Rod Dreher's Blog, page 663
October 2, 2015
Oh, the Places You Should Go
James K.A. Smith, on examining the latest offerings at Wichita’s Eighth Day Institute, says, “Seriously, isn’t this like Mission Control of the Benedict Option?” I cannot disagree. It is astonishing that a place like this exists at all. Actual people can go to these events. I’m planning to go to their 2016 Symposium in January, and I see now that one of the speakers will be Hans Boersma, an Evangelical theologian whose book Heavenly Participation is one of the volumes I’m reading as I write the Benedict Option book. First Things said this of the book, in its review:
This concern for the “deep and permanent unity of the faith . . . the mysterious relationship of all those who invoke the name of Christ” animates Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry . The book aims at a ressourcement on three interrelated levels. First and foremost, Boersma seeks to remind Christians of their heavenly destiny: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your heart on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1). Second, writing as an evangelical theologian, Boersma suggests that the best hope of healing the tragic split of the Reformation lies in a recovery of the sacramental vision that was the consensus of patristic and high medieval theology: “A common rediscovery of the depths of the Great Tradition will, as a matter of course, lead to genuine rapprochement between evangelicals and Catholics.” Third, Boersma seeks to retrieve and extend the theological vision of the twentieth-century French Catholic ressourcement . The key figure here is de Lubac, whose writings on the relation between Church and Eucharist, the tradition of spiritual exegesis, and the theological anthropology of Thomas Aquinas provide essential resources for overcoming the modern separation of nature and grace.
The central idea unifying this threefold ressourcement is “sacramental ontology,” a vision of the created world as participating through Christ in the mystery of God. Boersma argues that the sacramental ontology of the Great Tradition allowed for an affirmation of the truth, goodness, and beauty of the created order while safeguarding the infinite difference between creation and God.
I have been in Waco, Texas, these past two days, giving a talk on Dante, and participating in a panel on the Benedict Option, both at Baylor University. I’ve also been spending time with some old and new friends in and around the Honors College here, and the Great Texts program. As a father who will be looking at colleges with my firstborn in a year, I don’t exaggerate when I say how simultaneously thrilling and comforting it is to visit the honors programs at colleges like Baylor, Villanova, and Union University — all of which I’ve been to in the last month — to meet Christian professors who deeply care about the Great Tradition, and students who are eager to learn. I would be deeply pleased if any or all of my Orthodox Christian children joined the honors program at any of these colleges. It has been my impression that all of these programs prepare young people for the future by anchoring them deeply in the wisdom of the past.
(Plus, in Waco, you can have breakfast at a local oupost of Torchy’s Tacos, with Alan Jacobs. So there’s that.)
Some of you readers are no doubt headed off to Geneseo, NY, today, for the Front Porch Republic hootenanny. Look at the speakers and the topics they’ll have. How can you not want to be there? While in Geneseo, keep an eye peeled for the great Dantist Ron Herzman, who teaches at the university there; you don’t want to miss an opportunity for a Brush With Greatness.
I will be talking on Saturday morning at the annual conference of the Christian Legal Society, in New Orleans. The topic? The Benedict Option.
But now, it’s off to the airport. Time was just too short in Waco, but any pilgrimage that concludes with dinner at the home of the great Ralph C. Wood and his generous wife Suzanne lacks nothing in the way of perfection.
October 1, 2015
View From Your Table
Waco, Texas
At Torchy’s Tacos have breakfast with Alan Jacobs (across the table) — the start of a great day at Baylor.
Famous Black Radical Makes Chic Move
Did you know that Ta-Nehisi Coates has decamped for Paris for a year? Turns out he’s living in the Marais and dining out with a correspondent for the Financial Times. Excerpt:
There’s also a tradition of American writers who come to Paris to escape the US. Baldwin, one of Coates’s role models, said the city gave him the gift of ignoring him. For a black American, that felt like freedom. “I feel that, too,” Coates agrees, “which I think is different to saying there’s no racism here. But when I talk to people here, the first thing they sense is about [my] Americanness. That’s the mask I have on for them. It’s an incredible experience. This is the first place I’ve been where I felt people saw something different. It allows for greater comfort walking down the street.” The fragility of the black American teenage male’s body being a particular theme of his books, you can see another reason why Coates has brought his son to Paris. Piquantly, the boy, Samori, is named after a west-African military leader who resisted the French colonists.
“I think there’s something else, too,” he adds, as we eat the unadorned fresh seafood with little of the usual embarrassment of strangers sharing a plate of food. “There are a lot of guns in America. I’m not saying there’re no guns here, but significantly fewer. I think you feel that in the public space. When I walk down Canal Saint-Martin and I see people with open bottles of wine, sitting there, in my American eyes I think about that in a public space and I think about people getting shot. Somebody gets too drunk, bumps into somebody and then somebody pulls out a gun.”
Well now. First off, good for him. If I had hit the financial jackpot like TNC has done with his work in the past year, I would do the same thing. As you know, I did a much more modest thing with some of the advance money for Little Way, taking my family to Paris for a month in a rented apartment. A whole year? Wow. Fantastic!
That said, it’s funny that he is financing a year in a chic Paris neighborhood from the proceeds of a nihilistic bestseller denouncing America is a hellhole for black people. America made TNC rich! It’s even funnier, if you ask me, than a dude financing a month in Paris from an advance on a book about embracing the simplicity of small-town life — because of the radical chic element.
I think that TNC remark above about how unlike the French, Americans can’t have a bottle of wine in public without somebody pulling a gun, inadvertently reveals the parochial narrowness of TNC’s vision of his own country. In non-ghetto parts of America, it is generally the case that people can and do enjoy drinking in public without fear of gunfire. He’s generalizing the criminal pathologies of the kinds of neighborhood in which he was raised, and applying it to the entire country. This is the kind of thing that makes his writing about race and America so frustrating.
I’m on the record as judging his Between the World and Me a bad book, mostly because it is tendentious, and does not ring true. I am also on the record a couple of years ago saying that I wish somebody would pay TNC to go live in Paris for a year and write about that experience. So now it looks like it will happen. I hope he rediscovers what attracted me to him as a writer in the first place: his ability to look at old things with fresh eyes, and to convey the pleasure of discovery. For instance, I love in the FT interview how he owns his hokey passion for Paris (a hokey passion I share), and I love how he admits that he loves Paris in particular for the food. James Baldwin wrote beautifully about how he went to Paris to escape American racism, but found out that it’s impossible to escape human frailty. He was unjustly imprisoned in France for eight days, and discovered that even in his dream city, one has to face the reality of arbitrary power being brought to bear against one. I think that is what TNC has tried — with some success — to help white Americans understand about the black experience. I would add, though, that the state is not the only actor capable of using force arbitrarily against individuals. But that point is for another day.
Maybe TNC will come home from this incredible blessing of a year in Paris with the ability to see his own country more clearly.
The Invisible Poverty of ‘Poor White Trash’
The racial privilege status of white trash makes them unattractive to the media because being penurious and pale-skinned is not respectable. While poor minorities are viewed with dignity and sympathy (as they should be), the same doesn’t apply to Caucasians. The white working class is, as Baptist minister Will Campbell put it, “the last, the only minority left that is fair game for ethnic slurs from people who would consider themselves good liberals.” Since the Progressive Era, the U.S. government has made it a goal to forcefully equalize society between races, classes, income scales, and gender. But to Campbell, “poor whites have seen government try to make peace between various warring factions but they have not been brought to the bargaining table.”
The result is pockets of despair in many parts of the country, most predominantly the South. And while it’s true that poor whites have always existed in America, the callous disregard for their difficulty we see by blue bloods in the Acela corridor is new. People like Kim Konzny have been stripped of dignity and left to fend for themselves without the assistance of the media or Washington elites. Unlike impoverished blacks who hold tight to faith and community, they are without an honorable sense of identity. If they cling to the Bible, they are seen as brainless, flat-earth bumpkins. If they somehow succeed in getting out of the trailer, they are demonized and told they’ve earned nothing because of “white privilege.” If they try to stick with their own kind, they are called neo-segregationists.
It’s a lose-lose for poverty-stricken whites searching for solidarity. So instead they anchor their life to cigarettes and booze. They are taught to hate themselves, to think that life in a dirty, dented trailer is all they should expect, and to not have a stake in their future because the rest of the country doesn’t want them.
Read the whole thing. And if you haven’t yet, read Stephanie McCrummen’s amazing WaPo narrative “An American Void,” and Kevin Williamson’s equally amazing, but more polemical, National Review piece on “The White Ghetto.”
This morning, I had a conversation with a college teacher who lives in a rural part of Texas, an area where there is a lot of white poverty. There are a lot of methheads, he said, and despair. There are also white working class people who are doing their best to keep it together. The teacher said that in his conversations with the people in his area of late, they reveal a deep distrust of and hostility to the media, and to the American establishment. They believe that the deck is stacked against them, profoundly.
They will never be part of the meritocracy, these bitter clingers. And nobody cares, or even feels the need to pretend to.
I’m thinking of the atrocious “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” that now-cancelled reality show that highlighted the trashy antics of a working-class white Southern clan. Can you imagine a similar TV show whose raison d’etre was poking fun at poor or working-class black or Hispanic grotesques? No, I didn’t think so. Why do you suppose that is?
UPDATE: Several readers tell me that there are such shows. I had no idea. Depressing. I’m so glad I’ve checked out of popular culture.
Dante and Me at Baylor
Hey! If you are in or around Baylor University in Waco, come out to hear me this afternoon talk about How Dante Can Save Your Life. I’ll be appearing at 4pm at the Alexander Reading Room, which is inside Alexander Residence Hall at 1413 S. Seventh St. It’s free and open to the public — and there will be copies of the book on sale, which I will sign if you ask me to, and don’t force me to drink Dr Pepper.
September 30, 2015
Doug Wilson’s ‘Reluctant Response’
Yesterday I posted a long item critical of the way people in the Moscow, Idaho, church community around Pastor Doug Wilson handled two cases involving young men who sexually abused minors. I offered Doug Wilson the opportunity to respond in this space. Below, his unedited response, which I’ve split into multiple paragraphs, in part, for easier reading:
A Reluctant Response
By Douglas Wilson
Introduction
While I would have preferred that a response would have been unnecessary in the first place, I am grateful to The American Conservative and to Rod Dreher for the opportunity to respond in this place. At the same time, not wanting to overstay my welcome, I want to address three basic areas and be done.
Was All This Necessary?
The first thing I would like to do is provide a link to what I said on my blog about the hasty and precipitous nature of this attack. While Rod mentioned in his response that he linked to a number of sources, he did not have access to the information below, and didn’t check with us to find out if such information even existed or was available. It did exist, and it is available.
A Sitler Timeline
The second thing is to fit a Sitler timeline into one extended paragraph. This is not scintillating prose, but the actual record matters. Every point in this paragraph is taken from a transcript of every reference to Steven Sitler in our elder minutes from 2005 to the present.
Steven was caught in March of 2005. I counseled the father of the victim to turn Steven into the authorities immediately. That happened the following day, and Steven was arrested. He was immediately expelled from New St. Andrews College.
The following week I informed the elders that Steven’s home church in Colville, Washington (OPC) had suspended Steven from the Supper and did not allow him to attend church services there (he was now back home in Colville).
On July 7, I reported to the elders that Steven had pleaded guilty. In October the elders were informed that Steven was sentenced to a 6-month treatment program, with the possibility of additional prison, and was registered as a sex offender.
In December, our elders met with one of the victim families to arrange for a no-contact order by consent, anticipating the time when Steven would be back in Moscow.
On June 15, we received Steven into membership at Christ Church via transfer from the OPC church in Colville. Steven was still under suspension from the Supper, a suspension which Christ Church continued to honor and maintain. We brought him into membership with the proviso that he have no contact with children in the church. The following September, with the concurrence and blessing of his former pastor in the OPC, we lifted his suspension from the Supper. He had been suspended for about six months.
In May of 2007, I reported to the elders that Steven had been released from prison. He was a member who was not yet allowed to attend our regular services, so we arranged for some of our Greyfriar students to hold services with him Monday evenings, and to serve him communion.
In November of 2008, one of our elders reported to us that Steven’s probation officer was considering letting him attend our church services Sunday morning. The state decided by January of 2009 to allow him to attend, provided he was constantly attended by a state-trained chaperon. The church also applied a second layer of the same standard, and in addition required that he not attend any service where any of his victims were present. We presented this arrangement to our congregational heads of households meeting, and there were no objections. This meant that Steven began to attend services about three and a half years after he was caught.
Two years later, in April of 2011, I reported to the elders on Steven’s upcoming wedding, and the minutes noted that I was also going to mention it at our heads of households meeting. In May of 2011, I reported to the elders on the wedding, where I had officiated.
Not mentioned in our minutes were the following facts, which can be corroborated by other means. After his arrest and before his trial, I spent a number of sessions counseling Steven (he would come down from Colville, about 132 miles away, to meet with me). During that time, other offenses were uncovered, going back to his early teens (he was around 19 at the time of his arrest). Under my direction Steven confessed those to the authorities as well. I wrote a letter to the judge prior to Steven’s sentencing, wherein I told the judge I was grateful that Steven was experiencing “hard consequences,” and I urged the judge to have those hard consequences be “measured and limited.” I did not ask for leniency. Steven was given a life sentence, which means that since he is out of prison now, he is on probation for life. Also, a judge authorized Steven’s wedding before it occurred. The Sitler pregnancy, which occurred years later, was not a violation of his terms of probation. And to this day, Steven attends church to worship with us. He is attended by a chaperon every time, comes in and sits quietly before the service, and leaves shortly after the service.
Now I can understand how another session of elders might have made different judgment calls along the line. This was a thorny issue in many ways. But a review of the documented facts hardly shows us treating this issue in a cavalier or casual way. We coddled no one, and we have shown extraordinary concern for the safety of the children in our congregation. When I look at this from the vantage point of years, I certainly do not see perfection. Reasonable men could have chosen different options than we did. But what I can do is look at all of this with a clean conscience.
The Wight Situation
The other main object of attention in Rod’s post was the situation with Jamin Wight and Natalie Greenfield. We are in the process of reconstructing a detailed and documented time line for that situation as well. But in brief, Jamin was one of our Greyfriar ministerial students who was exposed in 2005 as having been engaging in criminal sexual behavior with Natalie Greenfield a few years before. His behavior was criminal, hers was not.
Because most of the information in the Sitler case was public, I have been able to talk about that more freely. But for a long time now I have refused to talk about everything I knew in the situation with Jamin. This is because there was no way to talk about the details without spreading the hurt to others. I knew the things I did because of my work as a pastor in the situation, and I wanted to keep my standing commitment to be discreet with any such information, and to do so as long as possible. But since others have been spreading the hurt for me, and the letter that I wrote to the officer investigating the crime has now been posted online, it has now gotten to point where if I speak, I might be able to help minimize the hurt that is careening around the Internet.
As my letter makes plain, Jamin was guilty of sexual behavior with a girl who was below the age of consent. She was underage. Our letter acknowledged fully that Jamin was guilty of criminal behavior, and we wanted him to pay the penalty for that criminal behavior, which was a species of statutory rape. In a letter to the victim’s father, dated September 15, 2005, I wrote, on behalf of the elders, that “Jamin is in no way justified . . . and we have no problem with his prosecution” (emphasis added).
But the question before the court was what kind of criminal behavior it was, not whether it was criminal. We had instructed Jamin, who was professing repentance, that he needed to demonstrate it by taking full responsibility for what he had done. But what he had done was very different from what was potentially at stake in his trial. Our elders had no problem with him being charged for the crime of sexual behavior with a girl who was not capable of giving legal consent (she was 14 and he was 23). At issue was whether he was going to be charged as pedophile, and placed in the same category as one who was molesting little children. But we believed his crime was not in the same category as Steven Sitler’s crimes at all. Steven’s behavior was with young children and was simply predatory. Jamin’s crime was that of engaging in sexual behavior with an underage girl.
The reason we did not want it treated as pedophilia is that her parents had bizarrely brought Jamin into the house as a boarder so that he could conduct a secret courtship with Natalie. So Jamin was in a romantic relationship with a young girl, her parents knew of the relationship and encouraged it, her parents permitted a certain measure of physical affection to exist between them (e.g. hand-holding), Natalie was a beautiful and striking young woman, and at the time was about eight inches taller than Jamin was. Her parents believed that she was mature enough to be in that relationship, and the standards they set for the relationship would have been reasonable if she had in fact been of age and if the two had not been living under the same roof.
But please note well: Things like her height, apparent maturity, and parental knowledge of the fact of a relationship are simply irrelevant to the morality of Jamin’s behavior. They are irrelevant to the criminality of his behavior. They are irrelevant to whether Jamin was selfishly manipulating a young girl, preying on her for his own selfish ends. They are irrelevant to whether it was statutory rape or not. But such things were not irrelevant to whether it was pedophilia.
What we wanted the court to know was simply this: it is simply not possible to have it both ways. If you are pressing charges of child abuse, you are saying that Jamin failed to respect the fact that Natalie was a child. But this was the same failure that he shared with her parents, who thought she was a remarkably mature young woman. That fact simply needs to be recognized on all sides. I do not argue this to intimate or hint that her parents were in any way aware of the crimes Jamin was committing. What they were unaware of, Jamin did need to go to prison for.
Nevertheless Jamin was brought into the house in order to make Natalie the object of his romantic intentions, and to do so more conveniently, out of the eyes of community accountability. The arrangement became public years later, and with much harm done. Jamin was trusted by Natalie and her father. He certainly abused that trust sinfully and grotesquely—and took terrible advantage of it. He abused it in criminal ways, and the time he spent in prison for it was no miscarriage of justice. However, the time he has spent on the Internet, characterized as a pedophile, by people who were entirely ignorant of the facts of the case, and whose only interest in it was finding a rock to throw at me, is the very definition of injustice.
The first letter that Natalie posted on line from me was addressed to her father, and it admonished him for failing to protect his daughter. There was outrage that I had dared to admonish the “father of the victim.” But the father of the victim had approved an extraordinarily foolish arrangement that left his daughter vulnerable. Two weeks later I wrote her father another letter on behalf of the elders, and this letter has not yet been published online. In this second letter I said, “We simply want to make sure that Natalie is protected by you in the coming months . . . What we are doing is exhorting you to make protection of Natalie your highest priority in the months to come, because we are convinced that she will need it” (emphasis added). Unfortunately, that did not happen.
We found out about the abuse of Natalie years after the fact. In the areas where we could act, we did act right away. Jamin was disciplined for it immediately (e.g. expelled from Greyfriar Hall). We supported his prosecution. We exhorted Natalie’s father repeatedly to protect his daughter. This is yet another situation where reasonable men could easily have made different choices. But it is also a snarl where it is possible to look back with a clean conscience.
Up until recently, Natalie’s account has been dangerously incomplete and misleading. We were letting it go for the sake of others. As things have spilled out, it is much closer to the full story now. The whole thing was tragic and grievous. The damage it has done should be clear to any observer, from sea to cyber sea. In the midst of all of this, it is our heartfelt prayer that Natalie will return to Christ—the only place where the kind of wounds she received can ever really be healed.
Conclusion
I don’t want to make any rash promises, and so I won’t. No telling what the Intermob might start yelling for later on, and another set of answers might become necessary. The mob is ever hungry for new victims, and doesn’t really care about the old ones. But as much as they demand answers, they frequently show a singular lack of curiosity when actual answers are offered. My hope is that the readers here will not fall in that category.
And Rod, if I may turn to you directly here at the end I would appreciate the opportunity. We invite you to visit us here in Moscow. We will pay the plane fare, and have you speak in some public forum on a subject of your choosing with a suitable honorarium. We will treat you kindly and show you around. I would hope that it might help place some of the things you have read in a better and far more accurate context.
[END OF DOUG WILSON RESPONSE]
I thank Doug Wilson for his detailed response, which does make the record more complete. I particularly appreciate his making clear to readers who did not look at the correspondence published on critical websites that he (Wilson) acknowledged clearly the wrongdoing of the two young men in question. As to whether or not he asked for “leniency” (my word) for Steven Sitler, you read Wilson’s full letter, and you be the judge. Here is the particular paragraph:
I am grateful Steven was caught, and am grateful he has been brought to account for these actions so early in his life. I am grateful that he will be sentenced for his behavior, and that there will be hard consequences for him in real time. At the same time, I would urge that the civil penalties applied would be measured and limited. I have a good hope that Steven has genuinely repented, and that he will continue to deal with this to become a productive and contributing member of society.
I also appreciate that Pastor Wilson encouraged Sitler to confess other sexual offenses against children to the authorities when they came to light in spiritual direction (“During that time, other offenses were uncovered, going back to his early teens (he was around 19 at the time of his arrest). Under my direction Steven confessed those to the authorities as well.”).
That seems to be true, based on this 2006 Defense Review Hearing Memo, which notes that Sitler “withheld nothing” from investigators, and told them about “much more [acts of pedophilia] on multiple occasions to multiple people.”
So everybody knew that Sitler had, in the words of one evaluator, “a significant problem with pedophilia.”
On May 27, 2011, a parole officer for the Idaho Department of Correction wrote to the Latah County Prosecuting Attorney saying the department could not support Sitler’s intention to marry. Here is that letter. In it, the officer says that given Sitler’s stated intention to start having children within a year of his marriage, the department would face the problem of having to separate the Sitler family “because we cannot allow him to be unsupervised with children.”
And yet, Pastor Wilson married them, knowing that Steven Sitler, by the confession he made to the police at Wilson’s urging, was a serial pedophile.
This is I do not understand. Nor do I understand the kind of church culture in which an elder of the church sets up a young woman who is anxious to get married with a convicted pedophile. And nothing Pastor Wilson wrote here makes it any more understandable.
On the Wight matter, there can be no doubt that the abuse victim’s parents behaved foolishly in letting the 23-year-old Wight into their home to court their young teenage daughter. Wilson, in the letter to the judge, acknowledged Wight’s wrongdoing, but said he did not think Wight’s deeds made him a “sexual predator.” The blog posts of Natalie Greenfield, the victim, tell a different story (this one, for example). Seems like sexual predation to me.
Pastor Peter Leithart, who at the time headed the daughter church of Doug Wilson’s Christ Church congregation, recently apologized publicly to the Greenfield family for errors in pastoral judgment in the way he handled the Jamin Wight matter. He wrote, in part:
It is clear now that I made major errors of judgment. Fundamentally, I misjudged Jamin, badly. I thought he was a godly young man who had fallen into sin. That was wrong. In the course of trying to pastor Jamin through other crises in his life, I came to realize that he is deceptive and highly manipulative, and that I allowed him to manipulate me. A number of the things I said about Jamin to the congregation and court at the time his abuse was uncovered were spun in Jamin’s favor; I am ashamed to realize that I used Jamin’s talking points. Though I never doubted that Jamin was guilty, I trusted his account of the circumstances more readily and longer than I should have, and conversely I disbelieved the victim’s parents (to the best of my recollection, I had no direct contact with the victim, who was a member of Christ Church). I should have seen through Jamin, and didn’t.
As a result, I didn’t appreciate how much damage Jamin did and I was naive about the effect that the abuse had on the victim’s family. I recently asked her and her parents to forgive my pastoral failures, which they have done.
I suppose it’s possible that Leithart, who was Jamin Wight’s pastor, made severe errors of judgment, but Wilson, who pastored the victim and her family, did not. It would be interesting to learn what Leithart and Wilson today think of the way each other handled the matter.
Anyway, I am glad that Pastor Wilson wrote a response, even if I am not personally convinced by it. And I appreciate the invitation to Moscow, but I will pass on that.
UPDATE: Several readers have sent me notes saying that it is inaccurate to describe Doug Wilson as “Reformed,” explaining that he has his own vision of Reformation Christianity that is not considered orthodox by established Presbyterians.
A reader sends a link to the audio recording of Steven Sitler’s court hearing, in which the judge approved his marriage plans.
Another reader points out that Natalie Rose Greenfield, Jamin Wight’s victim, has responded to the above piece by Doug Wilson. Excerpt:
Doug was not in my home when my parents discussed allowing Jamin to court me. Doug was not in the room when they spoke about whether or not we should be allowed to hold hands. I imagine he may have something in writing from them, perhaps asking advice or seeking guidance on the situation and this may shed light on the foolishness and naivety of some of my parent’s choices. The fact that my parents trusted a dangerous and conniving criminal to respect the boundaries they had set is no secret and yes, it’s embarrassing. They have sought my forgiveness heartily over the years and I have unconditionally given it. But I would like to also point at that neither was Doug in the room when my father said, No. I am not comfortable with this. There will be no courtship. There will be no hand-holding. Do not touch my daughter and do not foster a relationship with her. Doug was not with my father as time dragged on and he began to become suspicious of Jamin. He was not in the hallway with my father where he sat on a chair in the middle of the night watching my bedroom door to make sure I was safe and protected. If only he had known my father’s heart, and yet he is quick to place blame on two parents who were deceived and manipulated by a calculated criminal. The fact that my parents were deceived does not change the nature of Jamin’s crime. The fact that my parents had moments of naivety does not merit letters from a pastor requesting leniency for a man who the prosecuting attorney called ‘a textbook pedophile’ and place a massive amount of blame on a father already broken by the news of his daughter’s abuse. The fact that I was beautiful and stood taller than my abuser does not lessen or change the sickening nature of what he did to me. The fact that I was infatuated with him and lived to please him does not mean that I was asking for it. Nobody asked for it.
The Failed Francis Papacy
In one 15-minute meeting, the pope undermined the unifying, healing message that many queer people and our supporters were so eager to have him bring. …
The pope ate with the homeless, visited a prison, and spoke about the plight of immigrants, but all that is threatened by one single meeting. However assiduously he avoided pressing America’s hot buttons over the rest of the visit, he’s pressed one now, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. This is unfortunate, because the other message, the one about coming together and addressing the poor, the vulnerable, and the dispossessed was a message we desperately need to heed.
This blog’s reader Edward Hamilton, who tipped me off to the crestfallen Slate analysis, nails it:
There’s no train of logic to this conclusion, since most of the folks who would be critical of the Pope’s meeting with Davis are already on board with the rest of his message. Are they going to stop believing in any of these causes, just to spite him? To the extent that the Pope maintains credibility with cultural conservatives, that should only make it easier for him to promote left-right cross-partisan coalitions to address all these other issues. So this isn’t an argument based on actual consequences. It’s just a litmus test for public virtue, full stop.
A year ago, tens of thousands of public officials were legally obligated to withhold marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Now having any form of unpublicized private contact with a lonely cultural revanchist devoid of national political influence is enough to permanently poison every other public stance the man has ever taken.
Let this be a lesson to the Christians who believe that if they are only more winsome, cultural liberals will embrace them. You cannot out-winsome Pope Francis, but if you even appear to get on the wrong side of the LGBT mob and their allies, they’ll Eich your butt in a jiffy.
Ban These Books, Please
It’s Banned Books Week again. Six years ago, Mitch Muncy wrote what I consider to be the definitive piece on what a content-free swivet Banned Books Week is. Nevertheless, Matthew Schmitz has a fun piece up listing his choices for Seven Books That Should Be Banned. Among them:
Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, etc. by Ayn Rand
Badly written and tendentious, Rand’s books give readers a tidy explanation of matters personal, economic, and political. Her materialist and godless world is also a perverse and cruel one.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Also badly written and tendentious, Coates’s books give readers a tidy explanation of matters personal, economic, and political. His materialist and godless world is also a perverse and cruel one. Excuse me if I seem to repeat myself—it’s hard not to. Coates is quickly becoming the Left’s answer to Rand. Better to stop him before the transformation is complete.
Read the whole thing. Now, before you too go into a swivet, Schmitz is not actually calling on the government to ban these or any books. He’s using BBW as an opportunity to list some books that are, or have been, popular, but which have been harmful.
So, let’s hear it from you readers. Which books would you “ban,” in the sense of “wishing that they had never been published and that no one would read them any more” — and why?
Be brief — and don’t say the Bible, the Quran, or any other sacred text. Too easy.
(Hey readers, I’m going to leave for Texas shortly. Speaking at Baylor this afternoon on the Benedict Option, and then on Thursday about Dante. Will post when I can, and approve comments as I am able.)
Jean Raspail: ‘We Are Only At the Beginning’
Le Point: Some on the right consider your book The Camp of the Saints, written in 1972, as visionary, especially since the refugee crisis. How do you feel about that?
JR: This migrant crisis puts an end to thirty years of insults and slander against me. I have been called a fascist because of this book considered to be a racist work…
Are you a racist?
No, not at all! You can’t spend your life traveling the world, be a member of the Society of French Explorers, meet I don’t know how many endangered populations, and be a racist. That would be hard, it seems to me. When it came out in 1972 the book shocked people tremendously, and for a reason. There was a period, notably during the seven-year term of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing when a veritable intellectual terrorism was employed against right-wing writers.
More:
What’s happening today isn’t important, it’s anecdotal, for we are only at the beginning. Right now, the whole world is talking about this, there are thousands of specialists on the issue of migrants, it’s a chaos of commentary. Not one looks at the thirty-five years that lie ahead. The situation we are living through today is nothing compared to what awaits us in 2050. There will be nine billion people on the earth. Africa has gone from one hundred million to one billion inhabitants in a century, and perhaps twice that in 2050. Will the world be livable? The overpopulation and the wars of religion will make the situation fragile. That’s when the invasion will occur, it is ineluctable. The migrants will come in great part from Africa, the Middle East and the borders of Asia…
Should we fight the evil at the roots and bomb the strategic points of Daesh, as France has just done?
It’s their problem not ours. It doesn’t concern us. What are we doing in this business? Why do we want to play a role? Let them cope! Years ago we got out of these regions? Why go back?
And what do we do when Syria sends out orders to attack France?
We block them. We prevent them from entering French territory. The politicians have no solution to this problem. It’s like the debt – we pass it on to our grandchildren. Our grandchildren will have to manage this problem of massive migration.
The Catholic Church is not at all on this wave length. It is urging the faithful to show their generosity…
I have written that Christian charity will suffer a bit when faced with the answers to the influx of migrants. It will have to steel itself and suppress compassion of all sorts. Otherwise, our countries will be submerged.
Pope Francis to Kim Davis: ‘Stay Strong’
No photo — official, selfie or otherwise — of an encounter has emerged. But same-sex marriage-opposing Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis met with Pope Francis during his visit to the United States, according to her lawyer.
… “During the meeting Pope Francis said, ‘Thank you for your courage,’” according to the press release. “Pope Francis also told Kim Davis, ‘Stay strong.’ He held out his hands and asked Kim to pray for him. Kim held his hands and said, ‘I will. Please pray for me,’ and the Pope said he would. The two embraced.”
Davis was elated.
“I was humbled to meet Pope Francis,” she said in the press release. “Of all people, why me?”
She added: “I never thought I would meet the Pope. Who am I to have this rare opportunity? I am just a County Clerk who loves Jesus and desires with all my heart to serve him.” And: “Pope Francis was kind, genuinely caring, and very personable.”
Apparently it’s true. It was first reported by Robert Moynihan in his Inside the Vatican magazine (I can’t get a link to the article to work), citing Vatican sources. Based on this meeting, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Pope Francis supports Kim Davis. That doesn’t make Kim Davis’s course of action correct, but man, it’s hard to have a better ally than Pope “Who Am I To Judge?”
Love the people who admire Pope Francis for embracing the hated actually spitting now that he may have embraced Kim Davis, whom they hate
— Michael B Dougherty (@michaelbd) September 30, 2015
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