Beauty and the Beasts: Equality 1.

Up front.  Men and women are equal.  Men and women have equal minds and equal hearts.  Men and women have equal capacities to do what is right and to do what is wrong, to be a blessing to the world or a curse upon it.

That has been my belief for forty years and more and has not changed.  Everything I know, everything I have learned, tells me that it is true.

It is not up to me, as an individual, to decide that I am ‘natural’ simply because in certain ways I conform to an expected norm, nor have I the right to regard anyone who falls outside those human constructed norms as a freak, however unique they may be.  I have no idea what nature intended, I could myself be the deformed mutant even if I number among the majority of manknd.  But I’m fairly convinced that she did not intend what certain believers have chosen to determine she did.

I can be, have the right to be, troubled by what falls outside ‘nature’s norms’, by ‘freakishness’, only when and insofar as the condition causes pain to those who experience it.

 She has created children who, at birth, are biologically indeterminate and whose sexual determination and supposed orientation has to be determined by surgery.  She has made what we consider to be ‘male’ minds in ‘female’ bodies and vice versa.  Or perhaps sometimes that is not ‘nature’, perhaps sometimes that is a deeply subconscious choice, but even if it is, it is a choice that people should be free to make.

There are decisions I can make, and decisions I should be free to make, and among those are to choose to love, to choose to try not to judge too harshly, to be tolerant – to do, in short, all of those things which, were they universal, would make the world a happier, better place.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” 

Not my favourite literature, this Book, but this is a truth beyond misunderstanding, and there are other truths in there which I may touch upon anon.  Those truths, however – being honest – have yet to convince me in the interventionist, creator God that some have chosen to ‘follow’.

I have walked long-term in the shoes of the poor and I know that, then, people did not do unto me as they would have had me do unto them in the same circumstances.  I have had my life disastrously circumscribed by a series of tragedies during which kinder and more intelligent responses from others would have been of great service.  The very experience of being ‘judged’ has taught me how wrong and dangerous it is to judge others – even if, in practice, I am not always perfect.  That doesn’t stop me striving to be.

I do know, too, that if there is a God, if Him of the Bible is real, there WILL come a time of judgement and ensuing punishment, and that it is presumptuous, arrogant and evil of his so-called followers to attempt to try to make His judgements and inflict His punishments before – according to them – He will Himself get around to it.  If He is judge, we are not even Jury, let alone His hangmen.

In a single time and place, Nazism was the norm.  It didn’t stop all its followers from being wrong.

It is up to each of us to determine that the world should become a better – never a worse – place for our being in it.  Such is my choice.