Gender ideology turns women against the family, warns Honduran expert

Aparecida, Brazil, May 31, 2007 / 10:34 am

The Executive Director of the Education and Family Association of Honduras, Gracia de Villeda, warned this week that gender ideology “has led us to become enemies of the family.”

In statements to CNA, Villeda said, “Gender ideology has made women turn against themselves, because it has led to scorn for maternity, which is one the characteristics and conditions inherent to our nature as women and it has led us to become enemies of the family.”

 In response to an impoverished understanding of love in today’s world, she said, “families must work to truly teach their children to recognize that they are sold cheap love by the media and by the music they listen to.” Parents must teach their children that, “true love is love that is surrender and commitment,” Villeda said.

The Honduran expert, who was in Brazil for the 5th General Conference of the Latin American Bishops’ Council, explained that gender ideology has led women to question the natural inclination they have to be mothers and wives, and that they have been made to feel that everything to do with children and the family “enslaves them.”

Children are a blessing, she continued, “that gives meaning to our lives and in no way prevents us from developing our qualities and capacities.”  The key is “to know how to prioritize and order things properly in the different phases of life,” Villeda explained.

Within the “gender ideology,” she said, “sex is referred to as biologically defined while gender is a social construct, which is false, because biology is what defines and characterizes us, and just as each of our cells is genetically imprinted with the genetic code. In the same way, femininity characterizes women in their personality, who they are and what they do.”

Villeda stressed that gender ideology harms the family because “it turns women against their children and makes them view life at home as a burden instead of as a reality assumed by a freely chosen decision.”

She also said the incorporation of gender ideology into sex-ed text books for schools causes great harm because it promotes “a loss of sexual identity and generates identity confusion in the personality, and no public authority has the right to do such an irresponsible thing.”