I guess God really messed up when he allowed a woman to be the first to discover that Jesus had risen from the grave.
Women are important in the Church, and always have been--and yes they are spiritual equals to men.
However, if anyone wants to say they follow the bible, they need to follow all of it--especially the commands and advice in the New Testament (which helps us interpret the Old Testament, and its commands correctly). Any honest look at the New Testament on leadership clearly shows men are to be the leaders of the whole church.
Men learn from women all the time of course, ask any Christian husband...but formal leadership in the Church, as it is in the home, is clearly commanded to be men. Only since the feminist movement of the 20th Century has this been questioned: Christians are virtually unanimous for 2000 years of what they read in the bible on this until then.
The reason the ordination of active homosexuals so easily became an issue in mainline churches is they have ignored the commands on leadership and church discipline for quite a long time now. It's no accident that in virtually every defense the homosexuals make they bring up the women's leadership question, its quite logical. If we can fudge on what the Holy Spirit said through St. Paul and other authors of the New Testament on the issue of women, why not bend the rules for homosexuals too? It's a very good question, and one I've never heard a good answer to by the pro-women-leadership "evangelicals" and Charismatics.
Christians are bound to obey the New Testament, even, or especially, when it is counter-cultural.