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Notes -
In the context of a parachurch ministry, the answer is straightforward: God designed the human sexes that way, and He has commanded us to follow that design. The Bible is pretty emphatic about this:
If I were to make a secular argument, I would build it on the distribution of temperaments in men and women and how they interact within this framework, and I’d refer to studies of different subcultures with different marriage norms, being aware of the biases in social psychology. But it’s much harder to make a normative argument that way, and there would be legitimate discussion to be had about when to strengthen traditional norms to benefit the average person and when to weaken them to benefit outliers.
When you believe that the Bible is God’s Word – and that’s the conviction the Promise Keepers were working from – then it has the right to make normative claims that human prudence does not.
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