Women in Ministry study gets derailed

I've spent a chunk of this afternoon reading and learning about Women in Ministry, and whether it's cool or not. So while I'm going through it all, learning lots of cool things, and points from both sides of the argument, I get hung up on a minor detail. Why

Proponents for the prohibition of women as leaders in ministry use 1 Timothy 2:12 (NIV), "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." An argument against it is that this is only applies to the woman that Paul is talking about in the context of the letter, which I was in the middle of exploring, when I thought, "Who is this 'I' that is forbidding it?" Why Paul of course. And is Paul God? No, he is not. So then why is something that he forbids law? Who is he to tell us what we can or cannot do? Sure his words are "God-inspired," but are they to be taken as the be all and end all? And there are plenty of critics who don't even believe that Paul was the writer of 1 Timothy. *sigh* This didn't go the way I expected. Now I need to study the canonization of the bible before I can continue with my study of women in ministry.