In the matter of Greyfriars’ Hall ministerial student Jamin Wight, Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, posted the following statement to the local community bulletin board:
And for the sake of accuracy, if anybody still cares, Jamin left the Greyfriars program on his own before we discovered what he had been doing. But when he was discovered later, we placed a letter in his file noting that he would have been dismissed immediately had the information come out while he was still enrolled. Although he has repented, he has still disqualified himself from ministry. Now if he had only had the sense to have a sexual affair with another man, Joan might currently be agitating for his reinstatement. What a strange world we live in. (An Open Letter to Dave Johnson, the Daily News, and Lewiston Tribune)
Please note the words “disqualified himself from ministry.”
Doug Wilson wrote this statement “for the sake of accuracy.” Mr. Wilson wrote it in case “anybody still cares.” Mr. Wilson wrote it despite the stipulation that Jamin Wight had “repented.” And Mr. Wilson wrote this one week before he publicly affirmed Idaho’s “age of consent” applied to Jamin Wight’s sexual abuse of a 14-year-old child.
Doug Wilson publicly disqualified Jamin Wight from the ministry on June 7, 2006, roughly four years before the Kirk dispatched the convicted felon on a missionary journey to Haiti, which occurred on May 13, 2010 — “if anybody still cares.”
“Now if he had only had the sense to have a sexual affair with another man, Joan might currently be agitating for his reinstatement. What a strange world we live in.”
Huh???
I actually began to explain this line but didn’t want the major point — namely, that Doug Wilson lied — to get lost in the weeds. So here goes:
Douglas Wilson wrote this email in response to Joan Opyr, who is a lesbian progressive who regularly ate Wilson’s lunch on the community bulletin board. Joan was (is) an exceptional writer; she’s about six times smarter than Wilson; and she drove him nuts. So the real dynamic here isn’t the fact that Wilson lied — it’s who he lied to and why he lied to her.
It’s about homosexuality. Wilson always has to humiliate and belittle homosexuals, and he cannot tolerate them ever getting the upper hand on him. In this instance, he fabricated Jamin Wight’s disqualification from the ministry just so he could take a cheap shot at Joan: “Now if he had only had the sense to have a sexual affair with another man, Joan might currently be agitating for his reinstatement.”
Note the strawman does not work unless Wilson disqualifies Jamin Wight.
The next week, he did the same thing, when he affirmed Idaho’s age of consent laws. He knew he was lying, but he had to take a whack at Joan because she’s lesbian. Here’s the gratuitous smack:
He postures in the first paragraph of this post so he could grandstand in the last paragraph (quoted above). He’s always posturing (which means he’s always dissembling). In this case, he could not cope with the thought of a lesbian advocating higher standards than himself — so he lied.
This strikes me as an aggravating circumstance to his act of public deceit, but as I said — I didn’t want the big point to get lost in the weeds.
And I should note that in the original unedited post, I wrote that Joan Opyr regularly made Wilson look like Elmer Gantry. This explains the front-page image of “le charlatan,” which was taken from an old movie poster for the movie Elmer Gantry. The reference got edited, but the image stayed. It still fits.
All liars have “tells.” When DW is going to tell a whopper, he often starts with a plea to accuracy.
Yes, that tell shows up in his Reluctant Response to Dreher as well.
In yesterday’s article, DW draws a comparison between a pedophile and a promiscuous woman:
“Or suppose the problem is a sexual one, but not pedophilia. Suppose we have a young woman with a history of promiscuity. Do the mothers of nineteen-year-old boys feel safe with her around? Should I as a pastor tell the congregation about all the instances of adultery in the past that I happen to know about? After all, if someone did that in the past, it might happen again. Can’t be too careful.
Right. But if I were to be so foolish, I could say that I was protecting the congregation against future adulteries when I would be actually leading the congregation into a state of unprotected vulnerability to pharisaical accusations. Recall that this is a danger also.”
As if there is any kind of reasonable comparison whatsoever between adultery, which involves two consenting adults of legal age, and pedophilia, which involves a depraved sexual predator and a defenseless child.
Yes– it’s sin leveling– I may be a serial killer but you yelled at your dog– we’re both sinners!
@Phred Rogers: Thanks for the heads up. Reading between the lines, he’s in trouble. He needs to raise kirkers’ tolerance for wickedness — that is, he needs to harden them to his psychopathy. He’s going somewhere and he’s going there for a reason.
I imagine an imaginary, strictly hypothetical conversation of Doug with a kirker:
“We heard that Goose told you he feels his kids are unsafe around Steven. But Kirk should be a safe place for repentant sinners. You wouldn’t want the elders blabbing about your slutty daughter, would you?” Didn’t think so. If you listen to Goose’s grievances again, that makes you a pharisee, and pastors need to protect the kirk from pharisees. It’d be a shame if anything happened to your nice little business. Are you selling, by the way?”
The 19 year olds (at an age where they can not only give sexual consent but get married, vote, serve in the military, etc.) already know everything they need to know about the promiscuous woman: they are not married to her and therefore should not even think of entering into a sexual relationship with her. What if one might mistakenly consider her as suitable marriage material? In that case, a discreet warning to the would-be groom might be in order. The would-be bride should also be advised to be open and forthright about her past, and counseling with both of them should deal with whatever issues come up as a result.
I don’t think we need to warn congregations at large by exposing all the porn users in their midst, or all the lecherous men obsessed with female bodies, or all the spouses who have broken their marriage vows. However, I’ve appreciated in the past when I was warned discretely about criminals, whether they were newly “repentant” or not. And I was not so appreciative when church leadership placed a stamp of approval on a man they knew to be a liar and con artist, and he fooled many of us with his tragic tales of woe — all lies. It wasn’t until after compassionate church members sacrificed to give him thousands of dollars (which he used for drugs) that the leadership finally warned the congregation that he was not to be trusted.
That was just money, not the lives of children. How many children does Douglas Wilson think should be abused and damaged before the congregation is warned that there is a predator on the loose?
Doug Wilson sincerely believes that children are to blame for their own sexual abuse. Ask Natalie Greenfield.
In the meantime, until something can be done about removing Doug from his fake pulpit, no sane parent should allow their child within a thousand meters of Steven Sitler or Christ Church.
And Wilson did the weeweeing when Emily Belz wrote at World Magazine about his plagiarized book on “justice” and Wilson’s pastoral pedophile cases; Wilson got all minutaei minded that Belz had correctly crossed all T’s.
I told her he would do that and he did not disappoint.