Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) March 3, 2024: Recently I read Carol Glatz's news story "Eliminating differences with gender ideology is a terrible danger, pope says" (dated March 1, 2024) at the website of the National Catholic Reporter:
In her news story, Glatz reports the views that Pope Francis expressed in his opening remarks at an international congress at the Vatican on March 1-2, 2024. Speaking off-the-cuff, before his prepared remarks, Pope Francis said, "'Today the worst danger is gender ideology, which erases differences and makes everything equal.'"
Glatz also says, "'As he often has done in the past, the pope referenced the dystopian science fiction novel Lord of the World, written in 1907, by [Monsignor] Robert H. Benson, a former Anglican vicar, encouraging his audience to read it. He reiterated that he considers the novel to be "prophetic because it shows this trend erasing all differences."'"
Disclosure: I have not read Benson's 1907 dystopian novel. However, Wikipedia has an entry devoted to it - and another entry about the prolific but short-lived convert Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914).
Ah, but is Pope Francis' critique of gender ideology and his defense of gender differences just another manifestation of the doctrinally conservative pope's conservatism? Or are there certain real gender differences?
I have profiled the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis in my OEN article "Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" (dated March 24, 2019):
Now, this morning, I read the op-ed commentary titled "Men Are From Mercury, Women Are From Neptune" (dated February 29, 2024) at the website of the New York Times by the conservative columnist since January 2023) David French (born in 1969; J.D., Harvard University, 1994), a lifelong civil libertarian - and an evangelical Christian.
Toward the end of French's op-ed commentary, he explicitly mentions John Gray's 1992 book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Obviously, French's title "Men Are From Mercury, Women Are From Neptune" is a take-off on Gray's book title. However, French does not explicitly explain what he means by the imagery of Mercury and Neptune.
But the main thrust of French's op-ed commentary is to accentuate differences between men and women - which he repeatedly characterizes as culturally conditioned.
Now, inasmuch as the evangelical Christian libertarian French maintains that men and women are different, his view of gender differences may be consonant with Pope Francis' view of gender differences. Consequently, if Pope Francis is correct in claiming that contemporary gender ideology militates against gender differences, then contemporary gender ideology also militates against the gender differences that French describes as culturally conditioned.
Now, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) suggests that certain gender differences are real in his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (Cornell University Press), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University - which Cornell University Press has made available in a print-on-demand paperback edition.
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