When the European missionaries came to the New World to evangelize the natives, they did not find creatures of a different species. They found human beings, male and female. They did not find any tribes in which the women met in council, hunted the large animals, smoked the peace-pipe, trained up their daughters in savage displays of physical courage and endurance (the “sun dance” of the Plains Indians, for example), and established elaborate hierarchies of honor. They did not find any tribes in which the men took care of small children, gathered roots and berries, made themselves up with pretty decorations to delight their women, ground corn kernels to powder to make bread or paste, carried water while the women were singing war-songs, gossiped with one another to share the news and to keep daily morals in line, and made “nests,” as it were, as clean and neat as possible, for the sake of the little ones, and because that is the way they liked things best.
They found men and women. That is what you will find wherever you go in the world. . . .
Men and women are different from one another, down to the roots—down to the cells. We have merely trained ourselves not to see it or not to admit it when we see it. It is a willed stupidity. It is also a willed grimness, a willed refusal to delight in the natures God has given us. There is nothing glad or merry about it.
Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.93-95
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