The Southern Poverty Law Center, the world’s richest civil rights organization, puts out an unfortunately named publication called the Intelligence Report. In a recent version of that report, they decided that it was now important to talk about me.
Given the nature of the case, I thought I should take snippets from their article and engage in a little dialogue. Dialogue is what liberals want to foster lots more of, right? So here I am, dialoging away like anything. They are in bold, and I am in italics.
A radical church? What gave us away? Was it the preaching in camo-gear?
. . . has always seemed to project a persona of smug and self-satisfied arrogance.
You should see how smug it gets when I am not holding back.
. . . Wilson scoffed again, deriding the “local Banshees” who criticized him over what he portrayed as a mere citation problem.
It is quite likely that I did describe some of our local critics as Banshees, but it is also obvious that I did not do it nearly often enough.
Wilson went on to say that his Moscow-based Canon Press was issuing a corrected version of the booklet — correct in its citations, that is, but maintaining unchanged its portrayal of happy and well-fed slaves whose relationship with their masters was described as one of “mutual confidence and affection.”
They are probably referring here to a book that they have clearly not read, not wanting to disturb the purity of their little minds. But I like it when people bring this up because I can point out that Black and Tan was blurbed by Eugene Genovese, one of America’s foremost historians, and I can do it without actual bragging. Did I mention that Genevose said that my grasp of “the essentials of the history of slavery and its relation to Christian doctrine . . . is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history”? It’s not bragging if the SPLC brings it up first, right?
Now, Wilson is back in the news. This summer, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News published a story on “rumors” that Wilson, who controls an extreme-right religious empire in Moscow . . .
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! North Idaho! Gateway to the Yukon!
and his New Saint Andrews College had tried to “cover up” serial sexual molestations by a college student — molestations of very young boys and girls carried out over several years.
Yeah, we covered it up by reporting it within hours.
The father of the girl in the second incident told the Intelligence Report that church officials tried to keep that quiet as well. At one point, he said, they threatened to bring him under church discipline for failing to protect his daughter.
Let’s just say that I have never seen quite so striking an example of a father neglecting his daughter. But this is not one that you have to take my word for. Just look at the previous paragraph. This is a father who was willing to talk to Intelligence Report about this particular incident because he doesn’t believe his daughter has been through enough. And the ghouls at SPLC were willing to print it.
What may have been most remarkable about the entire affair was Wilson’s role in the case of Sitler, who he ministered to after Sitler was caught. Wilson wrote the sentencing judge in Sitler’s case, describing him as “most responsive” and “completely honest” and asking that criminal penalties be “measured and limited.”
I wonder why they didn’t quote other parts of that letter? Oh, shoot, I bet I know. It is because there were sections like this: “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.” And although I do believe that Steven Sitler was “completely honest” with me about his offenses (with the exception of the incident where he was first caught, he busted himself on all the other counts), I am afraid that it is impossible to use that same phrase “completely honest” in the same breath with the Intelligence Report.
But Doug Wilson is no normal pastor. He is a biblical hard-liner, a man who in numerous books and speeches is quick to advocate the most draconian punishments of the Old Testament for all kinds of offenses, some quite minor.
Okay, I guess that’s true. For example, I believe in the death penalty for owning more than two Barry Manilow albums, or more than one by John Tesh. Not that these are minor offenses.