[Vision2020] Sitler, Wilson, and Pooh Bear

[Douglas]

Visionaries,

Michael is grieved and baffled at the consequences of his actions. 
Little kids playing with matches in tinder dry forests often feel the 
same way, which in no way alters the consequences. Michael needs to 
apologize for intruding himself into a situation that was way over his 
head, where he didn't have all the facts, and for failing to understand 
what a naif he has been. His anonymous friend who had him post this 
salacious material has perhaps lost a friend over how the information 
was used on the Internet? "Oh, /dear/, what are /those /people /doing 
/out there?" It appears that Michael's friend was born yesterday, and 
Michael was born the day before that.

Keep it simple, Michael. The request for privacy that you refused to 
honor was a reasonable and heart-wrenching requests from someone who has 
already been through enough. Read through what you posted below, and 
then read through all your cyber self-centeredness of the last week. It 
is hard to suck and blow at the same time. The only way out is to drop 
it. Stop grieving over not dropping it. You are being pathetic, and you 
need to ask for help from somebody.

Douglas Wilson



Michael wrote:
>
> Vision Friends:
>
> Writing is a bit hard on the road with four little kids 
> (understatement!); so I don’t hope to accomplish much for now, even 
> though it is true that I’m finding my name out in public a bit more 
> than I would like. For now I wanted to offer some important 
> clarifications to my involvement in this issue.
>
> First, the Sitler issue never has been nor is it now something I have 
> wanted to be involved with. Although I have been tempted to cease all 
> blogging many times now, for various reasons I continue to plug away 
> at trying to analyze, and at times unmask, what I see as some unusual 
> corruptions at Christ Church; this has been a difficult process of 
> going from a loyal Wilson defender to a public critic, and I still 
> feel like I’m in process. My primary concerns have been with respect 
> to the ‘serrated edge,’ a developing ‘enemy theology,’ and what I call 
> Wilson’s ‘sociology of violence.’ The problem of cult of personalities 
> and closed communities is also of interest. The Sitler issue does not 
> sit very snuggly in these categories, and I have been—probably to a 
> great fault—very apathetic to it. I remain apathetic to it in many 
> respects. However, after a long bit of encouraging and arguing from a 
> friend of mine, and after getting notice that I had many respectable 
> people with the same encouragement, I went ahead and forwarded the 
> public announcement. Even after I did, I was asking people I trust if 
> they thought it was the right thing to do, and I received no thumbs 
> down. I forwarded the public announcement along with trepidation, and 
> I actually had little desire to make this some sort of political 
> attack against Doug Wilson. I do desire to continue to unmask the 
> various levels of corruption at Christ Church, but if you haven’t 
> noticed, most nonChristians find much on my Blog a bit boring. I’m not 
> into this politics stuff, nor am I interested in bashing Wilson with 
> anything I find on the ground. In fact, I have been forced to actively 
> defend Wilson and Christ Church on occasion off line because of my 
> status of public critic.
>
> What has followed my posting of this announcement has simply grieved 
> me. I deplore the undisciplined and ungodly use of this information to 
> spew bitterness and fabricate half truths. The person who wrote the 
> announcement has condemned the handling of it by some others, to the 
> point of possibly loosing a friend over it. And I have been saddened 
> to see the way both sides of this ‘dispute’ have handled the topic of 
> “victims.” In fact, I almost feel like I’m staring into a wasteland of 
> chaos as I watch the posts role in. This is just further illumination 
> of what I see as the continuance of a ‘sociology of violence.’ Are all 
> the claims made about Wilson just? Of course not. Are all of them 
> true? No way. What I feel in my heart seems so simple to me that I 
> would not have imagined that anyone would entertain the idea of 
> lumping me in with those people who will pick up any stick to do the 
> work once the ‘enemy’ is located. In some ways I wish I never posted 
> this announcement, thus freeing my name from the train wreck that was 
> going to result once this information got out—which was inevitable. 
> Perhaps I was unwise in posting this. It would seem so looking at what 
> Christ Church has done with my posting of this announcement. Many of 
> you not following some aspects of this might not realize the fact that 
> Wilson and others at Christ Church have rhetorically associated me 
> with the wildest responses to all this and have gotten the suspicion 
> off the ground that my posting the announcement makes me just as sick 
> as a child molester. I have now been labeled as totally immoral and 
> psychologically unstable. This is in fact the primary response of 
> Wilson and Christ Church to the revealing of this information: those 
> who offered the information are attacked first, other questions are 
> partially addressed secondarily.
>
> So this is where I see myself in this issue. My blog was the conduit 
> of revealing this information. My name is attached to the origination, 
> and that is all. Wilson has therefore made me the whipping boy as this 
> issue heats up. This kind of slanderous attack by Wilson is fully in 
> line with the purpose of my web site; Wilson’s response to this issue 
> is my primary concern: the deceitful rhetoric; the maligning of people 
> instead of dealing with the evidence and issues directly; abusing his 
> position through intimidation and manipulation, etc. Apparently, many 
> do not share this concern as much, but I believe they should; I 
> believe that this is really getting more at the heart of the problems 
> at Christ Church. Do I think that there was pastoral misconduct in how 
> the Sitler case was handled? From everything I can tell so far, it 
> would seem so; but I’m reading this off the nature of Wilson’s very 
> troubling response to this more so than the actual evidence we yet 
> have of what had really transpired. I wish I could just correct the 
> announcement and say that it is true that the congregation was 
> sufficiently notified, but I still cannot. One of the reasons for this 
> is the fact that myself and many other kirkers were indeed not 
> successfully notified at all. Does this reveal aspects of the 
> corruption at Christ Church? I would think so. But this does not mean 
> that there was some kind of big sex scandal to go on the front page of 
> the newspaper. I could be wrong; there could be more to this than I 
> know. But I currently have little reason to believe this and I have no 
> intentions of being a part of the next big politicized attack on Doug 
> Wilson or Christ Church. So few find it interesting that Wilson is 
> currently attacking the person who posted the information on Sitler 
> more so than providing basic information; I think this highlights how 
> at odds I just might be with this current ‘controversy’. Some of you 
> will thank me for the info and then tip your hat once the Kirk has 
> lynched me. A good reason to be careful on all fronts it seems to me.
>
> Finally, I want to also comment on my thoughts about Sitler. I agree 
> more with Wilson and Christ Church than others who have so far 
> commented to this—although I do not wish to suggest a great coherence 
> between this and their prior theonomic stances and attitudes. We are 
> all sinners, and it is ultimately not by my choosing that I’m Metzler 
> and not Sitler. The entire world is sick and full of perversion. I am 
> thankful for the American Legal Tradition and its careful balancing 
> between protection from harm and the disciplining of vengeance. The 
> law and the courts are not God, nor do they perfectly reflect ultimate 
> justice. The way some of the talk has gone about the death penalty and 
> disgust reveal hearts that need to know the God who became man and died.
>
> I think I rambled a bit, but if you are still reading: Thanks for 
> listening; I hope this at least clarifies my take on all this.
>
> Michael Metzler
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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