Civil Commotion

Clearwater Christian College is closing.

Dear Alumnus,

I regret to inform you that on Friday, June 5, 2015, the board of directors announced the closing of Clearwater Christian College. The challenges associated with the rising costs of higher education and declining enrollments have taken a toll on the institution to the point that closing our doors appears to be the only option. No new student will be permitted to enroll in classes. Appropriate plans are being finalized to assist students needing to transfer to other schools or programs. Remaining staff will be working diligently in the weeks to come to assist students and complete closure tasks. The time for Clearwater Christian College appears to be coming to close after almost 50 years of ministry.

[ … ]

Ho-hum. Reality always has the last word.

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has been criminally charged for failing to protect children from a priest it knew to be a sex abuser.

The charges stem from the archdiocese’s oversight of former priest Curtis Wehmeyer, who is now serving a prison term for abusing two boys while he was pastor of Blessed Sacrament Church in St. Paul.

“Today we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” said Ramsey County Attorney John Choi.

Yay!

The publicity beatings that Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert are taking just now are good examples of how good, decent, Godly conservative people are persecuted right here in the Good Ol’ U.S. of A.

On her radio program yesterday, Sandy Rios of the American Family Association said that Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert, who have both been accused of sexually abusing minors, are the victims of a conspiracy against conservatives.

[ … ]

She added: “Something should go off in someone’s head about the way in which conservatives, social conservatives, are being systematically targeted. It’s going to happen and it’s been happening for a very long time.”

[ … ]

“This is the kind of thing that is going to be happening to conservatives, just think of the Denny Hastert situation,” she said, citing the Duggar and Hastert abuse scandals as reasons that conservatives, whom she suggested are the targets of government surveillance, should oppose measures like the PATRIOT Act and the USA Freedom Act.

I say again: These oblivious fools truly don’t have any idea how squalid and pathetic they are.

Watching the latest breathless installment of the Duggar scandal on the news last evening, I unaccountably found myself thinking of the famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

What I haven’t heard any commentator mention yet is that, though the details vary from one instance and family to the next instance and family, there is nothing very interesting about the progression of the Duggar story; those of us have who given serious attention to abuse in religious environments know the all-but-invariable pattern inside-out: Rally around the offender, ignore or scorn the victim, turn criticism into a narrative about “the world’s” hatred of Christians.

Robert Jeffress, for instance, the pastor of FBC-Dallas, thinks there is a Lefty plot afoot:

Seriously: These small and stupid people are totally oblivious to the squalor of their behavior. And with far less publicity, on this very day, a drama similar to the Duggar story is playing-out in churches all across the country.