Or to get away from the kind of women who would rather pitch a fit and bust up a men’s organization than form their own 
For the record - while the LLL seems to be limited to people who are breastfeeding or people about to start breastfeeding, the League of Women Voters seems to welcome both women and men.
Yes, I think it can be taken for granted that it seems logical to Masons, but the question is, “What is the logic behind it?” What is it about Masonry that would be changed, harmed, or otherwise lessened by the inclusion of women?
The logical reason is that we take good MEN and make them better.
The logic is that men who seek to become Masons want to be taught by men to be better men. How in the world does this logic escape anyone?
What would be harmed by admitting women is that we would no longer be a fraternity. We would then lose the claim to being world’s oldest fraternity. What would be harmed is men would no longer be able to teach men to be better men without the undue influence of a female presence. The methods of teaching, the meanings of the symbols and the ancient rituals would all need to be modified for women. All of those things would be harmed. Perhaps non-Masons don’t understand that; but then there are reasons not every man is made a Mason.
There are plenty of civic organizations like Lion’s Club, Moose Lodge, etc. that welcome women. Masons do not.
I think there is a difference betwen being an exclusive club and being descriminatory. It isn’t any more descriminatory than a chess club excluding people who don’t play chess, or a Hairy Human association excluding anyone who doesn’t have a lot of body hair.
This sounds a lot like circular logic to me. You’re using the fact that things are a certain way to explain why things should be that way. You don’t have a better reason for excluding women than “we’ve always done it that way”?
I think a logical reason for excluding people from groups are intrinsic to the nature of the group, like the example of the La Leche League, or the Thomas Jefferson’s Descendants group. I don’t breastfeed, so I have no interest in the LLL; I’m not a descendant of Thomas Jefferson (as far as I know), and I have no interest in that group either. A woman’s college excluding men doesn’t make sense to me - learning is basically the same for both sexes. I don’t see an intrinsic reason for excluding men.
Modified does not necessarily mean harmed. I can see that it would change them, but if the Freemasons modified their rituals, etc. to include women, how would that harm them?
[QUOTE=Wrath]
What would be harmed is men would no longer be able to teach men to be better men without the undue influence of a female presence. /QUOTE]
“undue influence” … HAHAHAHAHAHA! hee hee hee… snif (wiping eyes) Oh, man, that’s a **GOOD **one. Don’t want none 'o dem WIMMEN hanging ‘round, ‘cause then we’d have to stop struttin’ round with our beer bellies bared, actin’ like we REAL men.
Undue influence. Ye gods.
I think you’re just worried that the women would take one look at what you’re doing and laugh themselves sick.
That’s not logic, that’s just sloganeering.
So? The question at stake is, “What’s so great about being a fraternity, anyway?”
Define “undue influence.” What, precisely, about a female prescense makes it impossible to teach men to be better men? For that matter, what does “teaching men to be better men” even mean? Better than what?
How?
My response is that I can’t come up with a characteristic, trait, or behavior that I would encourage in men to make them better men that would not (if encouraged in women) make them better women. Self improvement is gender neutral and the qualities that make good men into better men also make good women into better women - they make good people into better people.
To me, the fact that those groups allow women show that it can be done with admitting women and that very little would be lost if women were admitted. The civic organization could still do civic activities.
Okay, what if a math club in a city required that you have credentials in mathematics to join?
Well the reason for this is obvious, this math club wants to promote a certain level of discussion that would be harder to reach if everybody who knows how to add and subtract could join. And it would give the club a certain membership culture that the creators of the club found desirable.
A private club is no different from a family/household. I don’t want you or anyone else on this forum to move into my house and hang out all the time.
Is it because I’m against you because you may or may not be of a different religion, political creed, race, gender, sexual orientation? No, it’s because I’ve decided to establish my household for myself and my wife. Just as some people decide to establish clubs for particular people, not the public at large.
I don’t get how you can take that to mean we are talking about some evil organization. The Masons do a lot of good work and the fact that women can’t be Masons has nothing to do with that. I think this is a classic case of overreactionaryism (sic).
I just thought I should point out your post shows a disgusting trend in public sentiment that says if white males decided to associate they are racists while if blacks decide to associate exclusively they are just upholding their culture and ought to be applauded.
Well I’ll put it this way, if everyone here thinks it’s okay for men to hang out in women’s bathrooms then I’ll say your arguments are justified.
Hell no, I’ve always hated that sentiment.
And what I posted gave examples for why some men/women/whites/minorities exclude and I ended it with saying that I personally thought that men/women/whites/minorities should be able to form exclusive clubs for whatever reason.
Well, didn’t (at least here in the States) women reporters fight for and win the right to go into male locker rooms when reporting on sporting events? (I don’t watch sports, but I’ve heard that enough times.)
As I recall , they weren’t exactly fighting for the right to go into male locker rooms. They were fighting for the same access to the athletes that male reporters had, and would have been content if there were no locker room interviews at all.
Yes, but still, no men in the women’s restroom? How is this appropriate? Or any more appropriate than what the Masons do?
No, we exclude women because men and women are different. Are you men and women shouldn’t be different?
The Bible recognizes, for instance, that children ought to be raised with the influence of both the masculine and the feminine. Acknowledging the fact that there is a masculine and a feminine, Masons take good men and make them better. We don’t seek to make women better, teach men from the feminine. The undue influence of the feminine is removed for the purpose to making good men better.
What interest would you, as a woman, have in joining a group that excludes on the basis of your gender? There’s a Mayflower Society that one can join ONLY if they are decendents of the original Mayflower colonizers. Why? What do they do that entitles them to be exclusionary? What information is shared, what takes place at their meetings, that others would not benefit from? Why is their form of exclusion (birthright) given a pass in your eyes but a gender-based one does not? Why is it so hard for folks to understand that there are men who want to be among, converse and learn from men? Something tells me y’all are just irked from be excluded.
There are Masonic Lodges in France that admit women. Go. Have at it. And then have your laugh and what all the hype was about. You would be considered clandestine by Masons in America and elsewhere, and such Masons will not acknowledge your membership.
Modified most certainly does mean harmed. We are the caretakers of our rituals and landmarks. We are charged that they remain intact and unchanged by our actions. To alter them would be to destroy them. It’s as if you were saying “I see no reason why the Bible needs to say Jesus is the Son of God since he wasn’t” and then seek to rewrite the Bible. You would destroy Christianity in the process, just to suit your whim of “logic.”
We really don’t care what you think.
Better than they are now. Female presence doesn’t make the lessons impossible, it means thay would have to change. And change of that nature would harm the purpose. Perhaps you don’t understand that changing the actual writing of the Magna Carta would cause the Magna Carta to no longer be the document that it is. It would be harmed, damaged, destroyed.
My response is that Masons don’t really care that you can’t conceive of the idea that some men want to be among men for that purpose.
How in the world can you possibly know that “very little would be lost”? Those other organization exist for both men and women. Masons do not. My point was if a women wants to join a civic organizations, many options abound. Masonry is not one of them.
Look, here’s why men join male-only social groups like fraternities, Masons, Stonecutters, the Royal Order of Buffalos and so on. So we can get drunk, watch football and eat ribs without the women-folk getting all up in our business. It’s a haven where we can be loud, crude, and obnoxious. Where we don’t have to worry about offending the opposite sex. When we have parties with girls (which is often) we take some time to straighten the place out and maybe take a shower beforehand. It’s a male-bonding thing.
“But what do you guys do that you can’t do when I’m not around?” my girlfriend laments. Well, for one, none of the guys scrunches up their face in disapproval during the 007 days of James Bond. No one screeches if someone drops a chicken wing on the couch. No one says “ew!” when I wear the same sweatpants 3 days in a row.
As a member of a fraternity, I can tell you that we like girls very much and would have them to the house as much as possible. They just don’t live there. And here’s why -
as soon as girls live in the house, guys start to hook up with them. It creates sexual tension and politics. Soon, the man-haven turns into an episode of The Real World. The girls get mad when so and so brings a girl back or the guys start fighting over the girls.
And why should anyone care if a bunch of guys want to hang together? Because women have an intrinsic need to rob men of their hobbies and interests because it distracts them from caring for the women. I was watching The Punisher the other day and there’s a scene where his hot neighbor (Rebecca Romaine) is trying to talk him out of his Wild Turkey enhanced gangster-killing rampage. The dude’s got TWO hobbies. Drinking and killing gansters. And she wants to take that away! Women!
Well, usually it’s just the whites who get together to figure out how to get rid of the Jew and the Negro that people have a problem with. No one gets on anyone’s case for forming a group to celebrate Greek, Irish, Italian or English, etc culture.
Partly true. Masons aren’t permitted to drink in the Lodge. At least not in most American Grand Lodge jurisdictions. Shriners drink though.
In a nutshell, true. But our focus is to teach men to be better, not to be loud, crude and obnoxious.
So mote it be. Ironically, caring for women (widows) is part of the Masonic obligation.
Any private group has the privilege of defining its membership qualifications as whatever it chooses – people with graduate-school knowledge of geomorphology, white anglo-saxon protestant males, women with a fur fetish, whatever.
In the U.S., it’s based in the most certainly established unenumerated right – that of Free Association. (The explicit language of the First Amendment allows for freedom of assembly, a clause regarding petitioning for the redress of grievances being connected to it in an ambiguous way that implies that it is the reason for permitting assembly. By longstanding interpretation, the free-assembly clause is read to guarantee that individuals have the right to associate with whom they choose for whatever legal reason they choose, excluding from their gathering whom they choose.)
What people have objected to in such associations is when such groups claim a public purpose and therefore quasi-governmental privileges while maintaining such membership requirements.
When such requirements appear to have no connection to the purpose of the organization, there is a perceived disjunct between intent and membership qualifications that makes it seem unreasonably discriminatory to have those qualifications. Certainly the Sons of Polish Veterans, for whatever reasons male offspring of persons of Polish descent who served in the Armed Forces may have for banding together, has every right to limit their membership to men who are in fact sons (or male-line descendants) of Polish veterans, and a Hmong immigrant who wishes to join is S.O.L. But if the SoPV claims that it is a patriotic organization entitled to manage the municipal Veterans Monument Park and permit or exclude whom it chooses from using that city-owned park, then some serious questions about discrimination rise. The issue about the Boy Scouts that was debated here last year is an obvious example of invidious role-switching.