Hermanos

English is a fallen language. The beauty of our language has been watered down over time, and coarseness has taken place. In addition, political correctness has creeped its way into the language until PC and grammar are considered one and the same.

When I grew up, if we were discussing a person of unknown gender, it was grammatically correct to refer to this person as "he." For instance, "In order for the student to understand complex mathematical problems, he must study nightly." Further, multi-gendered nouns took on the masculine, "policeman" "congressman," and humanity itself was referred to in the masculine. "Wherever the rights of man have been threatened..." "Good Christian men rejoice!" "Brothers let us now be at peace with each other."

By high school, "he" had been replaced with "he or she." Besides being a hassle to write (that extra "or she" is a lot of work), the change resulted in a new onslaught of grammatical errors. It is not correct, for instance, to say, "In order for the student to understand complex mathematical problems, they..." It has to be he or she. But people, under the grounds of political correctness and ignorant of the correct grammar, ultimately turn to they or them.

After that, it became necessary to switch "he or she" with "she or he," and then finally "she" became the norm in some texts.

Worse, of course, is the message it sends. It sends a message of ignorance of our language origin and meanings. Calling a non-gender specific person "he" does not make that person male. It simply is what words like "he" "she" and "it" have always been - a pronoun, something that takes the place of a noun. It shows that we are easily offendable, to the point of ridicule. If we cannot listen to humanity described in differing and unique terms, which even include "all men," "men" and "mankind," then we are likely to take offense at anything ("Why did you invite a policeMAN to come speak to the children? Can't you bring in a policeWOMAN?)

Unfortunately, this terminology is even slipping into our Bible and religion. The one place where women should know that they are loved and accepted - equals to men - is church. Christianity has always been one of the most women-friendly religions of the world. And yet, Paul now writes to his "brothers and sisters," and Bible have become gender neutral in other ways as well. The worst part is that some are now calling God a woman - our heavenly parent or heavenly mother.

Don't get me wrong. We all know that God is gender neutral - He has to combine all the male and female parts and traits in order to have created them. And He loves us all equally. However, He chose to represent himself to us as a male figure, as a Father. He chose to send His Son to earth - we can't get around the fact that Jesus was a man. To call God a "parent" or woman is to politicize our great creator!

I went to church this afternoon, and the service was done in half English and half Spanish. Because I have a fairly good grasp of Spanish, I followed along with the Spanish readings, interpreting them as I went. Imagine my horror to see written on the page, "hermanos y hermanas" or "brothers and sisters."

The Spanish language is different than English in that all nouns, whether living creatures or not, have genders. It's a grammar thing. A house, casa, is feminine and so all the words used to describe the house are also feminine. Words of living beings that have genders will have two words to describe them, much like we do. HermanO is brother, and hermanA is sister.

However, much like English, in Spanish if there is a crowd of mixed genders, the masculine form is used. Therefore, "hermanos" may translate to "brothers" OR it may translate to "brothers and sisters" depending on the context. Much like we have the word "grandparents" to describe two individuals - grandMA and grandPA as a group, they have "abuelos." And much like English, this system has nothing to do with a masculine leaning machismo society. It has everything to do with grammar. That's it - grammar. I've always liked Spanish because it is so much easier to work with the gender system than to try and tiptoe around offending anyone on the basis of gender.

But now we have printed "hermanos y hermanas." Bad Spanish grammar. Is this a simple mistake on the translators part? Based on the fluency of the rest of the translation, I think not.

How sad is it that this political correctness is seeping into Spanish. It's as painful for me to consider as, say, the westernization of native American cultures has been. When we were in Spanish class learning gender grammar, no one ever thought to say that there was some sort of bias. But today, it seems that someone thought that the "sisters" might feel left out if they weren't specifically mentioned. I know this has to be an act of an English-speaking person, probably not a native speaker of Spanish. You may as well have printed "brothers and brothers" or "sisters and sisters" based on the grammatical rules.

And as women, especially, we should be trying to preserve this grammatical heritage. We should be celebrating our differences with men. We should be aware and respectful of our long history and how we are afforded more rights today than ever before. We should be reading "brothers" and smiling at our knowledge that Paul may have been writing "brothers" but that the religion he was spreading was open to both male and female.

And ultimately, we should keep our heads. Making a big deal out of the gender of unidentified people or groups should be seen as ridiculous as trying to gender identify a tree or a flower. Yes, words do mean something, and in this case, not yielding to the PC temptation means something as well. It means that we are bigger than the prejudices that we may have faced in history and that we are still one united race, one humanity, one mankind.