Every now and then I click on the links that WordPress features on their main page, and sometimes I find a gem of a blog that I bookmark, and sometimes I find something that shocks and amazes me.

In the shocks and amazes category, I clicked through to a blog called: Family Reformation (that should have been my first red flag; in the immortal words of Monty Python, “Run away! Run away!”) where there was a post entitled, intriguingly:

Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”

(read it here, if you dare, and note that all quotations of the author below derive from this link, so I will not link them individually.)

In Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”, blogging Pastor James McDonald takes aim at women seeking fulfillment outside the domestic sphere by comparing the arguments in favour of said expansion of women’s sphere by “egalitarians” (quotation marks his) to the evolutionary missing link – a species between apes & humans that McDonald clearly believes is a silly myth. I should point out here that taxonomically speaking, of course, we — Homo sapiens sapiens* — are already apes, as we belong to the family hominidae, or great apes, along with gorillas and chimpanzees.

*From here onwards, I’ll shorten Homo sapiens sapiens for simplicity’s sake to just H. sapiens: anyway, when you read tripe like this you question whether we deserve even the one sapiens moniker; wise indeed!

As a thinking (and reasonably educated) person, I couldn’t ignore his off-hand dismissal of evolution; as if it were a given that there was no missing link (there are many!), and so I’d like to take on Pastor McDonald first on these grounds, then (in my next post) on his real argument: that of woman’s “unique role as wife, mother, and keeper at home—the normative role for women…happily under the authority of her husband”. Join me, if you will: all that’s required is an open, questioning mind. I ask you simply to look at the evidence and make your own decision, unlike some, who would require you to believe in the – frankly – unbelievable. Read the rest of this entry »