The Reverend Mark Oden says that women ought to submit to their husbands. That's fine by me, says Bryony Gordon, but men should be careful what they wish for.
Should you like a glimpse of what life was like in the Middle Ages, you could do worse than a visit to St Nicholas Church in Sevenoaks. There may not be bear-baiting or cockfighting, and thankfully the Black Death is no more, but the attitudes, particularly in regards to women, well, they are positively medieval.
In recent weeks, the clergy at St Nicholas have delivered a series of sermons
that threaten to split the church. It all started with accusations that the
rector, Rev Angus MacLeay, had handed out a leaflet which urged women to
"remain silent" if "questions could legitimately be answered by their
husbands".
The matter was compounded when Rev Mark Oden last month called on the wives of the congregation to submit to their men. Their unwillingness to do this, he said, was partly to blame for the high divorce rates throughout the country. Women gasped; their husbands said: 'pipe down love, and listen to what the man has to say' (this last bit may or may not have happened). Unrepentant, Mr Oden delivered a Valentine's Day sermon entitled "Marriage MoT", in which he conceded that his words "might not be palatable" but "we need to hear them". He insisted that he did not think women were "weaker intellectually". However, it was "an eternal principle that women are physically weaker than men."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mrs Oden has not made public her views on the debacle.
But the good clergymen of Stepford - no, hang on, I mean Sevenoaks - should be
careful what they wish for. If they want us to submit, that's fine by me -
as long as they don't mind us living by the following commandments:
Source: Telegraph
Comments |  RSS |
|
