Important Blog Articles Related to Doug Wilson, Christ Church, and Convicted Pedophiles: Steven Sitler and Jamin Wight

Joseph, you have changed my mind on at least one point — I was laboring at not interacting with you guys directly because I did not want to give more fodder to our mutual adversaries, and I did not want anyone to think that a fight had broken out between us. But I appreciate how you all have sought to express your love for us and for our work in the midst of this disagreement, as we love you all. And I also realize that you don’t believe that you are undercutting us in the long run. Even if we are initially unhappy with what you say, in the long run you hope that we will see the point of it.

But here is the problem — first in a comment above, and then with what I think is the source confusion for all such comments in your post. Somebody said in the thread above that Steven Sitler re-offended. But there is no reason for saying this. He has not re-offended. That is a factual error that is now in wide circulation, and it is a factual error that is doing real damage to real people in real time. The disagreement before the judge is over whether certain possible indicators are worrisome enough to more strictly define or restrict the terms of Steven’s probation. It is not whether he should go to prison again for a re-offense. A large problem is created when many people are talking about a particular case like this and they don’t have the facts.

Now here is why I think this error is grounded in the reasoning of your post. You write as though we have the definition of sex offender on an on/off switch when what we really have is a very big dimmer switch. There is a category of offender out there that would cause me to amen everything you say above. The fifty-year old creeper hanging around playgrounds for thirty years is an easy case. There are cases where I would absolutely refuse to perform a wedding. But there is also a thirteen-year-old boy who got his sister to lift her shirt for him three times. Let us postulate that this is all that happened, no more than that. Now can this boy marry? His sin was serial. It was incestuous in spirit. It was definitely sexual. It was truly sinful.

The problem is that when you use words like predator, grooming, serial, and the like, you have to define your terms and establish the line between those definitions and cases which are similar, but not the same.

Now let us agree — as I assume we would — on two cases on either end of this dimmer switch. Nobody on your session or ours would perform a wedding on one end, and everybody would on the other. Factors to include would be age at the time of the offense, the number of victims, the heinousness of the sexual violation, time clean since repentance, etc. There is a line somewhere in between where we would all have to make a judgment call, and we might differ about that call. But when we differed, we would all agree on where the line was precisely, and we would know the nature of our disagreement. We would likely be able to come to that agreement because we would be talking about a hypothetical case, with the stipulated facts equally understood by both sides of the question.

But in the Steven Sitler case, I don’t think you all have your facts right. I believe that you all, if you were confronted with an identical case, would do something very much like what we have done. You are saying you wouldn’t, but I don’t think that is true.

When you say you wouldn’t perform a wedding that had 7x troublesome factors in it, one kind of disagreement would be if we said that we would totally do a 7x wedding. But a different kind of disagreement — the kind we are currently in — is a difference where you say you couldn’t see doing a 7x wedding, and we say that we couldn’t either, but that this is a 4x case.

When Bayly Blog first published a very nice statement of support for us, that was great. You weren’t saying that you knew the case, or the details of the case. You were saying you knew us. Such deference is an orderly and biblical way of proceeding. But when you reversed course and differed with our handling of this particular case, this can no longer be a matter of deference. Now you have to be in possession of the facts. You say this was a 7x, we were on the scene and say it was a 4x. When that kind of situation arises, it is the facts that matter. When we are discussing a hypothetical, it is the reasoning that matters, and we have no advantage over you. When we come to a particular case, the facts matter very much, and we have a great advantage over you. Why? We have the facts. We were there. We lived through it. We are up to speed.

So then, I would want to start asking you questions. What is the name of the judge, and was it the same judge who first sentenced Steven? Why didn’t the other victims testify? After he was first busted, how many of the victims were revealed by Steven, and how many came forward themselves? Under the terms of his probation, how often does Steven have to take a polygraph test? What are the terms of his probation? When did his offenses first begin and under what conditions? Did Steven in fact re-offend? What do these periodic uproars do to the victims and their families? I could go on for quite a while, but you get the drift. Now let us assume the possibility that these and other such questions could move the 7x in your mind down to a 5x. Is that possible? Could we conceivably find ourselves in a 5x/4x disagreement?

If that is possible, and I think that it manifestly is, then I would question the wisdom of publicly reversing course the way you did. As Keith pointed out above, it has provided a goodly amount of ammo for use against us. We are now seeing people praise Bayly Blog to the skies, people who would ordinarily rather be dead in a ditch than do that. Why? Because it harms us.

So there it is. We wouldn’t mind a necessary rebuke, even in the midst of battle, if we had erred grievously and were about to commit a disastrous mistake. And I know that you thought that this is what you were doing. But it wasn’t. And that means that we have to say something to you all about it, even in the midst of battle.

We love you guys. But because we all care about such things, I say this in the manliest spirit possible.