For those who are interested, there is a discussion of the World story on the Southern Slavery booklet over here. From the heading of the initial post at World’s blog, one of the things I mentioned about their initial story is worth mentioning again. Both Steve Wilkins and I deny that we were guilty of plagiarism. In my view, a story about these events ought to have included the salient fact of that denial. But both the World story and the blog post assume the plagiarism as an undisputed fact, and lead the reader to assume that our acknowledgments of our faults in this are in fact acknowledgments of plagiarism. But they are no such thing. Both Steve and I acknowledge that we were guilty of sloppiness in the production of the booklet, and if anyone ever gets to hear the details of how the unintentional unattributed quotes got into the booklet they will discover that the story chronicles a sorry excuse for booklet production, but nothing sordid or dishonest.
That story, sorry or not, happened almost ten years ago. The booklet enjoyed low sales and no controversy for quite a number of years. A couple years ago, the local leftist/radical/egalitarian axis in town decided to attack us by papering downtown with select quotations from the booklet. In the midst of that flap, Dr. McKenzie notified me of citation problems in the booklet. We pulled the booklet that same day. A number of months later, the information about the citation problems was leaked by some fellow Christians to our local Intolerista adversaries, who responded with Glee. We screwed up, so more power to them. Like I said, we deserved that lump on our head. And about a year after that, World magazine ran this story. Not sure why they did.