Audio only:
Joe answers Tim Gordon responding to his last video on male-headship.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome To Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to especially welcome Tim Gordon fans. So if you’re looking for the episode that Tim Gordon and Joe Enders recently critiqued on their live stream yesterday, I’m going to link to it at the end and in the description, but I have to warn you, if you watch it, you might realize it doesn’t say anything like what they falsely claim it said and that those guys are just using clickbait to draw attention to themselves. Now, you might not agree with everything I or Bias 11 say in the episode, but I don’t think you can possibly come out with a take as bad as the kind of takes that they offered. For example, Tim and Joe claim that I’m being dishonest or at least sloppy by not quoting the rest of Casty Canobie. Paragraph 27 in my original episode.
CLIP:
This is, I want to build off of this. This is why I’m skeptical that Joe had bad intentions going into this because all he has to do is read on in the same paragraph and it says, but it forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family. It forbids that in this body, which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin for if man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling the chief place in ruling. So she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.
This
Is clearly rebuking his own argument. He specifically took one paragraph or he took one sentence, one group of sentences from paragraph 27 without finishing paragraph 27, and I don’t know if you’re a poor researcher, I hope in all hopes, lemme just put it that way, that Joe, hes is this bad of a researcher because I’m citing the same paragraph that you cited for the right reason. Comment, the one that you took out of context,
Joe:
Which is an embarrassing take since if they’d actually researched enough to watch the video, he’d know that I spent a good portion of the video unpacking those exact lines. On the flip side, the fourth distortion that Pius warns against is what he calls that exaggerated liberty, which cares not for the good of the family in which he describes it as the head and heart of the family as being separated from each other. After pointing out where we see this in secular culture, I then quote the rest of paragraph 27. In contrast to this, Pius argues that the head and heart of the family should be in union, and it’s here that he lays out the clearest positive vision of the biblical model of the family for if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling.
So she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. In fact, I’m pretty sure I quoted the entirety of both paragraphs 27 and 28 of Cassie Canobie, including the parts Tim and Joe happened to exclude like it’s sometimes being necessary for the wife to take the husband’s place in directing the family and using Ender’s two options. I want to chalk this up to their incredible intellectual sloppiness rather than malice, but people in the comments were pointing out in real time that they were not honestly representing my argument and that I actually quoted the exact lines they were claiming I omitted. Either way. That’s the level of quality of Tim and Joe’s critique. They don’t even get the basics of my argument right? They literally spend more than 40 minutes live streaming 26 seconds of the video taken out of context. Now, Tim claims that he does that because he didn’t have time to play more of the video.
CLIP:
Bear in mind, I cut off the line or two before this just because I wanted to keep it quick. What he’s saying here, Joe Hess Meyer, is that this is one of two polar opposite wrong interpretations of Ephesians five. So he’s saying this is the first incorrect interpretation what this woman says, and she sounds like a great woman.
Is there a better file or is it this the only one?
I think that’s the only one. I mean, we’d have to find it there.
I think there’s a longer clip of him talking about it somewhere.
Yeah, there’s a whole video. There’s a whole video, but it’s 12 minutes and then he spends most of his time mocking the South Pole. The feminist answer that I guess even Catholic answers has decided to repudiate.
Joe:
I want you to notice the two things Tim says there. First, he’s intentionally choosing not to engage with the actual argument I’m making. He’s just going to engage with the soundbite from its somebody put up on Twitter, and second, he’s perfectly aware that the actual argument argues against a feminist rejection of male headship. So he knows all that, but how does he title his video? Catholic Answers says Feminism. Okay, now does that sound like an honest or charitable Christian interpretation? My argument? If you’re in any doubt, again, watch the actual 12 minute video for yourself. Now, to be honest, I don’t think that the rest of their critique is worth much of a rep reply since it’s targeted at what Gordon knows and or should know are strawman arguments, not real arguments I’m making, but also Gordon’s own view of headship appears to be of the very kind that P 11 explicitly rejects as false.
CLIP:
Holding your tongue is good, so you understand really clear. This is an obvious thing. Everyone knows men are in charge and women are followers, but you’ve been brainwashed to the opposite proposition. The case where a woman gets one bite of the apple is a case, and I should soften it up. I know people are disagreeing and it’s an area where I’ve looked at it a tremendous amount. Maybe you haven’t, but don’t contradict your common sense. You know what it is for someone to be in charge of your teenagers. That’s what it’s like with your wife. It’s like having a smart teenager around
Joe:
You. Sure about that. You sure about that? But as Pius explains, a husband’s authority isn’t like a parent’s authority since your wife isn’t a minor. Similarly, his idea that a wife gets one bite at the apple to express herself on prudential topics, that’s not how authentic authority works. You can do more than express yourself once and expressing yourself to your employer or your bishop, even God himself. As Jesus points out, we submit to God, he knows what we need, but our submission to him does not mean that we just shut up. Rather, Jesus tells us to pray like a persistent widow who entres a judge so often that he becomes worried that she’s going to wear him down or in some translations she’s going to haul off and strike him. So I think one of the reasons many people trust Tim and Joe that they quote a lot of magisterial texts and Tim says things like, I’ve looked at it a lot, maybe you haven’t. But as someone who’s actually studied this, if you do look at it in context, you’ll see that they’re often misrepresenting magisterial teaching or they’re quoting things out of context or just not understanding what they’re quoting. Just to take one example, posi 11 says that a wife does not have to obey her husband’s every request if it’s not in harmony with right reason. Now, Joe says this has nothing to do with the husband’s imp prudence. It’s just about the objective moral law.
CLIP:
What you’re doing is not, she doesn’t have to agree with everything. It’s not an indiscriminate agree with every single thing. It’s not an indiscriminate do everything. It says right reason here, which means
Failure to sin. Right,
Right, right. This is the obfuscation right reason. People are thinking like, oh, right reason. It’s a reasonable decision. It was well reasoned. It was rightly reasoned. No, he means by right, he means wrong or right. He means moral or immoral rec. Completely, completely different word. You guys are taking it out of context. Joe Meyer, you’re taking it out of context.
Joe:
But if they’d read the catechism or the summa, they would know that the very definition of prudence is right reason in action. So asking if an action is in accordance with right reason is just another way of asking if it’s prudent. So when Pius says that a wife doesn’t have to obey her husband’s every request, if not in harmony with right reason, he’s not just referring to a husband telling his wife to do something intrinsically immoral. He’s also referring to times where a wife doesn’t have to obey her husband’s request because to do so would be either undignified or imprudent. So for instance, if a husband says, honey, go bet our life savings on red at the roulette wheel. She doesn’t have to do that because it’s imp prudent and thus irrational. But Tim and Joe teach the exact opposite of what Piac 11 teaches. They claim that this kind of prudential judgment is actually inappropriate for wives.
CLIP:
So this adverb, unwisely is what we call a petitio principio or a begging of the question. She doesn’t know whether it’s wise, he doesn’t know whether it’s wise. Most of us don’t know with cer, none of us, I should say, no fortitude. Whether our prudential judgements are wise in real time ISTs or prudence is called the male virtue. It’s from Book six of the Nico McKean Ethics because women don’t have the right to make prudential decisions for their family. How much is too expensive? The husband does. So when you say unwisely buy this car, you’re begging the question.
Joe:
So if you’re confused on the matter, should I side with Tim Gordon who claims women don’t have the right to make prudential decisions for their families on things like whether something’s too expensive or should I side with Pope Pi Xi, who treats women as having the mature judgment to discern whether what her husband is asking her to do is in harmony with prudence? Well, I hope you’ll actually watch my full video here and you can then read Pi Xi and John Paul II for yourself, for Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.