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To: The Giant Apricots
The "erroneous fallacy" positions offered here are set up as easy enough straw men, I'm a bit surprised to find the author struggling and failing to dispose of them. Yet despite the failed attempt to find a "third way" between two hateful extremes (extremes which I don't know anyone advocating, yet presented here as somehow encompassing a pressing current debate), this article does get around to presenting something of a coherent thesis of its own. It is here:

Reality is extremely simple: people should, as individuals, pursue the career-and-family paths in life that they are, as individuals, good at. The sole qualifier upon such a pursuit is that no one else's equal rights, especially the rights to have and protect life, should be abrogated on the basis of gestational age, developmental stage, biological sex, race, or ethnicity in the course of that pursuit.

The underlying confusion of this piece appears even here. The author describes an opinion he is advocating as "reality." Unfortunately, in its details this opinion flies in the face of reality, as well as freedom.

Rather than pick apart the many and varied failures of this confused piece, I'll cut to the heart of the matter.

Mr. Flair ignores the fact that men and women are different. I don't mean different in terms that one is oppressed, or that one is better. I mean simply different. They have different capabilities, and they make different choices. Reality reflects this truth. Some fields are dominated by one sex rather than the other due to dissimilar average ability between the sexes. Other fields are dominated by one sex rather than the other not because of physical disparity, but because one sex prefers that field more than the other. Given the undeniable fact of difference between the sexes this is a normal outcome, not a problem to be resolved by social engineering.

Flair displays an ideological fetish for a form of absolute equality divorced from reality. An ideology that treats men and women as indistinguishable and interchangable, and castigates those who disagree, is at war with human nature itself.

14 posted on 05/29/2002 2:06:41 PM PDT by Snuffington
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To: Snuffington
They have different capabilities, and they make different choices. Reality reflects this truth.

And all of that should be defined by YOU?

The fact is, there should be gender-neutral standards...and then if certain areas of life wind up with more women or with more men, due to the decisions of those individual women and men, so be it. No social engineering from the right or the left needed. But both the right and the left do deny reality when they look down upon a stay-at-home dad doing a perfectly good job, calling him a "Mr. Mom", or when they look down upon a female construction worker who is doing a perfectly good job, calling her "butch" or "a dyke" just because of her occupation. Many psuedointellectual conservatives are obsessed with "traditional" roles. Let people do what they are good at. No affirmative action, but no affirmative presumptions of gender-based lesser ability in any given area of life either!

22 posted on 05/29/2002 11:17:09 PM PDT by Dr. Octagon
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