December 18, 2007
Last week one got to watch and hear various face-saving gestures by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who was discovered to have taken politically incorrect positions on a signature issue. As a senatorial candidate from Arkansas in 1992, Huckabee had dared to state that he opposed sending women into combat because it jarred with their “dignity.” The former Arkansas governor also endorsed the Southern Baptist Convention’s stance that “women should submit graciously to their husbands.” Reading the responses to Huckabee’s apparent missteps on CNN’s blog (December13), it seems that some of our fellow-Americans are going bonkers over his “barbaric” and “medieval” opinions. Perhaps this Baptist minister should be sent away to a detention camp where he can be indoctrinated in all the latest PC gibberish. (I suspect the Germans, who cannot be surpassed in such exhibition of breast-beating, have already set up such centers of reeducation. The spoof on South Park dealing with the German antifascist Nazis is probably more accurate than many of the viewers realized.) Still someone might get confused about rapidly changing party-lines.
Until just a few years ago people from across the political spectrum would have barfed at the idea of sending women into battle. At the time the ERA was being considered in the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of this redundant progressive project ran around denying that the constitutionally guaranteed equality for the sexes that they were seeking implied the policy that Huckabee (mind you back in 1992) rejected as incompatible with female dignity. Now anyone who questions the wisdom of sending women into battle to be raped or worse is being relegated to a subhuman status. How quickly Progress has progressed! It might be harder to get in line here than it was for American Communists to accept the Soviet-Nazi Pact.
As for the supposedly inappropriate stance of the Southern Baptist Convention, I”ve no idea what a Bible-believing Christian is supposed to do. Should he check with the PC mavens what exactly he is supposed to believe? Perhaps another biblical teaching will have to be suppressed in the next five minutes, in order to please the harpies and their obliging spouses. The Southern Baptist position about women cheerfully submitting to their husbands is the only reasonable one that one could arrive at from reading Ephesians 5, 22-25. The same passages teach that just as women should recognize their husbands as heads of the household, the men should “give their bodies to their wives,” as Christ gave Himself to His church. There should be nothing even vaguely offensive about this organic relation, built on mutual service; nor should anyone in his/her right mind be annoyed by Paul’s references to Genesis 2 about Adam cleaving to his wife.(proskallethesetai pros ten gunaika autou). It contains the most stirring description of marital obligation perhaps ever composed.
This doesn”t mean that a non-believer is conscience-bound to accept it. We are only talking about what the text requires believers to believe. Perhaps the male-bashing tracts of Andrea Dworkin should be appended to the Old and New Testaments, as a final authoritative revelation for those “religious” candidates running for political office. But that may not go quite far enough in keeping up with the accelerating demands of sensitivity training. There may be even more twists and turns on the PC highway waiting for us down yonder.
Having noticed Huckabee’s PC cringe on “Today America” after it was learned that he had accepted certain traditional teachings about social relations in the family, it seemed entirely proper that he should be forced to kowtow to the media priesthood. It would only be with their permission that he would be running the country if he ever happened to become president. One of his most awesome duties would then be to oversee the vast panoply of social engineering apparatus that the federal government, through the Justice and other Departments, has at its disposal. Presumably Huckabee would apply that apparatus to punish and stigmatize those who had dared to speak or act contrary to the social preferences of Matt Lauer and that Obama-enthusiast Oprah. Why the hell, except for obsolete male sexist concerns about freedom, should we tolerate an insensitive environment, one in which “medieval” thinking people are to be left alone to feel and express their unfashionable values! Neither CNN bloggers nor the media would want that to occur. Moreover, from Huck’s latest exhibition of cowardice, reflected in his nervous boasting about the scads of “women” he had appointed as Arkansas governor, he would be a willing camper, providing he makes it to the top of the Republican heap. Perhaps he could then trot out a biblical exegesis, showing that Moses and St. Paul favored gay marriage. I”m sure Matt, Oprah and the Bible-scholars among the CNN-bloggers would all approve.
