So my day job consists of managing a magazine about translation and cultural differences, including editing a host of articles written by people whose first language is not English. In these instances, it is very helpful to know how language works — the way French deals with certain idiomatic expressions that would not make sense translated literally, for example.

Over my years of editing, I also got pretty good at reading between the lines of a certain kind of person who was allergic to being wrong or to admitting to wrongdoing in writing — namely, lawyers. I edited my ex-husband’s legal briefs and memos, and I also dealt with the way he argued with me. His claim was, typically, that nothing existed unless it was written down. Because of this, he would insinuate things in writing but not state them explicitly — because that would get him in trouble.

My ex-husband received his education in debate from Doug Wilson, personally. And I’m strongly reminded of his style of discourse when I look over the things Doug has been writing. Although, credit where credit is due — my ex-husband, unlike Doug, would occasionally break down and admit he was wrong about something.

Doug’s letters to Natalie’s dad and to an investigating officer in the case of Natalie’s sexual abuse by Jamin Wight do just that: insinuate the opposite of what they’re explicitly stating. For example, in his letter to the investigating officer, he notes that Jamin has committed a crime, but he also claims that Jamin “is not a sexual predator” and, moreover, the only wrongdoing Doug mentions explicitly (aside from Jamin not living up to his duties as seminary student) is what Doug claims the parents did. In his letter to Natalie’s dad, he frames “protection” as the “protection” of not taking the case to trial — without ever explicitly saying so. And if you ask any number of the people who have interacted with Doug over matters of church concern, and subsequently left, the letters Doug wrote them were similar: unspecific, vaguely threatening and full of double-speak. There is a cloud of witnesses on this issue, and Doug’s still insisting they’ve all got it wrong, that they’re persecuting him with a pack of lies.

The thing is, I bet even his staunchest supporters would agree with me if they could shift their assumptions even a little bit. I encourage you who are, go back and re-read Doug’s communications imagining that Doug is someone else, from somewhere else other than your own culture — a Catholic priest or a Muslim cleric, for example.

However, Doug has been getting sloppy lately with his discourse and is actually going on record with things that are easily provable as false. What Doug has asserted in writing recently: that “it [the Jamin Wight/Natalie case] was a foolish parent-approved relationship, which led to statutory rape, as was shown in court.”

This is actually a lie, and here’s the proof, in writing. The court case did not show this; in fact, the court records stated that it was legally impossible to argue “consent” (by the victims or her parents) in this case given the age of the victim, and the “consent” of the parents never came into the court case either way — other than in what Doug himself wrote, and this notation by the court. So I find it ironic that Doug started this particular twitter conversation with a quote about truth. Here’s a link to the actual court documents, and if you are more up on courtspeak than Wilson appears to be, you’ll notice that the case ends in a plea deal where Wight pleads guilty — the case never even went to trial, so “the court,” by definition, never “showed” anything. Which Doug should know, since he sat in an adjacent room during the moderation.

Moreover, just because parents approve a courtship, that doesn’t mean courtship “leads” to statutory rape. Or is Doug actually arguing that it does? Is Doug actually arguing that two parents allowing one of his seminary students to be interested in someone — hold her hand, smile at her — “leads” to the kinds of grotesque things that Natalie describes on her blog, the kinds of things so vile that I don’t even want to think about them? If so, Doug should burn all the stuff on courtship he’s ever written. Because he can’t have it both ways. He can’t encourage parents to board his seminary students and college students, and encourage early marriage in his congregation, and encourage chaste getting to know one another under the eye of the parents, and then claim the parents were negligent because they followed his advice.

And for all of Doug’s recent private assertions to Natalie that she was so tall and mature and pretty at age 14 (you know, the really important things when looking at a sex abuse case), Natalie herself has said that her sex education consisted of her reading the dictionary at age 13. The rest of it, she said, she found out six months later when Jamin started abusing her. And this lack of sex education for females is entirely consistent with what the CREC teaches.

I’m not sure what tenuous “proof” Doug is holding on to in order to claim that there was a “secret courtship.” I don’t think he actually has any, other than his own faulty memory of something Natalie’s parents told him ten years ago, and which Jamin Wight spun to his own advantage. But I do know that when I shared his letter to the officer with Natalie (who had never seen it before), she was genuinely confused and horrified, as no such courtship had existed. Her reaction was not the reaction of someone who’d been holding back knowledge of some “secret courtship,” and as she pointed out, she would be the one to know, not Doug Wilson. Her family would be the ones to know, not Doug Wilson. You know, the family that nearly all left Christ Church after Natalie was treated so badly by the church in the wake of her abuse.

Doug has been using the “proof” he claimed he had as a threat to shut Natalie up, and actually wrote her a letter in which he the first thing he asks is “Did your mom hurt you or wrong you in some way that makes you want to get back at her like this? Is there something we don’t know? Are you aware that my central reason for not talking publicly about all this has been to protect your mom from accusations of parental negligence?” Translation: if you don’t stop talking about this, I’m going to have to try to vilify your mother publicly, even though, legally speaking, she had nothing to do with the case. So stop talking!

It’s important to note that, up until this point in time, Doug has been fighting tooth and nail to explain away why he felt the need to severely minimize Jamin’s crimes. And it’s relevant that Jamin, like Natalie has been telling anyone who would listen for the past ten years, was a violent, manipulative person, who, according to public court records, went on to throttle his now-ex-wife while she was holding their child.

But to Doug, everything Natalie is saying about Jamin is still untrue, because Natalie was tall at age 14, and because Doug has convinced himself that Natalie’s parents let Jamin show her affection. Doug wrote to Natalie a few days ago and told her, “what [Jamin] had done was very different from subsequent reconstructions that [you have] been periodically posting.” No hint of what, exactly, Natalie was supposedly lying about, except the “consent” thing — and Doug has claimed to Natalie repeatedly, that at least in a certain sense, she had consented to the “relationship” with Jamin.

Another thing Doug shared with Natalie a few days ago: “Though Jamin has been in possession of this entire set of facts through various Internet dust-ups (demonstrable facts which enabled him to show that his crimes did not include pedophilia), he has shown more respect for the feelings of others than have all the so-called ‘victim advocates’ in all our comment threads put together.” Translation: Jamin might have been a rapist and a wife-abuser, but at least he kept his mouth shut when I told him to, and that’s what really matters.

Now, Doug has recently indicated privately to Natalie that he was sorry about one thing — not finding a way around Natalie’s Dad to meet with her during the aftermath of her abuse (translation: it’s your Dad’s fault that you didn’t get the care from the church that you needed). But, in fact, he did meet with her then against her father’s wishes, and it was not an experience that resulted in anything but her feeling shamed and blamed for the abuse. Additionally, she was prodded for information about her father, as were other members of her family. Someone else recorded the conversation he had with Doug about this very thing:

Me: . . . did you meet with this girl alone in a room?

Wilson: Yes, for 15 minutes.

Me: So [Natalie’s father] gave you permission to meet with his little girl?

Wilson: Well, ah, no.

Me: Oh, I see.

Wilson: He did give me permission to counsel his family.

Me: Did he give you permission to interrogate his little girl?

Wilson: I did not interrogate; I met with her only to offer her encouragement during this hard time.

Me: Did you ask her if her father had made reference to Christ Church [Wilson’s congregation] as a “cult”?

Wilson: Yes, I did.

So there you have it — in Wilson’s accounts he gives of his actions versus what history actually shows, you have more posing, more wrangling, and no actual acknowledgement of cause and effect.

So what would the “internet mob,” as Doug is so charitably calling the people who want to see reform in the way the CREC handles abuse, like Doug to do in this instance?

First: we’d like to see him publicly retract his false statements that e.g. “it [the Jamin Wight/Natalie case] was a foolish parent-approved relationship, which led to statutory rape, as was shown in court.” And we mean actually retract — not pretend like those words mean something other than what they so clearly mean. Or that we all just misunderstand him.

Second, we’d like to see him demand that abusers pay restitution to their victims — all their victims, not just the ones they plea-bargain out for — in the form of, at the bare minimum, an acknowledgement that they abused the victims and that this will have lasting psychological consequences that will probably need professional psychological help. The more public the abuse, the more publicly it got hastened away into the shadows, the more public the restitution should be. In this case, Wilson himself is one of the abusers, since he used his power to silence the victim and insinuate, both privately and publicly, that she was lying, that her parents were to blame for her abuse, and that publicly calling for change within his denomination was an act of treason or war. Because Wilson said all this publicly, he should make his restitution public. He should make his retractions public.

But I would probably have a heart attack if Doug Wilson did either of these things. What we will likely see, instead, is what we’ve seen all along: more of the carefully-worded “my bad behavior was someone else’s fault,” more revising of clear historical statements in the vein of “see, when I said that Jamin was not a sexual predator, I actually meant that he was sexual predator — and it’s your fault if you couldn’t tell what I really meant,” or “I sneezed in Natalie’s direction once, and she didn’t take this as a sincere apology, so what are you going to do?”

Doug Wilson’s recent post reminds me of something he wrote back in 2013. So much so, that I pulled up a draft of what I was writing in response back then, and it basically matched word for word. I figure that if Doug can recycle his arguments ad nauseum, at least it gives me a chance to make good on stuff I didn’t publish two years ago.

His current post is about how non-Christian women really are mostly on the spectrum of whores and dykes, so it’s totally legit to “generalize” them as such because — wait for it — 50 Shades of Grey sold a lot of copies. The assumption here (quick lesson, in case Doug’s fans aren’t up on logic, but assumptions aren’t real proof) is that a. all these copies were sold to non-Christians; b. all the readers were women; and c. all the readers approved of the book. And when I say “all” I mean “all” in the way that Wilson appears to use it, which is “generally speaking, because I’m not going to bother being clear about this, since it’s more fun pretending I was clear in the first place and then mocking everyone who called me out on my BS.”

The post a few years ago similarly challenged us to consider the sexual double standard set forth by liberals, and was similarly used to sidestep the issue of his tendency to blame the victim in abuse scenarios. It appears from reading this post that Wilson sincerely believes feminists are staunch fans of 50 Shades of Grey and Lil’ Wayne, which is apparently hypocritical of them because they don’t like it when men tell women what to do.

So I’m wondering, based on these and many other posts like it: Does Wilson know any real feminists or real non-Christians, or is he still arguing based on some two-dimensional scarecrow he’s made up in his head? He seems very keen on letting us know how much people misunderstand his arguments, but he doesn’t waste his precious time actually trying to figure out the arguments of anyone who thinks he’s wrong.

In the post from two years ago, Doug urges us to compare 100 women who like him and follow his teachings and 100 women who don’t, in what he seems to believe is a good limitus test of happiness and safety: whether the women have been physically abused, been called “bitch” by a boyfriend or husband, or have read 50 Shades of Grey. He obviously believes the 100 women who follow his teachings would get better grades on this test.

So, Ok, I’m accepting the challenge. I know a fair amount of women who do like Wilson and a fair amount who don’t. Probably over 100 of each. I also know a fair amount who have abandoned his teachings (and teachings like them) precisely because they were abused in some way under those teachings. I’m not sure which category I’m supposed to put them in. Presumably, they’d go in the “don’t like Wilson” camp, although that’s obviously unfair; they don’t like Wilson because his theology enabled their abusers.

But still, for the sake of argument, let’s leave them out of it. I think we can safely say that the women who follow Wilson’s teachings won’t be reading 50 Shades of Grey, because according to Wilson, that’s a sign there’s something seriously wrong with you. To hear Wilson tell it, reading that book means you’re basically apostate. So, yes, Wilson, if they agree with you, they clearly won’t be reading that book. I believe this logical fallacy is called “circular reasoning,” if you care to keep track. Although, come to think of it, most of the Facebook posts I’ve seen mentioning 50 Shades over the years were made by people in Wilson’s camp — in the negative, obviously. I’m sure they read it twice just to make sure they disapproved.

However, of all the feminists I’ve discussed 50 Shades of Grey with, not a single one of them, male or female, was a fan. They’d read it, or at least started to, because they were curious what all the fuss was about. Because they don’t believe buying a book makes you apostate or anything. They said the book was degrading and insulting to women, that the female character was an idiot, that it was absurd, poorly written, and not erotic. I confess: I read it. I was in a hostel in London and it had been left behind by someone, and I had an evening to kill that I didn’t want to spend trying to get the best of the horrendous internet connection. I was not impressed. The book was mildly amusing, in the same way that horrible things that have somehow become popular are — Doug Wilson has jump-started his notoriety on this exact principle. I’m guessing the book became popular in part because it’s so easy to make fun of; everyone loves to hate it. And that’s kind of our cultural ethos right now. Not that Doug would know anything about that.

So on to the second part of the test: being called a “bitch” by your boyfriend or husband. Here I draw a blank, because this is not something I’ve ever asked anyone else or that anyone else (again, outside of the abused women formerly from Wilson’s circle) has ever volunteered. I have insider knowledge of myself and that’s it. However, if I consider my ex-husband, who was going to counseling with Wilson at the time of our divorce, compared to every other boyfriend I’ve ever had (none of whom were big Wilson fans) then sorry, Doug, you lose this one. Your camp is the only one that ever called me a bitch. Your camp is the only one who’s ever called me a lot of things, come to think of it.

The third test, that of physical abuse, is of course the most serious. I’m not sure what Wilson considers physical abuse, but I do know a few things that he thinks aren’t physical abuse, or at least weren’t abusive enough to merit much in the way of church correction. So I don’t think I know anyone who Wilson considers to have been actually physically abused, in his camp or out of it (as far as I know, he’s never stated publicly that anyone was). I do know that every single woman I know who I would say has been abused, however, was abused at the hands of a so-called Christian man who believed in traditional gender roles. More, the more dependent my friends have been on their boyfriends or husbands, and the more patriarchal their boyfriends, husbands, and broader community were, the more likely it was that they stayed in a bad situation.

That’s what feminists are trying to prevent, actually: the entrapment of the weak by the strong. In pop culture, feminists write parodies of Robin Thicke, beg Miley Cyrus to get a clue. In real life, they live, and they want other women to have the same opportunities. Because as much as feminists like community and supporting one another, in the end, they know those things can get pulled out from under you. So you’d better know how to survive on your own if you need to.

When I think of feminists, I think of my group of female friends in Sandpoint — all of them beautiful, in the way that the summer forests and the mountains of that region are beautiful — warm, in full bloom, adorned by the natural slant of the sunlight, strong, tireless, shaped by laughter and the glory of capability. We are designers, scientists, mothers, triathaletes, homeowners. We run businesses and clear trash from cliffs; we go rock climbing and skiing together; we trade clothes regularly because we are frugal and because we see where someone else would wear a thing with better grace. We are all close with our families, but we can all take care of ourselves solo. We are afraid of neither the future or the past. We do not suffer fools. We love deeply and selectively, because we, too, want happily ever after. We believe in sacrifice, but we also believe in standing up for ourselves. We believe we are human beings before we are women. We have differing opinions, strengths, and talents. We vote. We get paid at work. We love our work. Our work makes the world a better place. And this, Doug Wilson, is how you actually praise a group of people. You don’t praise a group of people by saying “they’re better than some really hideous people I could mention.” You also don’t claim that you’re being nice because you’re only nice to the people in your camp. Even the gentiles do as much.

Feminists want the world to be a safe and fair place for everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs, gender, level of attractiveness, or marital status. They don’t like patriarchy because it demands that women put themselves in a vulnerable position, suspending their own needs and safety in the hope that the man they’re under can provide for everything. And, of course, sometimes he can, and sometimes he’s wonderful. But certainly not always. Mind you, feminists are not adverse to being stay-at-home moms. They just don’t want to be required to be stay-at-home moms in order to be considered “real” women.

They just don’t want a woman to be required to submit against her better judgement. Because there lies the road to the kind of madness that Doug ends up defending.

Doug Wilson’s distracting us from the recent sex abuse hubbub by dishing up his usual insults about the kinds of females who displease him. Specifically, he gives us the supposed full picture of non-Christian females by stating “Unbelieving women either compete for the attention of men through outlandish messages that communicate some variation of ‘easy lay,’ or in the grip of resentment they give up the endeavor entirely, which is how we get lumberjack dykes. The former is an avid reader of Cosmopolitan and thinks she knows 15K ways to please a man in bed. The latter is just plain surly about the fact that there even are any men.”

Now, I’m pretty sure that, regardless of my actual beliefs, Doug wouldn’t count me as a Christian, since my doctrine is about as far from his as one could get. So which one am I — the shameless, Cosmo-obsessed hussy falling out of her clothing because she’s obsessed with getting men to look at her, or the resentful, man-hating, maybe-even “lumberjack dyke”?

Here’s a helpful photo in case Doug’s having a hard time deciding which of these categories I belong in. In it, I’m wearing a dress my grandmother designed in the 1940s. Hussy, dyke; hussy, dyke. You know, I can’t really decide. Am I inviting the male gaze too much or too little? Because for the non-Christian/non-CREC woman, those are clearly the only options.

Doug’s pulled this distraction before, numerous times, commenting on e.g. “clueless women … who are themselves pushy broads, twinkies in tight tops, or waifs with manga eyes.” This works as a distraction because he then makes a big show of correcting the people who inevitably draw the conclusion that he’s being pretty insulting to women. Because, you see, he’s not insulting all women. He’s just insulting some women. He pats himself on the back for thus schooling the masses in logic.

Ahem. Ever heard of the straw man fallacy, Doug? Where you disingenuously act like your intellectual opponents are arguing something that’s easy to refute, then blow them aside like so much chaff? See, it’s not necessary to claim that you’re insulting all women in order to say you’re insulting women. Or are you linguistically disingenuous as well? “You’re insulting women” is ambiguous precisely because it doesn’t specify how many women you’re hurting. “You’re insulting all of womankind” would be something else.

Let’s put this another way. Let’s claim that men who spend all their time deflecting accurate criticisms by trolling the internet hordes with shots about “small-breasted biddies” are themselves bulbous, unattractive effetes whose physical masculinity is obviously so tenuous that they need to assert themselves by regularly throwing verbal tantrums like two-year-olds obsessed with the idea that not enough people think they’re in charge. Actually masculine men don’t need to spend all their time convincing people that they’re masculine. Actually witty men don’t need to spend all their time convincing people they’re witty. Men who actually show honor to women — all women, not just the perfectly-dressed, perfectly-submissive ones — don’t need to spend time protesting that they’re nice to all the women who deserve it.

I’ve said all this, but note that I’m not necessarily insulting Doug Wilson with those statements. In fact, I’ll specifically say I’m not. See how Doug’s logic works?

Now, as it happens, I actually believe that kind men — men who are kind to their own bodies and to the people around them — are far more attractive, both physically and emotionally, than men who insult [some] women for a living. And this, to cop a phrase, is “an erotic necessity.” It’s sexy when a man is confident enough that he lifts up everyone instead of maligning some. It’s sexy when men take care of themselves physically, and usually this translates to an ability to take care of women physically (wink, wink, Doug. What am I implying with this statement? Rest assured, it’s the opposite of whatever you assume it is).

Also sexy: consistency, and humility. And that goes double for any man who talks day and night about submission, patriarchy and trusting the judgment of the elders.

So for those of you who are not aware, let me take you down memory lane, back to the birth of Christ Church. Trust me, it’s relevant.

Christ Church, Moscow, was originally planted as a mission church of the Evangelical Free Church of Pullman in 1975. By the early 1990s, the church, then called Community Evangelical Fellowship (CEF), had grown to about 80 families. It was led by four elders: Bob Callihan, Fred Kohl, Terry Morin, and Doug Wilson. As this archived website states, “although the origin of CEF was in the Evangelical Free Church, the doctrinal character of Doug Wilson’s pulpit and teaching ministry began to take on a Reformed orientation, first embracing a postmillennial eschatology in the late 1980s, and moving toward a Calvinistic soteriology in 1990 or thereabout.” This was a matter of doctrinal concern to the other elders, and they, all PhDs and professors at UI, served Wilson notice that the church constitution required them to remove him from the office of elder. In a responsive letter to these other elders, Doug wrote “If you require me to cease teaching, I will submit to that. If you want me to step down as an elder, I will submit to that. In no way will I fight, or maneuver to resist you. If anyone else in the church were distressed over what I was being asked to do, I would use whatever influence I had to keep it from being a problem.”

The elders responded in turn by asking Doug to resign from the eldership, unless he could confirm that he was in line with the church’s statement of faith. They also informed the congregation of their decision.

So did Doug step down? No, he didn’t. Instead, he drafted a letter to revise the events that had taken place, listing the elders’ names at the bottom. The elders refused to sign it. Doug did not leave the church, which forced two of the elders to resign instead.

Of note here: Doug’s financial shenanigans had been an issue in this church as well — he’d borrowed money from the church to pay his tax debts, something the elders were not happy about. In an elders’ meeting, they instructed him on how to pay the debt back, and to stop self-allocating church money. Doug complicated the issue by drafting a set of fake minutes from this elder’s meeting in an attempt to show a different story, which was subsequently posted on the Christ Church website years later when all this came to light. When the authenticity of this document was pointed out as false (along with the letter that the elders refused to sign, which had also been posted as “proof” that Doug had done the right thing), Christ Church issued a non-apology apology that included the assertion that the church should have just paid Doug’s taxes because they hadn’t taken out enough from his paycheck every month (weird, I don’t expect someone else, least of all a nonprofit run on donations, to pay my taxes if I owe tax money at the end of the year — it’s called being financially responsible) and gave a bunch of excuses as to why Doug hadn’t resigned like he said he would do back in 1993.

Are we seeing a pattern here yet? Doug talks straight but plays crooked, and he’s always blaming someone else for this, even in matters of obvious personal responsibility such as paying his taxes.

Crooked men are rarely beautiful at his age, since a lifetime of self-justification and making enemies of countless former friends tends to cook you from the inside out.

I’m not saying this, of course. I’m just saying this.

Doug Wilson is totally sticking by his decision to preside over the marriage of a pedophile who had made no secret of the fact that he wanted children. Wilson states that “when Boz Tchividjian is barely introduced to the subject, and then pops off with this, ‘Wilson’s unwillingness to acknowledge his ignorance about child offenders makes Christ Church an unsafe place,’ one doesn’t know where one should look exactly. Boz doesn’t have an earthly about what I know or don’t know, counseled or did not counsel, said or did not say, and this means that he wants to protect your church from such offenders using his amazing gifts of clairvoyance.”

But Wilson’s ignorance is obvious even in this statement. What Tchividjian and those like him are worried about is precisely that Wilson, in his own words, thinks that “[t]he wedding between Steven and Katie was a lawful wedding. There were no biblical grounds to prohibit it. When there are grounds to refuse, a minister should refuse. I would refuse to do a wedding if one of the parties was unlawfully divorced, for example.” In Wilson’s eyes, the fact that a convicted, repeat pedophile is getting married at least in part to produce offspring is not a “biblical reason” to object to the wedding. But, you know, performing the marriage of a divorcee who ran out on her husband because he was emotionally abusive: totes not biblical, and not something he would do.

People’s objection to this, no matter what Wilson may think, has nothing to do with Wilson himself. Just to test this theory, I commented to someone who had never heard of Wilson or this situation, “there’s this pastor who performed the wedding of a convicted pedophile who had said he wanted kids.” That’s literally all it took for the person to be outraged. “And he knew he was a pedophile?”

Put this in a different context: a Catholic priest who’s been caught molesting children red-handed. After multiple instances, he goes to jail for 20 months and claims he’s cured, because he’s “repented.” He can’t be a priest anymore, so he’s going to get married and have kids. Never mind that the state won’t let him hang out with any kids without a watching chaperone. Never mind that he’s struggled with sexual attraction to minors his whole life. Never mind that it took some serious pressure to get him to admit that raping kids was wrong. Never mind that he reoffended after admitting this.

Does facilitating his marriage to a sheltered Catholic girl, and therefore giving implicit endorsement of his clearly-stated desire to have kids in the marriage, seem like a good idea? Does it seem like the right thing to do? For the Catholic girl or for the future kids?

Wilson’s ignorance also lies in the fact that he claims getting married “helps against immorality” in the context of pedophilia. Pedophiles are sexually attracted to minors, by definition. Although they may be able to have sex with adults, having sex with people above the age of 18 does not cure them of this attraction. At least some pedophiles recognize that this attraction is abhorrent, and do not act on these urges. But, like recovering alcoholics, they have to stay away from temptation as much as possible. If Steven Sitler had stayed away from temptation, he would not now be facing the breaking up of his family over him being “sexually stimulated” by his infant son. If Wilson had recognized that 1 Cor. 7:2 isn’t just something you slap on a situation in the hope that it might cure pedophilia, the family might not be on the verge of breaking up either.

Here we come to another problem, by the way: Wilson, by his own assertion, wasn’t even convinced marriage would cure Sitler of pedophilia. But that didn’t stop him from performing the marriage either.

But none of this is even the biggest problem with Wilson’s most recent blog post. The biggest problem lies in this passage:

“Relationship meltdowns can be very messy, and sin can leave a big smoking crater, and the same thing is true when a family blows apart. If I were in the middle of one such situation, and one participant in it comes out years later to ‘tell the story,’ I am not in a position to set the record straight if the cost of defending myself is to volunteer information about other people involved in the meltdown. A shepherd doesn’t use the sheep to shield himself from wolves. It is supposed to go the other way…

“I am not giving hints about any particulars. But I do say that in both the Steven Sitler situation and the Jamin Wight situation, the principle outlined above is extremely relevant.”

Translation: the injured people who are “telling the story” (notice the scare quotes) about Steven Sitler and Jamin Wight are the ones labeled “wolves.” Let that sink in. Read the passage it in its original context if you doubt the translation.

And if you still don’t believe this translation, check out this screen capture of Wilson accusing someone (?) of lying about something (?) in the Jamin Wight case. Wight was a “skunk,” but… somebody’s still lying.

Let’s be clear: Jamin Wight was convicted of having sex with a then-14-year-old/15-year-old. Years later, long after he had been reinstated as a repentant member of Christ Church/Trinity society, he was found to have strangled his then- (now ex-) wife. These are matters of public record. And yet Wilson has the gall to assert that the Jamin Wight case, “telling the story” after the fact isn’t legitimate, and he’s certainly not going to answer any questions about it. Because “protecting the sheep.”

Here’s one question that Wilson can answer that absolutely does not conflict with pastoral counseling confidentiality: Doug Wilson, did you, in fact, tell the victim of Wight’s sexual abuse that she needed to repent of her “sexual sin” with Wight? She has publicly stated that you did. Furthermore, she has said that after she left your church (still a teenager at this point, and hurt on multiple levels), you told her she could not partake in communion until she came in and explained herself to you/your elders. Unsurprisingly, none of this inspired her to return to your church.

This is a yes or no question that does not involve anyone but her and you. Yes, you did tell her she needed to repent from being statutorily raped by a serial abuser, or no, you didn’t tell her this.

And, while we’re at it, was this wrong or right of you?

I know that there are people in the Christ Church/Trinity community who, particularly in retrospect, are horrified by how the Jamin Wight case went down, and who do see their past involvement as implying “support” of Wight. It saddens me that they have been silent, and I can only assume it’s because of Wilson’s shady rhetorical tactics and backhanded control moves (e.g. if you “tell the story” you’re a wolf, and the sheep must be protected from you by the pastorly knight in shining armor).

Church communities where victims are told to repent and stay silent, and where abusers are allowed to flourish in the name of Christian forgiveness, are not safe places. At least not when the leaders are justifying their behavior and refusing to apologize/admit fault for the way things were handled. Because I know and love a lot of kids in the Christ Church/Trinity community, this is deeply personal for me. History repeats itself, and this pattern will repeat itself if nothing is done to change it.