It is not my intent to start blogging again, at least not any time soon, certainly not of the kind necessitated in 2006. I have been writing two books since 2008, one of them a Memoir, and I have been able to do this largely in the comfortable privacy of my home, or, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, minded by nothing more than a handful of seagulls. I plan to keep it this way. I find that this approach increases literary productivity. It also helps mitigate the effects of the PTSD that our pastor, Douglas Wilson, has blessed me with. Please be assured that my last post was not an easy task.
However, I have been unable to put out of mind Douglas Wilson’s current bullying, shaming, threatening, and libeling of Natalie, a recent member of his flock. That alone I might have walked away from, but Wilson is offering all this as direct reprisal for Natalie’s public comments about the abuse she endured from one of his ministerial students – abuse that was just obliquely confirmed by a letter from Peter Leithart. So what to do?
I have decided to offer some of my experience with the other child rape scandal, involving pedophile Steven Sitler. In that case too, Wilson preached the protection of victims, while eagerly harming those victims most close at hand. Rob Dreher at The American Conservative gave Pastor Wilson a large space to respond to criticism regarding both instances of child rape, but regarding Sitler, Wilson’s response left Dreher confused,
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.
The following events of summer, 2006, will certainly not offer a full explanation, but I think they will at least help make it all bit more understandable.
What troubles me as much as anything is how Doug Wilson meddled and interfered with the police investigation by intimidating the parents of the victims to not testify. As Michael Metzler notes Doug Wilson used the victims as human shields to protect his own reputation. The man is evil. In my view Wilson should be criminally charged with obstruction of justice.
ReplyDeleteYes and defrocked, as well.
ReplyDelete