On yesterday’s Generations Radio, Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner took on the recent case in which the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a dentist was justified in firing an assistant whom he found “irresistible.” Swanson and Buehner, who agreed with the court’s decision, used the case as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the woes of modern workplaces that throw men together with women to whom they are not married. Such arrangements, Buehner fretted, are “pseudo-marriages.” Swanson feared that they come dangerously close to “polygamy”:
Swanson: This is not unusual, unfortunately, and it certainly is going to happen when you have a decrease in family economies. It’s one reason why we push the family economic vision, because the family economy is pretty much the way God set things up. The man and the woman come together not just for sexual union but also to be helpmeets and dominion-takers together as a team, as a lean, mean team in the dominion effort. That’s the way it was designed in the garden when the woman came to the man as the helpmeet for the man in the dominion task.
Buehner: And Kevin, I think that’s key. What we have in some of these business workplaces is a woman who’s not the wife being the helper or the helpmeet of the man and she has taken on the role of the helper…
Swanson: …for the man.
Buehner: And the only thing that’s missing in that relationship is the sexual consummation.
Swanson: Or the polygamy.
Buehner: Right. So remember, when God placed Adam in the garden, he gave him a mandate. He said you need a helper. He told Adam to go out and take some dominion, Adam named the animals, He said, ‘Yeah, this is really hard, you’re gonna need yourself a helper.” So He made Eve for him. It does not say that Eve was created because Adam needed to have a sexual outlet, it was created because Adam needed a helper. Now we take a man and we give him a helper out in the marketplace. He’s in a pseudo-marriage.
Swanson: And yeah, it can move in that direction pretty quickly.
The root cause of these inappropriate workplace relationships, Swanson and Buehner conclude, is an economic system built by “universities and colleges and political systems and corporate systems” in which women work outside the family unit. The fired dental assistant, Buehner contends, “would have been better off working for her husband.”
Swanson: Friends, you gotta understand that we have tremendous socio-economic forces that have been set up by systems that want to systematically destroy the integrity of the family life and the marriage in the 20th century and the 21st century. This is what you’re up against. I just want people to understand that as we are trying to reconfigure entire socio-economic systems by way of our familyeconomics.com and by our huge conferences we are sponsoring around the country to this year, we are going up against this socio-economic structure that has been put in place by universities and colleges and political systems and corporate systems, etcetera, etcetera, that makes it extremely difficult for the family to survive in the 21st century.
…
Buehner: In this dentist case situation, the dentist was married, his wife was working in the office with him. That’s great. This woman, this “irresistible” woman, she was also married and had two children. It would have been better if she was working for her husband! I mean, these are utopian ideas here, but these are Biblical ideas.
