
...an indispensible earthly and eternal companion in life, love, child rearing, spritual, psychological, and emotional maturity, and in the bringing to pass of the immortality and eternal life of man, that is, men and woman are inextricably linked to each other in the process of exaltation.
Which now forces one to take issue, not with the undefined term "wife", but with the detailed definition I provided (which is, of course, my own).
The other thing would be to ask Harmony just where her animus agianst being a wife and mother comes from, because, you see,
that is the crux of the matter.
I'll reiterrate something I've said repeatedly in this forum and in others about this subject: Men's and woman's primary roles, according to the gospel, are centered in the home. The woman's role is centered in home, children, and her husband. The man's role is centered in the home, children, and his wife. That's what the gosepl teaches. Everything else, such as the much more rigid dichotomy between the home and work, pursured by many men and encouraged by late 20th century western culture, is outside the gospel framework and an accretion that has no legitmate church or gospel sanction.
Men and woman, in modern times, have very much (thanks to feminism) the same temptations and challenges. They now must both face the pull of a shallow, materialistic, hedonistic culture that persues self fulfillment and ego gratification at all costs, including the cost of relagating those self
less, long time window aspects of life, such as long term marriage, and the raising, nurturing, teaching, leading, and disciplining of children, to tertiary status.
Harmony is an almost pure example of an ideologue; an otherwise fine mind corrupted by a deadly combination of deep animosity and a simple, manichean, pseudo-intellectual grand ideological framework that explains everything in neat, simple, black and white terms. Like the Marxist economic and social theory before it, Feminism divides the world up into two lumpen masses: men and woman. Men get to wear the black hats, and woman the white, just as the capitalist "exploiters" and the Proletiariat did in another sphere.
The ideologue is not a philosopher. He is not necessarily an expert on anything. The ideologue is a single minded fanatic preoccupied with a single or a few issues which have swallowed up his or her entire life and for which he has found a system of belief that supports his biases and predjudices and legitimates his passions.
This is a tragedy when it happens to any of us.