Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

August 24, 2014

The “Humor” Of Doug Wilson (And Why His Critics Just Have Hurt Feelings)

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 8:45 am

If there’s any person Wilson has hurt, it’s Jesus Christ, whose message he has turned into a hateful, smug, error-filled, bigoted primer on how to be irrevocably “predestined,” unless it turns out you’re not, while still taking pride in exhibiting rotten fruit contrary to those listed in Galatians 5.

He’s then managed to hurt thousands of people in Moscow, Idaho, who don’t want anything to do with a Jesus who’s in any way like Doug Wilson, and he’s been a heat-seeking missile of personal and direct harm to those unfortunates who find themselves in his flock. He can be, I’ll grant, a witty, puckish guy — in spite of or because of, depending on your level of overall maturity, his past fondness for what the Ancients called Titty Humor.

But, sadly, there’s not a damned thing funny about any of it — not even the lemming-like, lickspittle loyalty he demands from otherwise sane and/or intelligent men and their women who are champing at the bit to employ pretzel logic and heartbreaking earnestness to prove themselves worthy to their Master. The real Master, the LORD who asks us, lovingly, to not even try to impress Him, doesn’t find it amusing. The Day Doug Wilson and his feckless, beholden toadies are called to give an account of their lives to that LORD will, I guarantee you, not feature a shred of anything less than a heartbreaking, soul-crushing tragedy of profound loss as devoid of humor on that Day as his ministry is of wisdom and compassion on this one.

August 19, 2014

On Forgiveness

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 8:25 pm

Forgiveness coerced, forgiveness presumed, forgiveness-or-else, forgiveness as forgetting — none of these are righteous.

They’re the cudgel by which the offender keeps the offended in line. But forgiveness freely offered from a strong soul, a healing or healed soul, proffered from a position of strength that refuses to deny or diminish the original harm caused, refuses to countenance the self-serving lies the offender tosses out to mitigate what can never be lessened, is a powerful weapon. It’s not dependent or conditioned on the response or acknowledgement of the other; it’s made with full understanding of the wrong and its severity. This forgiveness stares unflinchingly at the truth, even as the forgiven scrambles to evade it or mocks the importance of it.

In the Christian story, it’s the forgiveness of Christ freely offered to those who sin against him; it’s also the standard for the forgiveness I am called to offer. I have been harmed by episodic offenses, while those whose experience with the filthy violence of patriarchy is more immediate and constant. It’s only in the Spirit that I’ve found strength to forgive. And it’s the Spirit, not me, not well-meaning bromides about the burden of nonforgiveness, that must provoke a person’s pardoning of the other. When that happens — when it’s Spirit-power and not political or personal pressure that draws forth forgiveness — reconciliation and restoration is possible on the personal level. And when that happens, when souls are restored and hearts are awakened unto peace, revolution happens.

And revolution is a good and necessary thing, like a cleansing breeze through rotten, dusty temples.

August 10, 2014

On How NOT To Counsel Rape Victims

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 5:00 pm

I’m really pretty sick of hearing anything from Doug Wilson, Moscow’s paleo-confederate patriarch supreme, because I find that his cluelessness only feeds his pomposity, and his pomposity only fuels his and his followers’ delusions of importance and relevance. But I will say this, in response to a recent article on his execrable Blog and Mablog:

When a woman is raped, she not only has the right but ought to be encouraged to view the evil of patriarchy as the motivating factor in her assault. She cannot afford the luxury of thinking that one bad guy harmed her and that such a thing, while tragic, is simply an instance of bad fortune — “hard providence,” in Wilsonspeak. She ought not be comforted with the false notion that rape is rare enough that she’ll never be assaulted again, and she must never be told that any fear of males that she develops is sinful. In short, she must never be even more inculcated in the idea of “benign masculinity” that, only in hers and a few other womens’ cases, spawned something evil. Above all, her recovery and response to what happened to her should never be, but, as Wilson demonstrates, too often is, overseen and evaluated by anyone other than Jesus Christ, for whom Wilson and other masculinist pastors are a miserable substitute.

Instead, and I write this as a woman well recovered from her rape in 1980, she must be surrounded by people who truly, in their hearts and heads, understand what happened and why. The “what happened” isn’t simply that a male person chose to violate her sexually; it’s that he chose, on his own volition and in response to his masculine socialization, to “colonize, penetrate, and conquer” a woman who didn’t want him. The words quoted above come from a horrid piece Wilson wrote about a year ago, words that illustrate perfectly that even “benign masculinity” and “Biblical patriarchy” are evil — never benign and never Biblical. Masculinity, which Wilson and his ilk defend almost to the point of obsession, is simply that part of the cultural hierarchy of gender that decides who is to rule and who is to be subject — or, who gets to rape and who gets raped. That is the “why” of rape: Males who have been socialized, either by a bombastic ass of a pastor or a knuckledragging secular bad-boy bully, into cultural masculinity feel absolutely entitled to “take” women, to harm them, use them, abuse them, and kill them. The difference between promoting a masculinity that says it abhors rape and the brotherhood of rapists, abusers, molesters, and murderers, is one of degree, not of kind.

My healing from what happened to me came through Jesus Christ. His Godhood, not his maleness, healed me; for a time, even that Incarnational reality — that he was born male — was hard for me. I am now, as you all know, on the cusp of my 30th year of marriage to a man I adore, a man who rejects the cultural socialization of masculinity that he was raised with and who strives, like all other decent males, to live a life of love, peace, and humility. Nevertheless, my husband wouldn’t dare counsel a victimized woman on how to respond to or heal from her rape, because, unlike Wilson, he knows that he is not qualified; his advice is neither invited nor welcomed. Rather, my husband lives a life that is in every way a conscious rejection of patriarchy, and while he’s aware that the world is nevertheless geared toward his success over that of others, he does what he can to mitigate his privilege.

Wilson, of course, believes that his white male privilege is a gift from the gracious hand of God, not the refuse of a toxic, polluted, patriarchal world. It doesn’t occur to the happily penetrating and colonizing moral dwarf that Wilson is that rape, like every evil, happens in context. That context is not, as he would say, a homosexual-accepting culture or a feminized Church. It’s not “father hunger” or “bitterness,” the two things on which he blames everything but — perhaps — the Challenger disaster. And it’s not one rogue reprobate, a bad seed who commits the violent fornication that is rape.

No, the context from which rape springs is exactly the context Wilson thrives in — a world of strict sexual hierarchy that celebrates what must never be celebrated: The conquering of a woman by any man. He is as much a part of the puzzle called “Why Do Men Rape?” as is the zipper fly that unleashed the weapon. A woman raped or otherwise abused by a man MUST recognize and reject the model of patriarchy and masculinity that, for millennia, has cheerfully dictated that she, by virtue of being born female, is the One Who Gets Raped, and the one born male, Covenant or reprobate, is the one who, satiated on the rape culture Wilson embraces, Gets To Rape. And expressing regret that he did so, and expressing anger that he sinned that way, is rather like raising your child in a candy store with no restrictions and then lamenting that he ends up with rotten teeth.

I would turn to Doug Wilson for advice only if I ran out of pejoratives for people I don’t like. That he counsels young women, and has influence over young men, is utterly chilling. That he would dare analyze rape and advise women to not drift into questioning the context that brought it on is horrifying. There is no healing brought by Wilson and his merry masculine men. Only the Human Holy One, Christ Jesus, who came to reverse the effects of the Fall, is able to set unsteady feet back on stable ground and to nurse broken hearts unto health.

And he, the Lord Jesus, won’t use a defense of masculinity to do it.

August 3, 2014

If You’re Gonna Talk About Mark Driscoll, You Must Consider Doug Wilson

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 10:49 pm

There’s been much chatter about revelations that as disgusting and wrong Mars Hill Pastor Mark Driscoll is when he’s playing bad-boy megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll, he’s even worse when he’s online, writing vile and misogynistic things under a pseudonym.  Sane people ought to readily agree that this man ought never to have been a pastor in anything even remotely connected the Gospel, but too many leave it at that — Driscoll is an undisciplined jerk, and sometimes you get one like that. But the Driscolls of the world don’t emerge from a vacuum, and they’re never alone in their commitment to offense. And as someone who has engaged with another “bad boy” of evangelicalism, Doug Wilson, I can say that the same foul, bitter, twisted tree of patriarchy has given us both men.

Of course, Mark Driscoll shouldn’t have been ever considered a minister of the Gospel, ever, under any circumstances, and yet for the past decade he’s been celebrated as a welcome breath of masculine fresh air. Note: Masculine fresh air has never brought anything good. But those of us in Moscow, where Driscoll has spoken at the invitation of Premier Patriarch Douglas Wilson, know that Wilson has been a blight on the Body of Christ for much longer than Driscoll has. Wilson, in fact, has been an encouragement to Driscoll; it would not be too far out to suggest that Wilson has provided a lot of the fuel the wreck known as Driscoll has run on. That Driscoll’s star is falling, as it ought to, simply means that Wilson will disavow any particular affection or connection to him.

So why mention, in an article about one disgraceful “minister,” another one? Because most of you don’t know about Douglas Wilson and thus don’t know why I write about him as much as I do. But for every pseudonymical comment Driscoll makes as William Wallace II, below, Wilson has an equal — and under his own name. Male homosexuals are, in Wilson’s twisted, warped world, not only an obsession, but favored with words like “sodomite,” “catamite,” “fudge-packers,” “gaytards,” and those who “do anal honors.” (Notably, during his debate with gay activist Andrew Sullivan last year, he chickened out when I challenged him, in front of 800 people, to show some integrity and call the man standing next to him one of those names). Wilson has called liberal women ugly because our men don’t love us; female pastors are nothing more to him than either the smartest lesbian in seminary, or hermaphroditic amoeba-types. While pretending to defend the hard work of Mexican laborers, he laments “the halcyon days when we could just say ‘wetbacks.'” He wrote a book, Southern Slavery As It Was, that defended slavery in the antebellum South as a positive experience for the slaves, who were provided “excellent health care,” “paid” extra on holidays, and were experiencing, through the benign example of their Christian owners, the “most harmonious” multi-racial society the world has ever seen — and who were generally better off than Black families are now. I’ll give you a moment to run to the bathroom and vomit, and if you want to read this piece of shit, I’ll happily provide a copy of it. Wisely, perhaps, his vanity press has discontinued it.

Oh, and it was just over three years ago that he performed the lavish wedding of a pitiful young woman who just wanted to “have it” — courtship, engagement, and wedding — to a serial, convicted pedophile, Steven Sitler of Moscow, and who did it knowing that the court had deemed Sitler to be at high risk of reoffending and that he would be sent to prison for the rest of his wretched life if ever left alone for even a few minutes with his own children, should he be able to father any, or any others. Katie, who pleaded with one of Wilson’s elders to help her find someone, was swept off her feet by the dashing pedophile and agreed to marry him after their second date. Search “Sitler” on my blog, www.keelyprevailingwinds.com, for my five-part rebuke of Wilson.

So while I would place myself in front of anyone who wanted to visit Driscoll’s church, I’ve got a far worse example here in Moscow. Just this week, I’ve been called a stubborn, bitter old donkey for taking him on, I’ve been called on to produce “the fruit of my life” to a Wilson supporter, and told that I’m obsessed. I’ve got the biggest church organization in my life convinced that I’m a deranged, apostate, sodomite-loving, ugly, unloved, unhinged man-hating sentimental, feminist, loon, and the field of nanotechnology cannot even measure how little I care.

My life is a witness for Jesus Christ. I’ll fight to the death those who in His name say and commit atrocities. If that surprises any of you, I guess you haven’t been paying attention. But if you live in Moscow, you’d better wake up. There’s a snake in our midst, a wolf roaming the streets, and the Jesus he represents and imitates isn’t anyone you want to know.

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