Category: Religion

Today’s Ray Of Hope: Harvard Gets A Clue

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— Wombat-socho


“Despair is a sin.” – J.E.Pournelle


This should actually have gone up yesterday, but I spent most of the day waiting for my truck to be worked on and am not much interested in trying to make posts from my cellphone, bolshy great phablet that it is. It’s actually better for having waited a day, since now I can point you to Da Tech Guy’s excellent post on the Eucharistic Adoration held Monday night at MIT’s chapel, and the consequent mass at St. Paul’s in Cambridge, which were a protest to the Black Mass scheduled to be held at Harvard. You should go read it now, enjoy the many interviews Pete did with (among others) former mayor of Boston and ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn, and check out the even more numerous pictures. Throw money at Da Tip Jar while you’re there.


Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I find it significant in this time of “anything goes” religious and anti-religious practice that the people of Boston and Cambridge stood up in great numbers and said “This far and no farther.” The Black Mass was not only protested by local folks but by thousands of students and faculty at Harvard itself, and whatever failures of nerve Harvard President Drew Faust may have shown in the past, I think it took a bit of courage to attend the Adoration and the Mass. Andrew Breitbart is often quoted as saying “Politics is downstream from culture,” and is it too much to hope for that the Silent Majority has finally grown sick of hipsters mocking their religion and pretending to play at Satanism to shock the bourgeoisie? As Pete points out, the outcry was enough for the club originally sponsoring the Black Mass to withdraw its sanction and with it, the use of Harvard space. Some sources say that the event was eventually held off-campus at a Chinese restaurant; others say the property owner refused to rent the space. One thing is clear: there was no Black Mass held at the college that once was known for training Congregationalist preachers.


Boko Haram and the Jihad in Africa

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The #BringBackOurGirls Twitter hashtag — online activism about the plight of girls abducted by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria — has been embraced by numerous celebrities, including Alyssa Milano. This situation has gained worldwide attention and highlights a reality that American media have in recent years deliberately ignored: The persistent menace of violent Islamic jihad in sub-Saharan Africa.

If the news of the Boko Haram abductions was shocking, it was because the American media have been so busy promoting the Obama administration’s narrative that, since the death of Osama bin Laden, the threat of Islamic terrorism has essentially ended. This narrative is politically convenient for Democrats, but as with most such narratives, it’s a gigantic lie. There are still many millions of Muslims in the world who hate us and want us all dead, and many of them are willing to take up arms to accomplish that goal.

Today, First Lady Michelle Obama will highlight the Boko Haram abductions in the weekly White House radio address, and I guarantee you in advance that the words “Muslim” and “Islam” will not be part of her script. American news media are willing accomplices in this dishonest propaganda, habitually referring to Boko Haram as “militants” or “rebels” (not terrorists, you see) and, as to the religious orientation of Boko Haram, they might as well be rogue Episcopalians for what you could gather from most media reports. Meanwhile, in Nigeria . . .

Damning testimonies gathered by Amnesty International reveal that Nigerian security forces failed to act on advance warnings about Boko Haram’s armed raid on the state-run boarding school in Chibok which led to the abduction of more than 240 schoolgirls on April 14-15.
After independently verifying information based on multiple interviews with credible sources, the organization today revealed that the Nigerian security forces had more than four hours of advance warning about the attack but did not do enough to stop it.
“The fact that Nigerian security forces knew about Boko Haram’s impending raid, but failed to take the immediate action needed to stop it, will only amplify the national and international outcry at this horrific crime,” said Netsanet Belay, Amnesty International’s Africa Director, Research and Advocacy. . . .
Amnesty International has confirmed through various sources that Nigeria’s military headquarters in Maiduguri was aware of the impending attack soon after 7:00 p.m. on April 14, close to four hours before Boko Haram began their assault on the town.
But an inability to muster troops — due to poor resources and a reported fear of engaging with the often better-equipped armed groups — meant that reinforcements were not deployed to Chibok that night. The small contingent of security forces based in the town — 17 army personnel as well as local police — attempted to repel the Boko Haram assault but were overpowered and forced to retreat. . . .

Read the rest. When the terrorists — oops, I meant to say militants — are better armed than the army, you’ve got a problem.

But where are the feminists who made #WarOnWomen and #RapeCulture into such trendy phenomena? Why aren’t feminists sounding the alarm about the dangers Islamic jihad poses to girls and women worldwide? Because our so-called “feminists” in America are merely the handmaidens of the Democrat Party, promoting whatever phony “issues” will help elect more Democrats and, as such are part of the same propaganda operation where the Obama administration and its media enablers refuse to call Boko Haram what they really are: Islamic terrorists. And just in case anyone is naive about what doctrines of the Prophet these rapists with AK-47s are imposing on their young captives, Phyllis Chesler is here to enlighten you:

On April 14, 2014, Boko Haram . . . captured three hundred Christian and Muslim Nigerian schoolgirls to become their sex and domestic slaves. The Muslim fundamentalists swooped down upon them as they were learning in a “forbidden” government secular school. . . .
The world media calls this a “kidnapping” in Nigeria. It is not a “kidnapping.” It is the face of Jihad, the way of Jihad. Boko Haram are not holding these girls for ransom, they are not willing to return them for money. They already view the girls as their God-given booty, and as sale-able property. . . .
The Christian girls will be raped, converted to Islam, and then, like the Muslim girls, “married” to one of their captors. Some will be trafficked into the sex trade, which is pandemic throughout Africa and the Muslim Middle East. . . .
Please understand: Boko Haram are the Nigerian Taliban. Like their Pakistani and Afghan counterparts, they oppose education for girls and would rather marry and impregnate them instead — for Allah’s sake.

Schoolgirls are being raped in the name of Allah and Mohammed, and there was ample warning of the danger: I wrote about Boko Haram in December 2012 (“Islamists Target African Christians“) and in January 2014 (“Islam’s Terrorist African Caliphate“).

But the Democrat-dominated media won’t mention Islam and won’t call Boko Haram “terrorists” because, so far as our journalistic establishment is concerned, the real enemy are always Republicans.

UPDATE: Dana in the comments informs us that my prophecy was correct — no mention of Islam in Michelle Obama’s radio address about the Armed African Girl-Rapers of Unknown Motive.

 

It’s Completely Out of Control Now

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Having previously noted a guy who got fired — fired! — for a Tweet — a Tweet! — now we can report that a black Christian minister may lose his day job in California because of his sermons:

Pasadena city officials placed Public Health Director Eric Walsh on temporary paid administrative leave Thursday after they learned of controversial statements he had made about homosexuality and evolution in online videos and audio clips.
In sermons uploaded to various websites, Walsh, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher, calls evolution “a religion created by Satan,” compares Disney to a “dark empire” of superstition and witchcraft, and criticizes homosexuality.
Walsh’s comments came to the city’s attention after he replaced Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black as Pasadena City College’s commencement speaker, said city spokesman William Boyer.
College officials said they replaced Black because they found stolen photographs of him and an ex-boyfriend engaged in sexual acts on Internet gossip sites, according to the school newspaper, the PCC Courier.
“With the porno professor and the sex scandals we’ve had on campus this last year, it just didn’t seem like the right time for Mr. Black to be the speaker,” PCC Board of Trustees President Anthony Fellow told the Courier.
Fellow was referring to former professor Hugo Schwyzer, who invited adult film stars to speak in a class on pornography and admitted to affairs with his students.
In a letter to the school newspaper, Black accused college administrators of attempting to shame him for his sexuality. He urged students to speak out, and soon a member of the group Students for Social Justice found some of Walsh’s videos online.
“We very quickly realized that there were a lot of communities that would be offended by Dr. Walsh,” said Sarah Belknap, a fourth-year student and member of Students for Social Justice.
The group compiled a list of Walsh’s controversial public statements, then published excerpts on Facebook and emailed them to media outlets.
“We were just so shocked that he was saying these things,” said Kelly Camacho, another student in the group. “This was even worse, to have this person as [Black’s] replacement, of all people.”

“Of all people”! In case you don’t know, Dustin Lance Black’s name has been mentioned in connection with the Hollywood pedophile scandal swirling around X-Men director Bryan Singer. Just “mentioned,” I say, and any suspicion of criminal activity is only a matter of allegations at this point. However, a notorious fondness for gay sex with teenage boys is less controversial in California now than, say, being a Christian who believes that homosexuality is a sin.

Obviously, “Students for Social Justice” prefers the boy-banging Hollywood guy to the black Christian preacher and, in raising a ruckus about it, managed to get the black guy suspended from his job — yeah, that’s a big win for “Social Justice” there.

(Hat-tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)

 

What Kind of ‘Militants’ Are They?

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Probably radical Lutherans, I’d guess:

For two weeks, retired teacher Samson Dawah prayed for news of his niece Saratu, who was among more than 230 schoolgirls snatched by Boko Haram militants in the north-eastern Nigerian village of Chibok. Then on Monday the agonising silence was broken.
When Dawah called together his extended family members to give an update, he asked that the most elderly not attend, fearing they would not be able to cope with what he had to say. “We have heard from members of the forest community where they took the girls. They said there had been mass marriages and the girls are being shared out as wives among the Boko Haram militants,” Dawah told his relatives.
Saratu’s father fainted; he has since been in hospital. The women of the family have barely eaten. “My wife keeps asking me, why isn’t the government deploying every means to find our children,” Dawah said. The marriage reports have not been confirmed officially, and rely on eyewitnesses.
The 14 April abduction of the girls — students aged between 16 and 18 who were sitting a physics paper at their school, one of a handful in troubled Borno state that had opened specially for final exams — shocked a nation inured to violence during a five year-insurgency. . . .

You see we’re now four paragraphs into a story about these girl-raping “militants” who have fought a “five-year insurgency” in Nigeria, and yet there is not a word to indicate what the “Boko Harm militants” are all about. Spoiler alert: You can read all the way through the Guardian article and never get even a clue that Boko Haram is also known as “The Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad” (Jama’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad), a terrorist organization founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002, which “seeks to establish a ‘pure’ Islamic state ruled by sharia law.”

So, 250 teenage schoolgirls are kidnapped and reportedly forced into Islamic “marriage” to their terrorist captors — a practice justified by reference to the Koran and other Muslim teachings —  and these violent girl-rapers are just “militants,” you see.

“It’s unbearable. . . . The abduction of our
children and the news of them being married off is
like hearing of the return of the slave trade,” said
Yakubu Ubalala, whose 17- and 18-year-old daughters
Kulu and Maimuna are among the disappeared.

Thanks, Militants of the Religion No Liberal Dares to Name!

 

Lawyer for ‘Patriarchy’ Pervert Says Accuser ‘Is Just After a Paycheck’

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Doug Phillips and his wife Beall (left); Lourdes Torres (right)

The Doug Phillips sex scandal has reached a new low, now that the disgraced homeschooling leader and “biblical patriarchy” advocate has unleashed his lawyer to smear Phillips’ accuser Lourdes Torres-Manteufel as a dishonest money-grubber:

Long time home schooling leader and former Boerne church official Doug Phillips is fighting back today against allegations raised by his former nanny that he ‘groomed her to be his sex object.’
“This more seems like an attempt to kill a Christian movement than it does just as an attack against Doug Phillips,” Jason Jakob, who is Phillips’ attorney, tells 1200 WOAI’s Michael Board. . . .
“Mr. Phillips was gone all the time with vision Forum ministries,” he says. “He is not a pastor who would be with her on a daily basis.”
Jakob says Torres “is just after a paycheck.”

This attack on Torres is part of a pattern with Phillips: He claims that criticism of his actions are attacks on Christian belief, and threatens legal action against his critics. You can read how Phillips had his attorney send a disillusioned church member a letter threatening legal action for slander, libel and blackmail in 2006. I also strongly urge you to go read this article at World Magazine — be sure to read all four pages — which describes how Phillips threatened legal action against Peter Bradrick, Jordan Muela, and Bob Renaud, three Christian colleagues who attempted to hold him accountable.

That article points out that Phillips did not threaten Rev. Joe Morecraft, another pastor who sought to hold him accountable, for which I suggest a simple and obvious explanation: He wouldn’t dare.

People who know Rev. Morecraft will tell you he is a mighty man of God, one of the most respected Calvinist preachers in America. Doug Phillips could not possibly win a showdown with Morecraft. So the silence of Phillips in that regard is quite telling: Doug Phillips is a bully, who only picks fights with people he views as vulnerable. This fits with the narrative of Phillips’ behavior alleged in Lourdes Torres-Manteufel’s lawsuit, and in the telling of the scandal by other informed sources.

It is by no means surprising that these “other informed sources” are critics of the “patriarchy”/”quiverfull” doctrines that Phillips advocated, even though one might discern that (a) there are other advocates of the same doctrine who have not been stained by scandal, and (b) Phillips’ alleged behavior is similar to sexual abuse cases involving many other offenders, including lesbian hockey coach Heidi Ferber. Good luck blaming that scandal on “biblical patriarchy” doctrine.

What did Phillips (allegedly) do? You can read the sordid details: “Douglas Phillips used Ms. Torres . . . as a personal sex object. . . . Douglas Phillips repeatedly groped, rubbed, and touched Ms. Torres’s crotch, breasts, and other areas of her body; rubbed his penis on her; masturbated on her; forced her to watch him masturbate on her; and ejaculated upon her,” et cetera.

The question that arises is, “How did Phillips convince her to tolerate this?” And the answer is rather simple: He groomed her, he took advantage of his leadership status to impress her, he isolated her in a situation where she was vulnerable to his influence and, perhaps worst of all, he strung her along with a false promise of marriage. Here we will quote “other informed sources”:

Doug told Victim they were soul mates. He told her he loved her and had promised they’d eventually get married and have children together. During these years, the relationship with Victim ebbed and flowed. Doug worked very hard at keeping prospective courters away from his victim. Victim also affirmed her affections towards Phillips.

You see? If the “biblical patriarchy” movement is to survive this scandal, young Christian ladies need to be warned to avoid any man who speaks this “soul mate” language, especially any married man who tries to justify an adulterous relationship with such language.

What should outrage Christians — especially homeschooling adherents of “patriarchy” and “quiverfull” doctrines — is how this married man allegedly manipulated this girl, discouraging potential suitors, so as to keep her romantically available for himself.

This beautiful young woman, who might have long since married and had children of her own, was instead (allegedly) kept in a condition of romantic limbo because of Phillips’ sinful and deceptive manipulation, so that she only married this month at age 29.

Never mind whether Lourdes Torres “affirmed her affections toward Phillips.” There’s an old country song about that:

It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels,
As you wrote in the words of your song.
Too many times married men think they’re still single.
That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.

Sure, it takes two to tango, and if Lourdes Torres developed some kind of crush on Doug Phillips, she wouldn’t be the first “good girl” to make herself vulnerable by admiring a married man. However, Doug Phillips was a grown-up, a married father in a position of authority and influence and, rather than avoiding this temptation, he seems to have become pathologically obsessed with the girl.

What the Doug Phillips scandal has done is to expose all Christian conservative traditionalists to renewed accusations that their doctrines of marriage and family life are aimed at wrongfully oppressing and exploiting women. As someone who has been fighting against feminist propaganda on almost a daily basis lately, I take this kind of embarrassment quite personally  The one thing a Christian conservative leader should never do is give Amanda Marcotte an excuse to gloat.

Not only is Marcotte gloating over Phillips’ downfall, but she’s even trying to drag the Duggar family down with him:

Amanda Marcotte just couldn’t resist a dirty jab at the Duggars.
In her scathing article at the Daily Beast [Thursday], the feminist blogger predicted the end of the Duggar Dynasty.
The popular TLC show “19 Kids and Counting” follows the semi-chaotic, but strangely normal and splendidly wholesome lives of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their nineteen children. Their oldest son is married and has three children of his own; one daughter is engaged and another has a serious boyfriend. . . .
[T]hey aren’t the women-hating, female-abusing psychos Marcotte presents them as.
Her accusations stem from the shameful fall from grace of Doug Phillips, the leader of Vision Forum ministries. . . .
Marcotte’s accusations that somehow this means the end of the Duggars is simply ridiculous. Yes, the Duggars were part of the ministry and have ties to the homeschooling movement Phillips led, but that doesn’t mean the Duggars themselves abused women or had affairs.
In fact, Jim Bob’s and Michelle’s marriage appears tender and loving. Marcotte’s attempt to stamp Phillip’s indiscretions on nineteen other people has no merit.

You can read the whole thing by The American Spectator‘s Natalie deMacedo. It is an incorrect and perverse distortion of biblical teaching to claim that Christianity teaches women should be weak, helpless and dependent creatures. The biblical concept of sexual complementarity certainly leads to a vision of  cooperation, rather than competition, between the sexes — a vision at odds with the power-oriented radical egalitarian doctrines of feminism.

However, it is an error to have a legalistic (and, we might even say, idolatrous) attitude about sex roles, so that what should be a voluntary cooperation in the spirit of Christ instead becomes a burdensome compliance with a rigid set of rules. And quite honestly, when I see a Christian man who seems to be constantly lecturing about male “headship” and wifely “submission,” I suspect his motives to be rooted in a fearful sense of personal inadequacy.

“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her . . . She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. . . . She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. . . . Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.”
— Proverbs 31:10-30 (KJV)





 

 


 

Shocking: Brandeis Feminist Faculty Led Petition Against Aayan Hirsi Ali

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The wretched cowardice of Brandeis University in rescinding an honorary degree for human rights activist Aayan Hirsi Ali surprised a lot of people. A victim of female genital mutilation (FGM), Ali was the target of terroristic threats in the Netherlands for speaking out against Islamic oppression of women. The question was asked, “Where’s the feminist anger at Brandeis over Ayaan Hirsi Ali?”

Brace yourself for the answer: Phyllis Chesler looked at the Brandeis faculty petition against Ali and found that 21% of the signatures came from faculty associated with the university’s Women and Gender Studies (WGS) program. As a matter of fact, it appears that the controversial petition actually originated with WGS faculty members.

The first two names on the petition are both members of the Women and Gender Studies faculty: Karen Hansen and Dian Fox. Assuming that the authors of the petition would also be the first signers, this is significant, as is the fact that four other of the first 10 signers were either core faculty or associate faculty of the Brandeis WGS program: ChaeRan Freeze, Bernadette J. Brooten, Mary Baine Campbell and Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman. The faculty petition claimed that, by honoring Aayan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis would suggest “to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam . . .  thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus,” and concluded:  “We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.”

Perhaps the Brandeis University feminists could send their young female students on a field trip to Tehran, Kabul or Mogadishu to protest against this “triumphalist narrative.” Meanwhile, the Iraqi parliament is considering a law that would legalize marriage to 9-year-old girls, and a 12-year-old girl died after being gang-raped in Pakistan:

The incident took place in the village of Khushi Muhammad Arain, located in the town of Kadhan. The 12-year-old victim used to go to the seminary to learn how to read the Holy Quran, according to her bereaved father.
A teacher at the seminary, along with three young boys who are said to be in grade 10, are accused in the case.
“Three days before her death, my younger son came home shouting that he had heard my daughter screaming from a room in the madrassah whose doors were locked,” said her father . . .

Yeah, too bad she died. Otherwise she might have some day attended Brandeis University, where Aayan Hirsi Ali can’t speak, because the Women and Gender Studies faculty are fighting against “a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.”

 

For Which He Cannot Be Forgiven

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The sordid details of the Doug Phillips sex scandal have so disturbed me that I am tempted to say some very un-Christian things.

You might want to go read this article at World Magazine — be sure to read all four pages — which references the fact that last month, Phillips had the effrontery to threaten legal action against Peter Bradrick, Jordan Muela, and Bob Renaud, three Christian colleagues who attempted to hold him accountable.

Forgive my un-Christian thoughts about that, OK?

Go read what Doug Phillips wrote about Lourdes Torres in 2003.

Now go read what (allegedly) he did to Lourdes beginning in 2007.

Perhaps you are also having un-Christian thoughts about Doug Phillips now. Extremely violent un-Christian thoughts.

Some of his deluded followers refused to recognize that Phillips “isn’t just an adulterer, he’s an abusive narcissistic sociopath”:

Sadly, there remain thousands of home schoolers who just don’t get it. They’ve learned nothing from the example of the disastrous life of Doug Phillips. They don’t recognize they were conned by a huckster, a carnival barker, a facile manipulator.

Professor Donald Douglas is likewise disgusted with all this, and calls attention to the very worst thing Doug Phillips did: He gave Amanda Marcotte a reason to gloat. Maybe Jesus can forgive that. Not me.

UPDATE: You may want to read Jennifer Epstein’s long but very informative first-person account of what church governance was like under Doug Phillips’ leadership. Let me stipulate that, if I were trying to build a harmonious congregation, I might be reluctant to have Jennifer Epstein as a member. On the other hand, the church governance under Phillips was autocratic and unhelpful to a couple in need. The worst of it was when Phillips had his attorney send Epstein’s husband a letter threatening legal action for slander, libel and blackmail. There is simply no need for such behavior among Christians. If reconciliation is impossible, just walk away and be done with it, but threatening a lawsuit? Crazy.

 

‘Repeated Requests for Phillips to Stop Masturbating and Ejaculating on Her’

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Doug Phillips and his wife Beall (left); Lourdes Torres (right)

“This kind of behavior is so bizarre — no matter which version of the story you believe, even if you take Doug’s own version of the story — it’s so bizarre and inappropriate that he needs to get his life in order and not be thinking about how quickly he can come back into leadership.”
— Michael Farris, Home School Legal Defense Association

Doug Phillips is an attorney by training and you might suppose he would have considered a settlement at any price preferable to the detailed lawsuit filed this week by Lourdes Torres-Manteufel.

Last fall, when Phillips confessed to an “inappropriate relationship” with his family’s babysitter, and resigned from the Christian homeschool non-profit Vision Forums Ministries, I wrote that “her identity must already be known by everyone who knows the Phillips family,” and predicted:

So she will no doubt eventually step out of the shadows and tell the whole sordid tale.
Or maybe collect a large payment to keep her mouth shut.

Let’s be honest, OK? There must be a lot of publishers who would pay good money for a Shocking Sex Scandal story like this, and if you don’t want to see the Sympathetic Victim crying on TV while she’s interviewed about her tell-all book, you gotta pay.

Alas, the same arrogance that made Phillips think he could get away with his double life — hypocritically posing as a “family values” spokesman while sexually pursuing this young girl — now evidently leads him to think he can escape the obvious consequences.

The woman was 15 when she met Phillips in 1999 through her parents’ involvement in the homeschooling movement. She was 23 when she said the relationship became sexual. She recently married Nolan Manteufel. In response to an article published at WorldNetDaily, Phillips’ attorney sent an e-mail that blamed the victim:

While it may be true that Mr. Phillips had an intermittent relationship with Mrs. Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, they never had the physical intimacy of touching and/or the exposure of genitalia, nor did the intermittent relationship escalate to sexual intercourse. Furthermore, the evidence demonstrates the relationship was consensual and often initiated, encouraged, and aggressively perpetuated by Mrs. Torres-Manteufel. It was welcomed, consensual and one in which Mrs. Torres-Manteufel repeatedly requested money, trips, jewelry, and numerous special favors from Doug Phillips.

The attorney’s e-mail said the accuser’s claims are “false, defamatory and made with malicious intent to destroy Doug Phillips, his family and his ministry.” And yet Torres-Manteufel makes these claims in a lawsuit, which suggests she intends to prove them in a court of law. Do I claim to know what transpired between her and Phillips? I do not. But I can report what she alleges in her lawsuit:

Douglas Phillips used Ms. Torres — against her wishes and over her objections — as a personal sex object. Douglas Phillips repeatedly groped, rubbed, and touched Ms. Torres’s crotch, breasts, and other areas of her body; rubbed his penis on her; masturbated on her; forced her to watch him masturbate on her; and ejaculated upon her. This perverse and offensive conduct repeatedly took place over the course of several years. . . .
Douglas Phillips — standing in a position of influence and prominence within patriarchy — methodically groomed Ms. Torres so that she would eventually participate in illicit sexual rendezvous with him promising that she could one day marry him. This grooming began when Ms. Torres was a fifteen-year-old child. . . .
Phillips promised Ms. Torres that he would marry her and that she would be the person who would have the great privilege of being his wife. . . . Phillips repeatedly told Torres that this was possible because his wife, Beall Phillips, was going to die soon. . . .
While Ms. Torres was living with Douglas Phillips and his family in October of 2007, Douglas Phillips entered Ms. Torres’s bedroom and without her consent began touching her breasts, stomach, back, neck, and waist. Phillips then began to masturbate and ejaculated on her. Ms. Torres asked Phillips to stop and broke down crying. Despite Ms. Torres’s repeated requests for Phillips to stop masturbating and ejaculating on her, Phillips proceeded to return and repeat this perverse and offensive conduct. Each night that Phillips returned, Ms. Torres requested that he stop. Defendant blatantly disregarded her requests but continued to masturbate and ejaculate on her each night.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think one request — “Hey, Mr. Phillips, stop masturbating and ejaculating on me” — should be enough.

How do we weigh her claims against the assertion by Phillips’ lawyer that this relationship “was consensual and often initiated, encouraged, and aggressively perpetuated” by the girl? Does it make any sense that she would have “initiated” this kind of behavior?

Despite the effort by Phillips’ attorney to intimidate reporters by labeling Torres-Manteufel’s allegations “false, defamatory . . . malicious” (implied: “Don’t report her claims or we might sue you”) she had been telling her tale privately for months before she sued. And from versions of the story that have emerged online, we can get an idea of how the situation was handled:

In 2007, illicit relationship became sexual…the victim began spending more time in the Phillips home and with the Phillips family. She was considered a close family friend…Phillips employed Victim to write Jonathan Park radio drama scripts with his daughter in an effort to spend more time with her. This was a paid position and provided Doug more opportunities to spend more time with Victim in his home after his children had gone to bed.
In 2009, Victim’s mother caught Doug Phillips and Victim having sexual-based chat sessions in the middle of the night. Doug, his wife, Beall, and Victim’s parents met. This was the first time Doug and Beall and Victim’s parents met together. Doug confessed to having romantic feelings for Victim, but there was no acknowledgement of any sexual impropriety.
In October 2010, Beall Phillips was made aware of the adulterous nature of the relationship when Victim’s mother informed her that Doug and Victim had been kissing.
Summer 2011 Doug told Victim they were soul mates. He told her he loved her and had promised they’d eventually get married and have children together.
In December 2012, Doug’s double life began to unravel when he was caught trying to climb in Victim’s bedroom window…followed by another private meeting between Doug, Beall, and Victim’s parents. They agreed to keep things quiet.

That is a secondhand version of the story and I cannot vouch for its accuracy. However, if it is true that the girl’s parents became aware of the problem in 2009, that his wife knew about it in 2010, and if Doug Phillips was caught trying to climb through the girl’s window (!!!) in 2012, then the specter of this sordid sex scandal has been looming like a shadow over him for at least five years.

Perhaps this train wreck could have been averted, but the same arrogance that originally caused Phillips’ behavior also caused him to think he could somehow keep the whole thing from becoming public.

And now that it has become public, Phillips has his lawyer sending threatening letters to journalists who report on the story?

“Hey, Mr. Phillips, stop masturbating and ejaculating on me.”

He should have listened the first time.