Many of you, if you don’t live in Moscow, will find much of what I’m writing here beyond comprehension. You will read it and hope you simply have misunderstood; you won’t want to believe that it’s true. And while all of you who do live here and are familiar with the situation I’m describing ought to be sickened, it appears that too few of you are, and that a marital, spiritual, and familial train wreck will, indeed, commence in about three weeks between two Kirk kids in the expansive sanctuary of another local church.
There are some links you out-of-towners needs to check out before you read what I’m posting here. The first is news gladly trumpeted by two young Christians, Steven and Katie, whose breathless, moment-by-moment account of their whirlwind courtship and wedding plans can be found here: http://june11eleven.com/
Now, other than the panting immaturity expressed by the fiancee’ and the certainty that as Kirk/New St. Andrews students, theirs will be a ceremony featuring her promise to “obey” him and his putative Biblical obligation to extract that obedience from her, what possible reason would I have to comment on, much less passionately object to, the circumstances of their upcoming wedding and the til-death-do-them-part it ushers in? After all, my previous post calls marriage a holy, beautiful thing. Why would I care who marries whom, particularly if I know neither the young woman or the young man?
Really, isn’t there quite enough going on in the world? Why involve myself in this?
I can only explain that after I direct you to
http://www.tomandrodna.com/CR_2005_02027/. There you will find some sickening information about Steven Sitler, the dream guy Christ Church Elder Ed Iverson set Katie Travis up with after she expressed heartwrenching sorrow that the whole courtship/engagement/marriage “thing” hadn’t, at 23, yet happened for her, as it had for practically all of her other friends. The website, which contains voluminous legal documentation, is as foul and disturbing as Steven and Katie’s website is hopeful and breezy. That’s because it shows, with primary-source legal documents, what many of Wilson’s foes here and elsewhere know to be true:
Groom-to-be Steven Sitler, the guy, well-known to Iverson, he zeroed in on as the answer to Katie’s longing, is a convicted pedophile.
The link will illustrate, in necessary but grotesque detail, that Steven Sitler is a man who confessed in 2006 to manual-genital and oral-genital contact with a kindergarten-aged little girl, was prosecuted for that crime, served less than a year in jail, and, before pleading guilty, acknowledged as part of the plea deal many other instances of pedophilia against children in three states prior to his being caught in the act in 2005 with the child of a family he boarded with while at NSA. Steven, who was caught in the act of sexual voyeurism less than a month after his release from jail, is on lifetime probation and is not and never will be allowed to be around children, any children, unless directly supervised by a “competent, mature” adult.
For the rest of his life, under threat of spending the rest of his life in prison. And a Christian elder figured he could fix the desperation of a sweet young woman by presenting this very sick man as the answer to her romantic woes and domestic dreams.
Katie Travis, who came to NSA from Fallon, Nevada, is smitten with Steven; her lament over being without a suitor at the ripe old age of 23, as well as her paean to the joy of a whirlwind courtship — they were engaged on their second date after her daddy approved Steven’s request to court her — suggests that she is somewhat less than demonstrably mature. Further, the Kirk’s emphasis on early and continual proof of marital fecundity means that she will be serving Steven a supply of potential victims, putting him at tremendous, if not virtually inevitable, risk of re-offending, but also putting her own eventual children at the horrendous likelihood of being molested by their own father.
Let me be abundantly clear here, knowing that as I’ve already angered my Kirk audience, I’m likely now to anger my secular one: I believe that there is no sin — none — that my LORD cannot forgive. I accept Steven Sitler as my brother in Christ if he has sincerely accepted Christ as his Savior, and I don’t hate him. I don’t want him killed, I don’t want him to treated like filth or harmed in any way, and I don’t want him to re-offend again, for the safety of the children in my community as well as for his own well-being. I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the sincerity of his repentance; I will not, no matter who it offends, doubt the truth of God’s Word. If the tomb was empty that first Easter morning, then all of Steven’s sins are forgiven — as are all of mine. I don’t hate him and I have no interest in stirring up hatred against him. I love him.
But love must be undergirded by truth. And the truth is that pedophilia is not “adultery,” and it’s not just another, perhaps simply rarer, form of sexual sin. This isn’t run-of-the-mill fornication, or unchecked masturbation, or a thing for pornography. Pedophilia is a distinct and, short of the miraculous, life-long preference for children, from infants and toddlers to pre-pubescents, as sexual partners. As heterosexuals have a marked sexual preference for the opposite sex and homosexuals, the object of much snorting derision on the part of Wilson and his ilk, have a marked sexual preference for members of the same sex, pedophiles — with much greater exclusivity than hetero- or homosexuals — demonstrate a preference for children as sexual partners. Adult heterosexual and homosexual relationships are consensual; if not, they cease to be sexual and are, then, examples of the violent crime of rape. By definition, children cannot give consent to sexual activity with adults — and yet regardless of the degree of pleasure or fondness felt by the child, pedophilia is always a crime, always a sin, and always a pathology. Marriage won’t cure Steven, but it’ll make it a hell of a lot more likely that he re-offends, and that he does so, in Wilson parlance, as his own childrens’ “priest” before God.
That shows precious little care for precious little people. It shows breathtakingly cynical disregard for Katie, only slightly less for Steven, and demonstrates not only abysmal judgment but a staggering contempt for marriage unbecoming even the most craven Vegas-chapel mobster.
The recklessness of encouraging this marriage is beyond comprehension. And it’s hard to overlook the filthy hypocrisy it represents, either. Wilson and his elders detest the idea of “sodomite marriage,” but Iverson encourages a desperate young girl to seek out a convicted pedophile, someone whose primary sexual attraction is to little kids, as a one-flesh heterosexual, marital soulmate — and at this writing, Wilson is conducting the ceremony. Wilson and the Christ Church/Trinity Reformed/Greyfriars/NSA empire he heads deplore abortion, but Iverson has enthusiastically arranged the circumstances under which Katie Travis’ and Steven Sitler’s as-yet conceived children will be born into a family where their daddy has demonstrated that he is a sick individual who has acknowledged more than the single case of genital contact with children for which he was prosecuted. Finally, Iverson and Wilson, who subscribe to an extreme patriarchal theology by which the father, as head of the household, not only represents God to his children but the family, including his adult wife, to God, show no compunction whatsoever in helping to bring about a household wherein it is virtually a statistical certainty that Dad-as-picture-of-God will asphyxiate any possible trust his children will have in their Heavenly Father.
And all because Katie felt like she’d been on the shelf too long, and Steven needed to be set on the right track. The question here isn’t why a pretty young thing like Katie isn’t married yet, Nancy Wilson’s latest book notwithstanding (see Canon Press, Wilson’s literary vanity project; I believe it’s item F-116, if your tolerance for 1950s sexism is greater than mine). The question is how in God’s name a sincere young Christian woman like Katie can have her deepest longing for love and marriage become fodder for the machinations of a couple of pompous buffoons eager to show that their idea of marriage is infinitely, eternally, more important than any pastoral duty they have to the two young people being shoved into it, or to the children heartbreakingly likely to suffer from it.
And that, dear reader, is a question I will very soon be publicly asking Iverson. However, for now, because I just checked in to Blog and Mablog, I will set aside incredulity and ask Doug Wilson if he really, truly, believes that “pomosexuals” (I’m guessing he sees me as one of ’em) believe children are off-limits to adult sexual activity simply because our sexual-ethic compass is so perversely skewed to the left that anything goes as long as we’re not personally, you know, icked out by it.
Here’s the deal, Doug: It’s about children and millstones, not your lashing out at critics and homo-lovers. You have my prayers and my pity. I just hope you read up on the millstone thing before you sink.