Radical Cleric Claims "Defiant" Wives Cause Spousal Abuse

Posted by Lucinda Marshall, Feminist Peace Network at 8:55 AM on July 1, 2008.

For a blogger, there is nothing that says welcome back after being on the road like finding a really good story about a major misogynist from your hometown on a seriously obscure website rather than in the morning paper where it belongs. But kudos to Ethics Daily which reports that Bruce Ware, who teaches Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY delivered a sermon that he said describes his "complementarian" view of SB theology as part of a series of sermons at the Denton (TX) Bible Church on "Biblical Manhood and Womanhood." According to the article, Ware claims that:

One reason that men abuse their wives is because women rebel against their husband's God-given authority.

"(W)omen desire to have their own way instead of submitting to their husbands because of sin."

And husbands on their parts, because they're sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged, or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches,”