Men And Women Are Equal, Not Identical

If our cultural trendsetters ever think about men of former eras, they smugly dismiss them as ignorant savages and resume tweeting. But our forebearers knew what many today have forgotten: men are men, women are women, and there's a real difference between them. 

They didn't need an Ivy league postgraduate degree they spent the rest of their lives paying for, or even twelve years of state-mandated indoctrination. The difference between men and women has been, and always will be, as plain as the nose on your face. They are without excuse.

As America's culture and politics turn sharply toward the surreal, repeated denials of the differences between men and women only serve to spotlight them. For instance, mediocre male athletes have been allowed to enter into women-only sports and compete against females as if they were females. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. 

The results, as any level-headed observer could have predicted, have been disastrous. Through superior size, strength, and brutality, which a brief regime of hormone-suppressing drugs could not neutralize, these men have wrestled, sprinted, and brute-forced their way to the top of their respective sports, stealing records, scholarships, and physical health from real women as they went.

But we do not live in level-headed times. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers said a bill to protect girls' sports would "prevent [transgender students] from reaching their full potential." Where is his concern for the potential of young female athletes who are getting man-handled (in some cases, literally)? State Representative Janel Brandtjen (R), the bill's sponsor, responded, "You can't win against men, that's biology, the reality.... Why would you compete if you knew you wouldn't win?" They became futile in their thinking.

There's nothing inherently immoral about men and women competing against one another in sports. After all, no one is complaining about co-ed leagues. Nor is it true that every male athlete can defeat every female athlete. But it is unfair to force girls to face off against boys, one-on-one, to be declared the best female. And it is profoundly uninteresting to watch lopsided contests. 

Inherent physical differences between men and women are the reason why separate athletic competitions for women were created in the first place.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is facing its own reckoning with biological reality. U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) hauled the Sergeant Major of the Army before the House Appropriations Committee Monday to explain why women have a harder time than men passing the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT). 

Partially as a result of efforts to ensure it "takes into account physiological differences between men and women," the ACFT has been modified twice already. Yet "figures from April show 44 percent of women failed the ACFT, compared to just seven percent of men," complained Wasserman Schultz.

The modern U.S. army is not the one that fought World War II. Despite every politically correct effort to level its ranks, it remains an elite unit of highly trained soldiers in peak physical condition -- because that can be a matter of life and death when under fire. That mission requires inflexible standards of fitness that should not be altered just so that certain types of people can pass the test.

Popular American culture has imbibed the false premise that men and women can only be equal if they are identical in every way -- or often, if women can do everything a man can do. By their unrighteousness they suppress the truth. 

Women were not made to be men, nor would that make them equal. We are equal because God created them "male and female" in his own image.

Originally published at Family Research Council - reposted with permission.