We're going to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. According to their Instagram account, The Women's March UK. will now be called intersectional uprising. The biggest irony in this rebrand that erases women is that on their website, the statement, In the War on Women, is right next to the alert that the women's march is no longer about women.
In the new film Truth Rising, Seth Dylan of the Babylon Bee remarked that some headlines read like comedy. This would be one of them if the stakes were not so high. In this cultural moment we live in, a women's rights movement that erases women is the inevitable consequence of terrible ideas. Back in 2020, Joseph Backholm asked protesters at the Women's March in Washington, D.C., the question, what is a woman? The responses were beyond parody.
Some were angered at the question, others looked around, worried someone might hear their answer and not be pleased. Others regurgitated the incredibly dangerous non-answer, whoever identifies as a woman. A few weeks later, teenagers at the annual Pro-Life March for Life had far less trouble giving a much clearer response.
Now, of course, everyone really knows to some extent or another what a woman really is, and that includes Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown Jackson.
So advocates of radical gender theory could only shame people who said out loud what we all know to be true. with feigned outrage that anyone would ask such a bigoted question to begin with. And so the movement that began to protect women Instead, erases them. The earliest feminists, like Susan B. Anthony, fought to ensure the rights and protection of women as women.
But at some point during feminism's second wave, when the movement was hijacked by the sexual revolution, the movement became more about making women another kind of man. And this was especially true of the movement's hyper-focus on abortion rights. As Alexandra de Sanctis put it, and I quote, feminists began to embrace abortion only after they began to take the male body as the ideal. and maleness as the pinnacle of the human experience. As a result, they redefined female equality as sameness with men, adopting the view that women could not be equal unless they could participate in the economy.
in sex, indeed in life, in the same way that men do. And the chief obstacle to this vision of fulfillment? The female body.
Now, perhaps the most common factor of leftist ideologies is that they deny and sometimes defy reality. In her book, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China, which describes a family's tragic experience under communist rule, Zheng Chang described how communist women in China and I quote here, wore shapeless clothes exactly like the men. Revolutionaries would then praise women who looked and acted like men as if it were somehow a form of female empowerment.
Now a similar argument is made in the book The Genesis of Gender, A Christian Theory by Abigail Favali. She critiques the ideas of contemporary gender theory as well as its atheist roots this way: quote, too often freedom for women is cast as freedom from femaleness. Autonomy is envisioned according to male parameters. Women are expected to use invasive chemical and surgical means to conform their bodies to that ideal. Women are not valued simply for being.
but only for doing. ⁇ And the same impulse can be seen in the men who believe they have successfully portrayed themselves as women by achieving shallow mockeries of feminine stereotypes, or the transgender revolution of recent years that resulted in a disproportionate number of young women rejecting who they are as opposed to the number of young men. Surgical and chemical interventions that were falsely called gender-affirming care have left scores of young women in particular with irreversible damage. And in the trans community, stereotypical masculine traits like competitiveness and aggression are encouraged while nurturing characteristics are derided. In almost every single aspect, this whole movement has waged a war on women.
Mary Cassatt was a turn-of-the-century American artist. She portrayed women as women, rather than reducing subjects as objects of male gratification or as substandard men, she portrayed them as fully dignified persons, often occupied in conversation with one another or caring for children. Jane Austen achieved much of the same thing in her writing. And these portrayals share the biblical perspective of the goodness and the givenness of womanly glory. In the Old Testament, Ruth and Esther are among the many women who played integral roles in the unfolding story of God's redemptive plan.
They did this not in defiance of being women, but as women. And the Marys of the New Testament, Mary Magdalene, Mary the sister of Martha, Mary the mother of Jesus, they all got what Jesus was up to well before the men around them did. These are heroines in Scripture, who point to the ultimate image of the Church as the bride of Christ.
Now in the end, all atheistic philosophies promise the perfectibility of humanity because they reject the goodness of our createdness. Modern gender theories promise to promote women. but instead reduce them, and now attempt to erase them. Once again, the only vision of reality that's big enough to describe reality as it is. is the Christian vision.
the dignity of women rests solely in the glory that God created them with. when he made them in his image. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.
If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to Love Like a Christian Today, go to breakpoint.org.
