[Vision2020] one final thing

[keely emerinemix]

You would like me to feel chastened and chagrined.  I don't.

You would like us to see you as patiently enduring yet another round of 
persecution.  You aren't.

No one has identified the family -- and you continue, by the way, to promote 
the idea that there is only one family whose children were victimized.  They 
have not been identified, and "they" are, by all accounts, not just one 
family.

You are terribly interested in promoting your righteous indignation and 
scorn for people who take joy in the suffering of anyone involved in your 
life.   How vicious of you -- both for your scorn and your martyrdom.  Do 
you really think that you are important enough to trump even the horror of 
sexual abuse in the minds of people in your community?  Or has it occurred 
to you that after yet another problem emanating from your flock, people have 
cast a jaded eye on you and yet still manage to reserve tenderness and mercy 
for those affected?

How dare you dispatch Roy Atwood to dazzle a young cub reporter by twisting 
the focus of the story she's writing about a pedophile in your church to an 
irrelevant comment about the perversion of homosexuality?  You cry once 
again about persecution -- who is using this for gain?  You accuse us of 
that, and presume that our gain is offense-oriented.  But you've turned this 
into a game of defense.  You demonize Metzler, Morin, Nolan, et al, and mock 
London, Opyr, Huskey, and myself.  You bedazzle an unsuspecting community -- 
city officials, newspaper reporters, the masses who think you're just 
another fundamentalist church -- with grandiose rhetoric and faux humility, 
but you never seem to reflect on the damage your serrated edge, your 
hand-rolled cigars, your nauseating Trinity Fests and your full-bearded 
future men inflict on the community, beginning in your own church.

I can't fathom what kind of church culture you've constructed that would 
impel a grieving family to report a crime against their children to you 
first, but to most people not pastored by you, that seems more than a little 
odd.  The fact that you seem to need to assure all of us, from the judge to 
the first-time reader of Vision 2020, that Sitler didn't understand "the 
magnitude" of his actions, but does now, is sickening.  What kind of 
Christian education do you provide, what kind of Gospel witness do you 
demonstrate, that makes an adult man unaware -- until he is availed of your 
counsel, after the fact -- that genital contact with preschoolers is 
unspeakably evil?  Wouldn't a prudent shepherd of the flock stop and wonder 
what went wrong if the courtship model he promotes results in the obscenity 
of a teenage girl being offered for courtship by a man 10 years her senior?  
  Certainly you are not singularly accountable for those instances of rape, 
but are you willing to consider that you're responsible for a church culture 
that promotes unquestioned obedience to parents and pastor and that produces 
young men who exhibit what could generously be described as deviant sexual 
ethics?

But no, the problem is that we all wrongly think you're the bogeyman and 
Lord, have mercy -- it's tough to be persecuted, especially by people who 
look funny and drink bad beer.

Lord, have mercy, indeed.

keely


From: Douglas <dougwils at christkirk.com>
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] one final thing
Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 09:18:20 -0700

Visionaries,

Well, that fax to First Step was something new. I want to make one last 
observation about what has transpired here, comment on the fax, and then be 
gone.

My interest in resubscribing to this list, first to last, was to protect the 
victims and their families, and to get this group to admit that their right 
to privacy outranked this listserve's right to chatter about it indignantly. 
The family had no interest in becoming a political football. They had no 
interest in having court records from their tragic case made public. They 
had no interest in having you do to them what you have now done to them.

One of your number, one of the sane ones, wrote me privately to offer help 
on working with families in our church because he works in this very sad 
area. His offer was well meant, and kindly received. He said that it is 
well-known in his circles that reporting this kind of thing happens at a 
much lower rate among religious conservatives. After this reaction from the 
usual vitriolic ones here, is it hard to imagine why?

Between the two of us, Peter Leithart and I pastor a community that is the 
size of a small town. Do you think that this kind of thing could ever 
possibly happen again? And if it did, I would seek to do the same thing 
again -- get the crime reported immediately, provide help, counsel and 
protection for the victim and families, and restore a climate of calm in 
which forgiveness and healing could begin to occur. But if the family 
involved in this new hypothetical case knew (and how could they not know?) 
what had happened to the /last /family who did what their pastor had asked, 
what do you think my chances are going to be?

You should encourage those who seek to do the right thing. You should not 
punish those who do the right thing. As a criminal, someone like Steven is 
being punished, as he ought to be. But you people (or rather, the small, 
malicious, and very vocal pack among you) have arranged to punish the 
victims, all while loudly proclaiming how interested you are in "protecting 
families." But if you really had their interests in mind, then why do you 
not do what they so reasonably asked, and shut up? When a family is thinking 
about reporting something like this, what might make them hesitate? Those 
who have experience with this (as I do) know that one of the big questions 
always concerns whether or not the process involved in reporting it could 
become as bad as the abusive experience itself. In this case, it has, thanks 
to Michael Metzler, and his apologists and enablers.

If I am counseling these hypothetical parents a year from now, should I 
print out all your posts, put them in a notebook, and ask the family to read 
through them? Full disclosure? If I say that I want you to report this, but 
"this will probably happen to you too, if you do," what effect do you think 
this would have on them? Take all the posts from Michael, Joan, Keely, 
Jackie, et al. and ask yourself -- could this kind of discussion occur about 
you? Yes, it probably would. If you asked them to stop it, please, would 
they? No, not a chance. Not if the situation provided them with a clear shot 
at Christ Church.

We are dealing with an out-of-control pack of ghouls. They are ghouls for 
different reasons. Michael's reasons are emotional, Bill London's are 
political, Keely's are theological, and Joan's are literary. But after the 
first twenty-four hours, when it initially looked as though the general 
pattern of posting was going to follow my pleading and drop the subject, all 
the old habits and antipathies then kicked in. The central subject and 
central concern was overlooked (the victims and their families), and your 
emotional renegades began bellowing about this and that, and demanding 
timelines and details. As Don Henley put it, "Kick 'em when they're up, kick 
'em when they're down." If any of you think that I am /incapable /of 
defending in detail what we did at every step of this story, you are 
mistaken. But I will not do that because of what it would do to the 
families. I have already been forced to talk about it to an extent that (in 
a decent community, one with an operating sense of shame) would have been 
unnecessary. I am convinced that since you clearly will not honor so basic a 
request as this, for me to stick around and upbraid you for it will simply 
inspire you to continue in your sadistic pattern.

And so this leads to the fax. If you think that this outrageous behavior has 
not made a lot of people angry, then you have really misjudged this thing. 
It is one thing to demand a "free speech" zone so that people can bash Bush, 
and liberals can pretend they are speaking truth to power. It is quite 
another to have an "accountability-free" zone that reserves the right to do 
to the victims of child abuse what a handful of you have done in this 
reprehensible display, and all on First Step's dime.

I know there are many of you who are not sympathetic with what is being done 
with the unmoderated space provided by First Step. Looking at the fax, that 
would appear to be an understatement. We keep thinking, surely they would 
draw the line at /this/. But then nothing happens, and the victims of child 
abuse are run through the FirstStepFreeSpeechGrinder.com. But one of the 
things that the broadband revolution is giving us (in increasing measure 
every year) is choices and options.

Douglas Wilson

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