Women

On yesterday’s Generations Radio, Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner took on the recent case in which the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a dentist was justified in firing an assistant whom he found “irresistible.” Swanson and Buehner, who agreed with the court’s decision, used the case as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the woes of modern workplaces that throw men together with women to whom they are not married. Such arrangements, Buehner fretted, are “pseudo-marriages.” Swanson feared that they come dangerously close to “polygamy”:

Swanson: This is not unusual, unfortunately, and it certainly is going to happen when you have a decrease in family economies. It’s one reason why we push the family economic vision, because the family economy is pretty much the way God set things up. The man and the woman come together not just for sexual union but also to be helpmeets and dominion-takers together as a team, as a lean, mean team in the dominion effort. That’s the way it was designed in the garden when the woman came to the man as the helpmeet for the man in the dominion task.

Buehner: And Kevin, I think that’s key. What we have in some of these business workplaces is a woman who’s not the wife being the helper or the helpmeet of the man and she has taken on the role of the helper…

Swanson: …for the man.

Buehner: And the only thing that’s missing in that relationship is the sexual consummation.

Swanson: Or the polygamy.

Buehner: Right. So remember, when God placed Adam in the garden, he gave him a mandate. He said you need a helper. He told Adam to go out and take some dominion, Adam named the animals, He said, ‘Yeah, this is really hard, you’re gonna need yourself a helper.” So He made Eve for him. It does not say that Eve was created because Adam needed to have a sexual outlet, it was created because Adam needed a helper. Now we take a man and we give him a helper out in the marketplace. He’s in a pseudo-marriage.

Swanson: And yeah, it can move in that direction pretty quickly.

The root cause of these inappropriate workplace relationships, Swanson and Buehner conclude, is an economic system built by “universities and colleges and political systems and corporate systems” in which women work outside the family unit. The fired dental assistant, Buehner contends, “would have been better off working for her husband.”

Swanson: Friends, you gotta understand that we have tremendous socio-economic forces that have been set up by systems that want to systematically destroy the integrity of the family life and the marriage in the 20th century and the 21st century. This is what you’re up against. I just want people to understand that as we are trying to reconfigure entire socio-economic systems by way of our familyeconomics.com and by our huge conferences we are sponsoring around the country to this year, we are going up against this socio-economic structure that has been put in place by universities and colleges and political systems and corporate systems, etcetera, etcetera, that makes it extremely difficult for the family to survive in the 21st century.

…

Buehner: In this dentist case situation, the dentist was married, his wife was working in the office with him. That’s great. This woman, this “irresistible” woman, she was also married and had two children. It would have been better if she was working for her husband! I mean, these are utopian ideas here, but these are Biblical ideas.
 

Last week, Bryan Fischer was making his case, yet again, that it is liberals who hate women ... especially stay at home moms. This prompted Fischer to go off on a tangent and declare that women can have more influence staying home and raising the next generation of leader than she can by "going out in the world and making her mark out there":

It's not possible to overestimate that value that stay-at-home moms, what they contribute to society by investing their full energies in the children. Where does the next generation of leaders come from? It comes from moms, and dads, who are invested in the lives of their children. So a woman can have far more influence, far more significant impact on the world by giving herself wholly to growing her children up to be responsible, mature adults than she can by going out in the world and making her mark out there.

The implication here, of course, is that "the next generation of leaders" - and every generation of leaders, for that matter -  will be men since every woman should be at home raising children instead of "going out in the world and making her mark out there."

Yesterday, Phyllis Schlafly traveled to South Carolina to speak to at The Citadel, which now offers a course entitled the "Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America."

Speaking to an all-male audience, Schlafly assured them that women don't care about the issue of contraception and warned them not to date feminists:

The recent political flap about contraception being an important issue for women is completely contrived by Democrats and the media to divert attention from abortion and other important issues, said conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly.

“Contraception is not controversial,” she said. “The issue is not access. It’s who’s going to pay for it.”

...

Most women are concerned about issues such as jobs and religious liberty, Schlafly said, not issues being drummed up by feminists to foster support for President Barack Obama.

And feminists are working through the media and other channels because the American public no longer seems to strongly support their agenda, Schlafly said. “Feminists are having a hard time being elected because they essentially are unlikable,” she said.

Schlafly talked to a group of Citadel students about the culture of conservatism and the history of the religious right. She told the all-male group that “feminist is a bad word and everything they stand for is bad.”

And she warned them about having personal relationships with feminists. “Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” she said. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

Last week, Rick Santorum explained that he was opposed to any plans by the Pentagon to place women in combat positions, asserting that the "types of emotions that are involved" would compromise combat effectiveness.

Santorum quickly "clarified," saying that he didn't mean that women were emotionally unsuited for serving in combat but rather that male soldiers would be protective of female soldiers and inclined to compromise the mission in order to defend them.

Not surprisingly, Bryan Fischer agrees with Santorum ... and is even willing to defend the view that Santorum himself rejected: that women are inherently emotionally unfit for combat:

But not only are women emotionally unfit for combat but also physically unfit because, as Fischer explained in his column today, "the average female soldier does not even have the arm strength to throw a grenade far enough to keep herself from getting blown up."