I read this article on my way into work this morning:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...volent-sexism/

It's obvious that benevolent sexism is rampant in the LDS church. Everyone knows it and oftentimes MJ, who is quite orthodox, gets offended by the amount of benevolent sexism that continues to exist. I'm not talking about the blatantly misogynistic church policies, but more of the rampant belief that women are inherently this or that (insert your favorite benevolent adjective).

My opinion on this is two fold: 1) The church does way too much in the way of benevolent sexism. I hope it stops and honestly I think it's not as bad today as it was 10-20 years ago. 2) I think many of the comments used to show sexism in the article above are reaches and that the women are somewhat overly sensitive in this regard. There's no question that male/female have different roles in pretty much every species on earth. Sometimes the male is the main caregiver and sometimes it's the female. I see no reason to think that humans are any different and I therefore have no issues with broad gender roles as long as they aren't absolute and those broad gender roles lead, IMO, to a lot of what is being considered benevolent sexism.

In short, I'm a feminist but I'm also someone that believes in evolution and therefore I believe in broad gender roles.....although since I believe in evolution I hold open the pathway that leads to the eventual changing of gender roles.