FEMINIST FUNDAMENTALISM ON THE FRONTIER BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY FOR CHILDREN

Abstract

The equality of the sexes, and the instantiation of that equality in the repudiation of "fixed notions concerning the roles and abilities of males and females," are fundamental commitments on which all levels of government in the United States must follow through, not only in lawmaking, but in hortatory pronouncements, funding decisions, and necessary interventions into the family, such as child custody and adoption decisions. Not only in public schools and government funded educational programs, but in state-licensed private schools and home schooling, they must ensure that girls and boys receive equal opportunity. And evidence of commitment to sex equality should be at least as assiduously enquired into and at least as positively weighted as a prospective adoptive or custodial parent's commitment to providing a child with religious training, something many decision makers seem to enquire into and weigh favorably, often without much apparent attention to the substance of the religious beliefs. As things now seem to stand, however, when repressive religious beliefs are pitted against secular feminist ones, the religious beliefs often seem to begin with a presumption to respect which is even more deserved by, but often not granted to, the feminist ones. Therefore, at a time when so many different religious fundamentalisms are demanding legal recognition-particularly when it comes to control over children, whether within the family, in the schools, or in the broader society-I want to vindicate something I have come to call feminist fundamentalism, by which I mean an uncompromising commitment to the equality of the sexes as intense and at least as worthy of respect as, for example, a religiously or culturally based commitment to female subordination or fixed sex roles.