Epiphoskei
Senior Veteran
I feel like Protestants wouldn't care about Mary's perpetual virginity if it wasn't such good ammunition in the fight to assert that Catholics don't really care about the Bible, since the Bible so strongly suggests Mary had other children.
So whether or not she was a perpetual virgin, I think it's really just about bashing Catholicism.
It has more to do with the RCC (and to a lesser extent EO) tendency to value virginity as an unqualified virtue as opposed to a situational virtue - fine when not married, but it doesn't make you purer or more virtuous to not marry. We were warned that in the end times false teachers would forbid marriage. In the earliest days of Church history, we called them Gnostics. When the church shut down that heresy, people with inappropriate ascetic tendencies had to find some other outlet for the sinful self-denial which makes a show of outward religion, hence the hermits, the stylites, and later, monks.
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