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The male.

The female seahorse deposits her eggs on her partner's underside, the aquarium volunteer told me. The male then fertilizes them and provides them with food and oxygen. After ten days to several weeks of pregnancy, the male's brood sack bursts forth with tens or hundreds of newborns.

Within a day, the male gets pregnant again. The cycle repeats itself throughout his lifetime, giving the male a few hours to recover between pregnancies. The same faithful female will visit him every morning for several minutes of affection. Leaving her lover in the same one square meter, she travels perhaps a hundred times that area, ignoring all other males. She's back to visit her partner the next morning.

"How endearingly egalitarian!" was my initial thought/gasp, soon followed by its amendment. "Nah! Unless the male for some reason relishes his pregnancies (which could be true; I don't know), his freedoms seem much more limited than the female's." But even if fundamentally unegalitarian, the reversal of the traditional sex roles—not the oppression of the male—brought to mind the men I met at Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) conference in Dallas at the end of June. In both cases—the seahorses and the egalitarian men—the culturally sanctioned gender-role reversal is warranted by divine endowments. In case of the seahorses, it's their God-ordained anatomy and instincts. In case of egalitarian men, it's their and their spouses' gifts and talents. Even so, both the male seahorses and egalitarian men remain confidently male, hormones and all. Ask the biologists and the egalitarian men's wives.

Some 2,000 members of CBE incorporated in 1988 believe that "the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the fundamental equality of men and women of all racial and ethnic groups, all economic classes, and all age groups," according to CBE's statement of faith.

To learn more about those teachings, 375 men and women, most of them evangelicals (a lot of them Southern Baptists) flocked to the annual conference in Dallas. They took in the sessions and workshops that expounded the biblical passages often used to support the hierarchical/complementarian gender structures, as well as some of the 100 Bible verses that support women's ministry; they received advice on egalitarian marriage and gender exactness in Bible translations. The words of biblical scholars such as Gordon D. Fee and Catherine Clark Kroeger soothed the wounds of many women who for too long were taught that God didn't want them to use the gifts he apparently gave them. Tears of hurt, freedom, and worship flowed spontaneously.

I'll direct those who want to know more about what CBE stands for to the group's Web site. The conference, however, made me think of what CBE is not. The uninformed as well as some advocates of male headship at home and in the church propagate at least four fallacies regarding CBE. What I learned at the conference seemed to debunk them all.

CBE is an organization for disgruntled women. Approximately 30 percent of the conference attendees were men, including speakers Gordon D. Fee, Dan Gentry Kent, and Richard J. Foster. Contrary to popular understanding, the egalitarian men are not weaklings codependent on their pants-wearing wives. Instead, the men who attended the Dallas conference know what their gifts are, and they know what their wives' gifts are. They are certain about one thing: they don't want anyone to miss out on what God can do when these gifts are put to use. When I asked them who the leader in their marriage was, these mutual submission advocates replied, "Both of us." The "leadership" depends on who has the relevant gift—not gender—that ought to be employed in a given situation. So, whether the men are better at childhood education and their wives at mowing the lawn—or vice versa—they divide the work accordingly.

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July (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45