benignuman,
I am not coming from some sort of feminist, “lets be egalitarian” position and I am not coming to validate anything ex post facto.
I’m not sure how you derived from my post that I was ascribing any motivations onto you, although perhaps I did so indirectly to charliehall, and definitely directly to YCT. I should have been more careful in my wording, so I apologize.
I value honest clear positions based on honest clear arguments.
I agree with you there.
There is no categoric rule in halacha that women cannot be rabbis, so why pretend as if there is.
I’m not sure that the absence from halacha is so clear cut. People who have much more Torah knowledge than I do seem to think that it is not permissible.
If I had a minhag that for some reason I wanted to change, or if I wanted to do something that wasn’t commonly (or ever) done in the frum community, I would go to my rav and ask a shaila. I think the first thing he would ask me is, “why do you want to do this”? Whether he ultimately permits it or not would depend highly on my motivation for doing it. A different person in a different situation might get a completely different answer.
The first change made by the Reform movement in Germany that brought huge condemnation from the rabbis of the time was something that seems tiny; they moved the Torah leining up to the bima. If a shul had done this because it was difficult for everyone to hear the leining, perhaps there would have been some disagreement, but not a full fledged outcry. The outcry happened because of the motivation of the reformers – to make their synagogues look more like churches.
I cannot myself answer the question of whether ordaining a woman using the smicha system we have today is forbidden or not, but it does seem clear that the way YCT is going about it is not the proper Jewish way.