In a 90-minute debate that touched on economic issues, foreign policy and immigration, Huckabee drew the loudest applause of the night from the audience when he was asked about having quoted a Biblical passage saying a wife "has to submit herself graciously" to her husband.

A Baptist preacher before entering politics, he said he was "not the least bit ashamed of my faith," but didn't impose it as governor and wouldn't as president. He said the citation is from Ephesians, and "the point is that as wives submit themselves to their husbands the husbands also submit themselves" to their wives.

"That's why marriage is an important institution, because it teaches us how to love," he concluded.

 If Huckabee's interpretation had prevailed within the SBC, Alan Brehm and Dan and Barbara Kent would not have been forced from their positions at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Huckabee can't have it both ways.  He can't endorse the the 1998 family statement and the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message and then endorse the egalitarian interpretation of Ephesians 5 -- an interpretation that the family statement was written to deny.

The unconditional nature of the wife's subjugation was made clear in 1998 at the official press conference following the statement's adoption. Dorothy Patterson, wife of Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson and a member of the committee that drafted the family statement, said, "When it comes to submitting to my husband even when he is wrong, I just do it. He is accountable to God."

Mainstream Baptists have been opposing the rigid, sexist, patriarchal SBC family statement since 1998.  Check here for documentation:

November 1998 Issue of the Mainstream Messenger -- entire issue on the SBC Family Statement

Dead "Head" leads SBC Family

Subjugating Women in the SBC

This entry is cross-posted from the Mainstream Baptist weblog.

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