Evangelical challenge on women's roles

Biblical conservatives are generally not happy with women's equality.  We see it in the battle over women's ordination (won in the Episcopal church, ongoing in the Roman Catholic church) but it is particularly prominent in the Evangelical conservative community.  

However, it's harder and harder in modern life to keep women pregnant at home in the kitchen or in the homeschool room, when women want legitimate careers of their own.  From Religion Dispatches

Some evangelicals’ complementarian commitments appear to be influenced more deeply by nostalgia for 1950s suburbia than by the Bible itself. The gulf between leaders’ wishes and women’s lives reveals how tone-deaf, incomprehensible, and inconsistent elite preferences have become....

Traditionalist evangelical elites may have overreached. Now, in light of the preferences and necessities that undergird evangelicals’ egalitarian family arrangements, leaders will have to concede that people can interpret scripture according to shifting cultural realities. Of course, this interpretive malleability and liberty of conscience isn’t extended to people who think differently about homosexuality.

Of course it is no coincidence that opposition to gay rights is linked to  rigid gender norms.

Conservative evangelical elites are expending a great deal of energy to keep acceptance of homosexuality out of their churches and institutions. But when it comes to enforcing patriarchy, they simply aren’t fighting as hard. As they battle on two fronts—often against their own people—evangelical leaders may have to decide whether homosexuality or egalitarianism is the greater evil.

They will struggle to argue that marriage is non-negotiable as they concede that gender roles are very much up for debate.

The re-definition of marriage, as Associate Justice Ruth Bader GInsberg reminded us yesterday, is not over same sex couples.  It's already occurred, when we acknowledged the fundamental equality of the partners in a marriage.