I stumbled across this photo of a ’60s Battleship game box yesterday while reading the latest news of Hollywood’s odd recent obsession with turning board game properties into films and was struck, as the writer was, with the depiction of this so-called idealic family.
I have friends, especially here in Southern Baptist-land Louisville, who faithfully believe the Bible instructs the brand of traditional family values depicted here. I caught a glimpse of this in a class once where I was taught all sorts of things about how men apparently don’t have any estrogen in them and how my at-the-time future wife was a helpless, prone to growing weeds “garden” I am responsible to “cultivate.” Or something like that.
If the class was teaching men to be lazy pieces of crap, I must have missed it. But that’s exactly what I see in this dated image – dad teaching his son to be lazy and mom teaching her daughter to be a sentenced-to-the-kitchen-for-life slave to her like-father-like-son brother.
To be clear, I’m all for women choosing to stay home and raise kids and I’m all for couples who mutually decide to take a more traditional approach to dividing household duties (the key word there being dividing).
What infuriates me is men who use this particular “biblical view” as license to basically do whatever they want, ignoring the sacrificial foot-washing kind of love Jesus demonstrates in the Gospels and actually instructs all of his followers, so-called heads of households included, to show to everyone they encounter.
Besides, I’ve always liked washing dishes.
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