ANN BARNHARDT has some incisive lines on this subject:
Should wives be subject to their husbands, as St. Paul exhorts? You’re damn right they should. All day, every day. The fact that this question even has to be asked is, by itself, evidence of how far gone our culture is. I truly believe that most people in Western Civilization go through their entire lives without ever actually experiencing love. They experience lust, and they experience various forms of attachment, but most people never actually love. To love IS TO SUBMIT. To love is to make oneself SUBJECT TO ANOTHER. To love is to freely choose to put another above yourself, to literally live for another. Within the context of marriage this dynamic of total self-gift obviously meant to flow in BOTH DIRECTIONS (as the love between God the Father and God the Son, and between Christ and the Church) and is equally expected of men vis-a-vis their wives.
The reason St. Paul went out of his way to specifically admonish wives to remember to submit to their husbands is because women have the greater tendency to slip into self-absorbed nagging shrewishness and take for granted the fruits of their husbands’ labors because those labors are usually done away from the home, and are thus invisible to the wife. A man married to a woman on a reality show about shrewish, materialistic wives (Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) just committed suicide because he was run into massive debt by his wife’s ostentatious and utterly avaricious lifestyle demands, and was also having his character assassinated on national television BY HIS WIFE. This woman didn’t love her husband or submit herself to him, she rode him, never sparing the whip, until she literally killed him. This is the opposite of love. This is evil. It isn’t a victory for the so-called liberation of womankind. It is a scathing indictment of our demonically perverted feminist culture.
Well said — with characteristic Barnhardtian directness and capitalized words. However, the Theology of Body concept of “total self-gift” is problematic. It is, in fact, a feminist concept in which submission isn’t really submission because husband and wife are ONE. In reality, marriage is not fusion or self-obliteration. Man and wife remain separate beings.
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