On the Square Today

R.R. Reno on the neo-bourgeois project :

Over the last fifty or so years, our common culture has decayed. Inane reality TV has replaced anodyne shows like “Leave it to Beaver.” Sex, profanity, and violence course through fiber-optic wires. Pornography dominates the internet. All of this has taken place against the background of a dramatic weakening of moral confidence. Today we find it very hard to pronounce behavior bad or wrong. We prefer softer, therapeutic statements: it’s unhealthy or self-destructive. Or we focus on utility: certain behaviors have high social costs. Or we step back: “Who I am to judge?”

Margaret Fox on obedient wives and helpless husbands :

Scripture’s picture of marriage is remarkably even-handed. A woman should be concerned with pleasing her husband, but a man’s first priority in sex, as in everything, is also to please his wife.

The Obedient Wives Club, however, does not offer a portrait of mutual giving; rather, it calls on the woman to give and please while the man need do nothing more than take. It’s no accident that the group also advocates polygamy, while none of its members would dare sanction the reverse situation, a woman with multiple husbands.