[Vision2020] Doug Wilson: Thy Name is "Slippery"

Sat Jun 27 09:55:25 PDT 2015

*Doug Wilson: Thy name is “Slippery”*

 Wilson’s column and mine are appended below

So the Rebel Flag was used only in reenactments at Logos School with a
balance of Union and Confederate student “soldiers”?  (Tell us another
one!) Does this mean that the people at the 2007 picnic divided up for
Civil War games, too?  But the band Potatohead did not see a Union flag for
balance, did they?

While you were going around with your Confederate clipboard, did Doug Jones
go around with a Union clipboard for balance?  Was Jones’ views on Civil
War part of the reason why he left the Church, and presumably left town?  A
visiting conservative minister saw a Confederate flag in your office, but
failed to notice a Union battle flag.

Steve Wilkins, founding director of the League of the South, was more than
just a good friend.  He was co-author of the slavery booklet (the source of
the plagiarized sections), and you joined him writing for the
neo-Confederate journal *The* *Southern Partisan*. Calling yourself a
“paleo-Confederate” instead does not help your cause one bit.

You could have ended the controversy very easily, by agreeing with U. of
Wash. Professor Tracy McKenzie, a congregant at your own sister Christ
Church in Seattle, that your slavery booklet should be condemned.  Instead
you took on McKenzie, an expert on the ante-Bellum South, and wrote *Black
and Tan* in defense of your discredited views.

I will continue to remind you of your past as long as you remain so
intellectually dishonest and slippery about it.  The good people of the
Palouse need to be reminded of your outrageous views.

*His View: Find a better spokesman than Gier*

*By Doug Wilson *

Posted: Friday, June 26, 2015 12:00 am

Unfortunate is too mild a word to describe Nick Gier's most recent foray
into an old controversy (His View, Thursday). I do not mind a controversy
when controversy is absolutely necessary, but it really isn't called for in
this instance. Christ Church is a church that has many members who are
active in many aspects of our community life together. Most of our
involvement is welcomed by the community outside our church family, but
even more of it could be if we could persuade some diehard combatants to
lay down their arms.

Part of Gier's "argument" was to connect me to Steve Wilkins, who was once
connected to Michael Hill, who has done something before with the Council
of Conservative Citizens, who had a website that was cited by Dylann Roof
in his horrendous attempt to set off a race war. I am disappointed - if
Gier had just gone two more rounds he could probably have connected me to
Kevin Bacon. The only part of this that had any merit or substance is that
Steve is a friend of mine.

Gier also cited the Southern Poverty Law Center, the world's richest civil
rights organization ($300 million and counting), as a reliable source of
information about hate groups. They were the same group that had to
apologize this last February for putting Dr. Ben Carson, the famed
neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate, in their "extremist
file." The FBI's hate crimes Web page used to link to the SPLC, but they do
so no longer, which means the FBI appears to be quicker on the uptake than
Gier is.

There are a host of other scattershot errors in Gier's piece that would
cause me to sail past my word limit in trying to answer him - because
quoting out of context takes up significantly less space than providing the
needed context does. So let me give just one obvious example under this
heading. Gier cited a quotation from me in The Spokesman-Review, where I
"admitted" Confederate flags "have adorned office and school walls at
times." To take just one instance of our "outrageous" practices on this
score, I do admit that Logos School is a school, and they teach history
classes there, and in the history classes they have shown the children
pictures of episodes from the war. In those pictures, the Union forces have
had their Union flags and the Confederate forces have had their flags. When
someone reacts to this kind of thing, they are, perhaps - and I merely
offer it as a suggestion - grasping at straws.

As it happens, I was quoted yesterday in a CNN article on this subject.
They, unlike Gier, quoted me accurately. I said, "The Confederate flag can
mean that you are at a KKK rally, that you are looking at a truck decal in
a NASCAR rally parking lot, that you are at a Skynyrd concert, that you are
looking a commemorative calendar painted by a memorabilia artist, that you
are driving by a car dealership in rural Virginia or that you saw a photo
of Kanye West taking his confusions to a whole new level." As that list
makes plain, there are uses of the Confederate battle flag that we detest,
and there are uses that we don't detest. One of the uses I personally don't
detest would be that time I saw Joan Baez singing "The Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down" in front of one.

But Gier's very selective quotations were designed to make me (and our
church) look sympathetic to certain attitudes that we find detestable in
the extreme. We believe, as a matter of biblically informed conscience,
that racial malice and enmity is abhorrent to God, and we reject it as a
matter of principle. We believe Jesus Christ died to bring all the races
and tribes of men into one new man, established in Christ.

If the forces of tolerance in our community want to get away from their
intolerista reputation, I would suggest a better spokesman

than Nick Gier.

*His View: Christ Church, neo-Confederates, tolerance*

By Nick Gier

| Posted: Thursday, June 25, 2015 12:00 am

Many people have the misconception that those who take issue with Douglas
Wilson's Christ Church and New Saint Andrews College are condemning his
religious beliefs. For me and many others this is simply not true.

In December 2002, I invited NSA faculty and students to attend the regional
American Academy of Religion meeting, which took place on the University of
Idaho campus in May 2003. (One year, 40 percent of the papers were
presented by faculty from conservative evangelical schools.) Then NSA
President Roy Atwood, however, said they had "better things to do," and our
relations, fueled by heated debate about Wilson's booklet "Slavery As It
Was," got worse and worse.

When over 1,000 people signed the full-page ad "Not in Our Town" in this
newspaper in December 2003, the issue was not evangelical theology; rather,
it was Wilson's slavery booklet, in which he and his coauthor Steven
Wilkins state: "There has never been a multiracial society which has
existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world"
(page 24).

Wilkins was a founding director of the League of the South, which has been
declared a "white supremacist hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law
Center. LOS founder Michael Hill proposed an independent neo-Confederacy
of 15 states would have the duty to protect the values of Anglo-Celtic
culture from black Americans, who are "a compliant and deadly underclass."

The LOS organizes public protests in conjunction with the Council of
Conservative Citizens, whose website decries "negroes, queers and other
retrograde species of humanity." In his own manifesto Charleston shooter
Dylan Roof stated that, after he started reading the CCC website in 2012,
he "was never the same." He was particularly drawn to "pages upon pages of
black on white murders," which convinced him he had to start a race war
against all black people.

Two UI history professors took time from their busy schedules to refute the
slavery booklet paragraph by paragraph. It was later discovered that 20
percent of the booklet was lifted verbatim from Robert Fogel and Stanley
Engerman's "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery"
(1974).

In an interview with The SpokesmanReview (Oct. 22, 2007), Wilson admitted
"Confederate flags have adorned office and school walls at times." At a
2005 picnic attended by members of Wilson's organizations, the band Potato
Head refused to entertain when they saw the Confederate flag prominently
displayed.

Moscow's "intoleristas" proudly wear the name Wilson has given them, and
now we have big name allies all across the nation. WalMart, Ebay, Sears,
Target, Etsy and Amazon will no longer sell Confederate flags and
memorabilia. Although they have received last-minute rush orders, major
flag manufacturers will no longer produce a flag that divides people along
racial lines.

Alabama's governor has ordered four Confederate flags be removed from his
state Capitol. A bill has been introduced in the Mississippi legislature to
excise the Rebel Flag that stands prominently in the upper left corner of
the state's flag. Unfortunately, South Carolina's legislators will have to
muster a two-thirds vote to bring down this symbol of hate and bigotry
that flies high over their Capitol. In stark contrast, the state flag and
Old Glory flutter at half-mast.

In a 2007 essay "Take Down That Flag" in the Christ Church journal Credenda
Agenda, Douglas Jones, Wilson's former right-hand man, argues the defeat
of the Southern forces was obviously a sign of divine wrath. Instead of
repenting, neo-Confederates boast about "their proud legacy and dwell on
the sins of their accusers." Jones declares they should burn their flag and
wear the ashes as a sign of repentance. How many neo-Confederates among us
are ready to accept Jones' challenge?

Nick Gier taught philosophy and religion at the University of Idaho for 31
years and is president of the Idaho Federation of Teachers.

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20150627/12eae250/attachment-0001.html>