Sex and gender

If the title baffles you, it may be because you are still happily unaware of the questionable moves some radical feminists are making in many places nowadays.

This may still be a good thing to have, but I must hasten to say that we cannot and should not be naive and complacent with this development. Though it affects more the advanced countries, it is actually also affecting us in our own country.

Even in my native Bohol, once a sleepy place but now, thanks be to God, bustling with life due to tourism, these disturbing maneuvers are taking place.

Imagine, in a supposedly Catholic school run by nuns, the little girls are taught not anymore to address God as Father, because according to them God has no sex and gender. Similar efforts to neuter Jesus Christ are reportedly being made too.

The parents, of course, were alarmed. A mother complained why such fuss was raised over this matter, when it is quite clear that in the Bible, God is referred to as Father or Son or Holy Spirit.

This, to me, already sounds like a radical feminist paranoia, that tries to undo well-entrenched historical and cultural elements with an arbitrary and abrupt move. There are other manifestations of the same paranoia.

Another feminist group, now banding themselves as an NGO in Bohol, is busy teaching young girls about the different techniques of safe sex, including a "taste test" of the different flavors condoms now have.

The problem with the radical feminist movement is that while it raises legitimate questions and issues worthy of public attention and concern, it also pursues and promotes an ideology that not only is anti-Christian, but also is clearly anti-human.

Thus, its proponents deftly use nice words and concepts, such as reproductive health, responsible parenthood, and the like, while at the same time rewriting moral law by promoting contraception, sterilization, even abortion.

They can talk about rights of women over their own bodies, taking this to mean that women have the absolute right to do anything with their bodies because these are theirs. In short, the Church should not pontificate on this matter. Let the women be absolutely free with respect to their bodies!

Now, in many international conferences, radical feminists not only make a distinction between sex and gender, between the natural differences between men and women and the cultural and historical attitudes related to these natural differences.

They are separating them, detaching gender completely from sex, and making gender a purely cultural thing with no relation to the sexual nature of the person.

Thus, because of this emphasis on gender, as defined and understood by them, any person can be anything he or she likes--masculine, feminine, homosexual, bisexual, etc., irrespective of one's natural sexual condition. Every so-called sexual orientation chosen by a person would just be all right.

This is the kind of mentality that is being propagated by some feminist groups these days. This is a clear case of what is termed by the present Pope as moral relativism about which he is warning all of us. This is neither progress nor growth in maturity. This is a regression to barbarianism.

While we all have to love one another as we are, this charity does not mean we can totally forget the objective truth of things. We have to learn to blend both, because one without the other nullifies or empties both.