Quote:
Originally Posted by non sequitur
This is done out of guilt. The Church is extremely patriarchal. In the Church, women are second class citizens and everyone knows it. We still cling to the notion of a woman's place being in the home, barefoot and pregnant. When leaders extol the virtues of women in the Church, they are throwing them the proverbial bone, trying to ease their own guilt.
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This is a very harsh way of expressing things, but there is some truth to the idea that there is a lesser expection for women. For example, since a man holds the priesthood he is more accountable that a woman for the same sin. I don't really think the source is necessarily doctrinal. I think it is cultural.
I mean this in no sort of critical way, but I believe that because of the age of church leadership that cultural progress in the church lags cultural progress in US society (where all of the leadership is from) by 15-20 years.
I have to believe that a man who is at least exposed to feminist ideas in college (are you at BYU? I would think not.) and who lives his whole adult life with a woman who is the product of feminism (most of the women the guys around here are married to fit this discription) will have a radically different take on the role of women and what is to be expected of them than GBH whose formative years were the 1920's and 30's. The women of that era were raised to submissive. The woman of today is not. Will the first prophet born after 1960 have much in common in his cultural thought process about woman as GBH? I would think only a little.