As you may have seen, Alan Grayson has a new ad blasting his opponent Daniel Webster as a member of the American Taliban. The ad uses Webster's own words against him, including a snippet from a speech in which Webster referenced biblical passages calling on women to "submit" to their husbands, and blasts Webster's support for covenant marriage and opposition to abortion even in the case of rape and incest.
Unfortunately, an inaccurate appraisal of the ad by FactCheck.org has provoked liberal consternation. FactCheck.org incorrectly claims Grayson took Webster's statement about wives submitting to their husbands out of context, leading Adam Serwer to conclude:
The problem is that, as far as the quotes about his wife are concerned, Webster is being smeared, Shirley Sherrod style. Factcheck.org has the full context of the video, in which Webster is actually counseling against listening to verses in the Bible that tell women to "submit" to their husbands.
Serwer correctly defends Grayson's criticism of Webster's support for covenant marriage and abortion in the case of rape and incest, but like FactCheck.org, his assessment of Webster's speech is wrong. Webster never spoke out against the notion that wives should submit to their husbands -- in fact, he embraced it. The only thing he spoke out against is that men should pray to biblical verses about their own responsibilities -- not those of their wives or children.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Webster was addressing "husbands at a gathering of a religious organization about biblical passages to choose when praying for loved ones." Here's what he said:
Find a verse. I have a verse for my wife; I have verses for my wife. Don't pick the ones that say, um, she should submit to me. That's in the Bible, but pick the ones that you're supposed to do. So instead, love your wife, even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it, as opposed to wives submit yourself to your own husband. She can pray that if she wants to, but don't you pray it.
Same with your children. Pick out the ones that have your responsibility listed in to it. Yes, children are told to obey their parents, but more importantly as fathers we're told not to provoke them to wrath.
As you can see, Webster is not challenging the notion that women should "submit" to their husbands nor is he challenging the notion that "children are told to obey their parents." In fact, he explicitly says both of those notions are enshrined in the Bible. All he's doing is saying telling this group of men that when they pray, they should instead pray to meet their own responsibilities. But that doesn't dismiss the fact that he believes women have a responsibility to submit to their husbands just as he believes children should obey their parents.
Moreover, note the parallel logic of his sentence about wives and the sentence about children. If you are going to argue that he counseled against the notion that wives are supposed to submit, then you also must argue that he counseled against the notion that children should obey their parents.
The question here isn't whether Webster ever told men to pray that their wives would submit to them. Grayson never claimed that. Grayson merely pointed out that Daniel Webster, in addition to supporting covenant marriage and opposing abortion in cases including rape and incest, had defended the belief that wives should submit to their husbands as being in the Bible. And in pointing that out, Grayson was sticking to the facts.
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Update: Serwer takes a closer look at what Taliban Dan said and agrees that "even the full context of the quote suggests he does buy into a sexist, reductive gender binary the reinforces men's "inherent" authority over women." Serwer doesn't buy the Taliban analogy, but that's a separate issue from the above argument.
