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

July 24, 2012

Don’t Judge His Words — Just The People Who Find Them Disgusting, Femina Girls Plead

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 11:04 pm

Now that you’ve read why this blog is “so focused on” and “utterly obsessed with” Douglas Wilson, it’s time to turn again to the controversy once again at hand — that is, the swirling tumult in the blogosphere regarding not only Wilson’s “blunt instrument” theory of heterosexual, penetrative, males-as-initiators, females-as-receptors sex, but also his shameful inability to handle criticism from even the most respected, conservative, Christian academics.

Dr. Anthony Bradley, a professor at King’s College, has written at length in recent days about his disgust with Wilson’s paleo-Confederate, putatively Biblical, defense of slavery.  Interestingly enough, I re-read just last week, before the fracas over what coitus says about God’s plan for power-over gender relations, Wilson’s and Wilkins’ “monograph,” “Southern Slavery As It Was,” later sanitized into Wilson’s “Black and Tan.”  I was as sickened then as I was the first time; may God grant that such idiocy and hatefulness never cease to affect me that way.

If you’ve been reading Prevailing Winds for any length of time, you know that Moscow has, since 2004, been alight with anguish and dismay over Wilson’s almost unimaginably stupid discussion of how slavery in the antebellum South was not in every way sinful, in some ways permissible, and in a few ways perfectly laudable, what with the decent health care, warm and affectionate relationship between the enslaved and the enslaver, and the unparalleled, he says, picture of harmonious inter-racial cooperation that Southern slavery brought about.  It wasn’t perfect, he says, but it wasn’t, this owning and abuse of kidnapped Black people, as bad as godless liberals — the abolitionists then and the pro-gay, pro-choice lobby today — have made it out to be.

Yeah, he said that.

And if you’re new to Prevailing Winds, or haven’t heard about this, I’ll give you a moment to recover.  This man, while lacking in formal historical and theological training AND even an apparent semblance of decency and sensitivity, stands solidly behind the most irresponsibly reckless, most anti-Biblical and falsely academic article I’ve ever read.  And now Dr. Bradley, in analyzing Wilson’s apparent inability to acknowledge, much less learn from, past errors, expressed his disgust over Wilson’s view of slavery — not as a Black man, I imagine, and not solely as an academic, but as a Christian man who recognizes, as does anyone else with a quickened soul, the foulness of Wilson’s defense of what must never have been permitted, much less defended.

So now Dr. Bradley has become the focus of Doug and his defenders — including the “Femina Girls,” his wife Nancy and his daughters Bekah and Rachel, who have lugubriously pointed out the cruel injustice perpetrated against their husband and father but who, in the face of such vicious persecution, valiantly assure their other Girls that they’re clinging to God in the midst of their persecution.  These are days of darkness directed toward Wilson World, Nancy says, and only by the grace of God will they survive this new outpouring of nastiness and lies directed, yea again, at Doug.  It’s just that they’re really perplexed as to why such a nice man as Dr. Bradley would join in with the malcontents, God-haters, lesbians, and liars who, after reading primary-source documents in Doug’s own words and the analysis of academics who draw conclusions from Doug’s own words, would be so mean to him — based simply on their disgust over Doug’s own words, regardless of whatever else they may have in common.

Non-defenders of Wilson realize that this embrace of “slander” against him and courage in the face of “persecution” entirely of his own making is a common tactic he assigns to his followers, apparently unaware that nothing that’s true can therefore be slanderous, and things like “he’s a racist, he’s icky, he’s a buffon,” etc., aren’t slanderous, either.  (And when written, the word for what the Girls believe is being done to him is “libel.”)  Either way, though, people’s disgust over his words isn’t slander, libel, surprising, or unjustified — which generally means nothing to those eager to defend their leader.  Nancy, Bekah, and Rachel, however, are more than his “followers” — their family, they’re his Girls, and they’re, well, perplexed.

But confusion wafts from the tidy kitchen of virtue that is Femina. ‘Tis a real mystery, it is, that a Christian academic like Dr. Bradley would join other thinking people in their outrage over Wilson’s claims about slavery and race relations. Nancy says she has “no idea why this nice man thought mining from the other team would make my husband look bad. Any fool could rummage around on the internet to find stuff like this. We expect more of actual professors.”

That’s good, I suppose, since many of us expect more from actual pastors — and even self-designated ones — than we’ve gotten from Wilson, so I can sort of see her point.  But Nancy and the Girls seem unable to imagine a universe in which horrid ideas and sloppy research are reviled both by Christians and by non-Christians — and even lesbians, who occupy a great deal of their Femina consternation.  It appears a horrific thing to them that a man like Dr. Bradley would “hate” Wilson’s position when, lo and behold, some atheists, liberals, and meddlers do, too.  The Girls are bewildered.  Doesn’t he know the political and religious beliefs of some of her husband’s critics?  Isn’t he aware of their sexual proclivities and private lives?  Can’t he see that Wilson’s very own words exist throughout the Internet not as specific, clear, defined, primary-source documents but, instead, hover through a gaseous cloud of Doug-hating that not only obscures but excuses them?

Dr. Bradley, you used to be such a NICE man . . .

It’s time, really, to set the Girls straight.  The thought that obnoxious words would be judged solely on their merit, or lack thereof, rather than by the demographics of those who recoil from them seems not to connect with the classically-trained-and-teaching Wilson Girls.  That makes their defense of Hubby and Dad somewhat more than lacking.

It makes it really kind of sad.

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