English
EspañolThe esteem for the truth and value of a woman and the esteem for the value of the family are vessels that communicate with each other. They go hand in hand. Where there is a woman, with her truth and worth, there is marriage, family, and home. And where marriage and family are valued, so are women and femininity.
Where women are discriminated against as inferior beings, families are patriarchal prisons that only value them as domestic servants. Where women, in the search for their feminine identity, become disoriented, mistaken or confused, and reject femininity and motherhood as their own and differential realities, and judge the intimate union with a man as husband and father as an alienation, marriage and the family home are weakened, lose their feminine heart, become fragmented or are simply rejected outright. In all these cases, men suffer in their identity and lose themselves in caricatures – the macho, the abusive, the insipid, the occasional, the absent, or the anonymous stallion – of what he should be.
Text
“History is burdened by the excesses of patriarchal cultures that considered women inferior, yet in our own day, we cannot overlook the use of surrogate mothers and “the exploitation and commercialization of the female body in the current media culture.” (The Joy of Love, n.54)
Commentary
The defense of women´s dignity continues to be a pending task, despite advances in their incorporation into the labor market and the public sphere. There is still a persistent desire to subjugate women´s bodies and sexuality. In some ideological feminist proposals, what could be understood as liberation, is a new form of alienation and slavery. Women need to recover the unfathomable value of their dignity and demand the greatest respect for everything that reflects their authentic femininity.
Without the truth regarding women, marriage and family lose their authentic identity, become substitutes and caricatures, and fracture. For women are the womb of human intimacy, the womb where the life of every child is conceived, the womb of the first love that a human being can experience. And while it is obvious to state that men lack a mother´s womb, this differential and obvious fact is sometimes forgotten in egalitarian ideologies that seek uniformity among all, as well as in popular culture and everyday life. Only the woman is the womb of life and love. The man receives it from the woman. By embracing her in her truth, without dominating or turning her into an instrument, she finds the platform and freedom, through the conjugal union and the family, to be all the richness that she carries within and is capable of giving. For this very reason, lovingly protecting the feminine heart, taking the utmost care that a woman – the beginning of a loving human intimacy – can be all that she is, instead of mistreated, discriminated against, and subjected – because of her nature – constitutes a radical understanding of being a man.
But once the difference – an irreplaceable value for the complementary duality that love brings together in conjugal unity – is erased, or instead prohibited, what happens to us? What occurs is that the light is covered by darkness.
In this new context, men and women no longer know what they are, nor what one is, and has to gift the other. They don’t know what they can be together, in the intimate gift and acceptance of their complementary difference, in the unity of love and life that, only between those two is the authentic marriage.
What we see in today´s culture is precisely that: marriage no longer means anything when the law gives that name to any sexual relationship. Same-sex relationships, where there are two husbands without wives or two wives without husbands, and it is impossible for both of them to have their own children. Other unions that abound are those who can conceive but agree on principle not to have children, those joined together for a specific amount of time, foreseeing their divorce, and those who, under this legal cover, agree to promiscuity, to consensual infidelity. Today civil marriage is a tower of Babel. A motley and contradictory human zoo.
