Each
year, educated, thoughtful, mature grown
women transform into pouting children or harping shrews,
browbeating the men in their lives over St. Valentine’s Day.
Sisters who otherwise demand respect and want to be taken
seriously as equals, routinely insist on being infantilized and
condescended to on February 14th. Worse, in our black church
tradition, these sisters routinely emasculate their men,
foolish, stupid men, by dressing them up in red and pink for
church-sponsored “sweetheart balls;” events where weak-willed,
low-information “Christian” men reject God and allow themselves
to be led astray by what the Apostle Paul called “silly women
laden with sin” [2 Timothy 3:6]. These foolish women—yes, your
girlfriend, your wife, your mother—know nothing about what this
holiday actually means (the color red stands for the blood
spilled at pagan sacrifices) and, frankly, don’t care. Most men
I know, including most pastors, care absolutely nothing for
Valentine’s Day, but dare not ignore it out of fear of their
wives. Fear of their wives. The anxiety we brothers go
through every February is in direct contention to God’s plan for
both men and women. Men are to love and protect their wives, not
fear them. And, frankly, if men were doing a better job of it,
their women would likely not be as psychotically invested in
Valentine’s Day. Similarly, God’s plan for our sisters is not
for them to invest in some ritual, least of all a ritual of
pagan origin. The dour browbeating is an artifact of our
sisters’ insecurity and neediness. Sisters: it is God’s will for
you to be a whole person and a complete person, not someone so
emotionally starved that she elicits “love” under threat.
Brothers: caving into this nonsense denies God and crucifies
Christ afresh. I can’t believe how many of our brothers actually
go out and buy a red suit. A red suit. You look like an
idiot, which is actually appropriate. Capitulating to her
insecurity in rejection of God condemns you as one. That precious few pastors I know—I mean, I
can count them on one hand—take a stand against such nonsense
deeply saddens me. And I can only imagine how God feels about it
all.
In five decades of breathing, I’ve not once met a man who looked
forward to Valentine’s Day or saw it as anything other than a
dreaded day of obligation. The typical refrain is, “I just don’t
wanna hear it,” a kind of “grin and bear it” get-it-over-with
dreary task of planning and spending or facing the consequences
of Annual Child Day; his wife or girlfriend melting down to
pre-pubescence. What’s even more disturbing: most women I’ve
known are fully aware their man is committing to this ritual out
of obligation and not out of his own impetus. I’ve yet to meet a
woman who cared. She’s earned this. She has this coming. Pony up
or face the consequences.
This is not love. This is not even close to love, has nothing
whatsoever to do with love. And this dysfunction is sewn into
the fabric of our existence, this annual drudgery, which many
like myself have come to resent. Not the sentiment so much as
the demand: do this or else. Love demands nothing. Love does not
insist on having its own way. Our sisters have been
indoctrinated into this mess by their mothers and pass this
disease onto our daughters who will grow up and browbeat their
husbands. This business is most especially ridiculous for
Christians because it denies most everything about Christ and
blasphemes the Gospel by trying to create a mix-in smoothie of
the Gospel of Jesus Christ and pagan idolatry, which the bible
itself repeatedly condemns. I’ve explained that to our sisters
many, many times. They don’t care. They are that ignorant. Yes,
you, sister. You’re that ignorant. You want what you want,
period. And you’re prepared to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to
the Gospel, and undermine your relationship with our man by
pouting and holding your breath and making him absolutely dread
this day of the year and resent you for it. And you don’t care,
long as you get what’s coming to you. This is the foolishness of
women, hammered into them by their mothers who had it hammered
into them by their mothers: the insecurity and need for
validation, the chronic childishness surrounding what is, by
definition, a pagan ritual that denies Christ.
Pastors who indulge this ritual, even obliquely, deny Christ and
really don’t deserve to be called “pastor” at all. This ignorant
tribalism demeans and oppresses women, perpetuating for all men
the stereotype of the woman as a child. Even some of the
roughest, baddest, most aggressive sisters in the church, some
of the best educated minds and most respected leaders, turn into
*idiots* on St. Valentine’s Day. Mass psychosis; it’s all
emotion over intellect, women slipping into depression or
committing acts of rage because “he forgot.” Female pastors—pastors—bringing
this mess into God’s House, emasculating the men by dressing
them up in “holiday” pink and red. And you stupid brothers allow
yourself to be cowed like that, to be unmanned like that, just
to “keep peace” in your house. Which misses the point, brothers,
that it’s your house. There’s not usually a point in a
relationship where we ask the wife to stop being a woman, while
women are constantly—from the first moments of a
relationship—trying to strip their men of their manhood. Trying
to “fix” him or rehabilitate him or bend him to their will. Only
to lose respect for him once she accomplishes that.
Women don’t respect some dimwit standing there in a red suit. It’s like putting a sweater on a dog; it’s what kids do, dress up the dog. She’ll be angry if you wear normal clothes but beneath her anger and disappointment is the visceral reassurance that her man is a real man who can’t be manipulated. I’ll take the anger and disappointment over the dog sweater any day.
