For Which He Cannot Be Forgiven

Posted on Comments

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’

Posted on Comments

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.

 

How @ClaireShipman Ironically Proves Phyllis Schlafly Right About the ‘Pay Gap’

Posted on Comments

The Left has been going nuts over an argument veteran conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly made about the “pay gap” between men and women. Schlafly referred to the pervasive phenomenon of hypergamy, i.e., “women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does.” Sociologists would say it is not merely higher income, but higher socio-economic status in general — including such factors as educational background — implicated in hypergamy. Women’s preference for high-status husbands is indisputable, as Schlafly says:

While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Obviously, I’m not saying women won’t date or marry a lower-earning men, only that they probably prefer not to. If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all.

This set off all kinds of shrieky reactions on the Left, with Think Progress headlining their item, “Prominent Republican: Women Need To Be Paid Less So They Can Find Husbands.” But this distortion of Schlafly’s meaning only shows (a) the dishonesty of the Left and/or (b) their willful ignorance of social science. The truth of her observation — that any policy aimed at closing “the so-called pay gap” would diminish women’s prospects for finding higher-earning husbands, and thus make marriage less likely — cannot be disputed by facts or logic. But this is not the same as Schlafly saying “women need to be paid less.” Schlafly rightly regards the “pay gap” as evidence of how men and women make different choices that reflect their personal preferences. The gap is not explained by sexist discrimination, Schlafly says, but by human nature.

Well, ABC’s Claire Shipman shows up on the cover of The Atlantic, along with the BBC’s Katty Kay, presenting a feature, “Closing the Confidence Gap: Even successful women lack self-assurance at work. Men have too much.” Leaving unexamined their thesis, let’s focus in on certain biographical data Shipman supplied:

Claire . . . had a habit of telling people she was “just lucky” — in the right place at the right time — when asked how she became a CNN correspondent in Moscow while still in her 20s. And she, too, for years, routinely deferred to the alpha-male journalists around her, assuming that because they were so much louder, so much more certain, they just knew more. She subconsciously believed that they had a right to talk more on television. But were they really more competent? Or just more self-assured?

Check Wikipedia: The daughter of an Ohio State University law professor, Shipman graduated from Columbia University, where she studied Russian before landing an internship with CNN. So if she was “just lucky” to be posted to Moscow, she was highly qualified.

Ah, but what about those “alpha-male journalists”? She married her boss: CNN Moscow bureau chief Stephen Hurt was 44 and Shipman was 28 when they married in 1991. After she returned to the United States, Shipman and her first husband separated in 1996, and soon she began dating Time magazine White House correspondent Jay Carney, whose Russian language studies at Yale University had also helped him land a Moscow bureau assignment in the 19990s. Shipman went from one “alpha-male journalist” husband to another.

Perhaps many older professional women like Claire Shipman, now 51, take for granted the availability of high-achieving husbands. Perhaps she does not consider the advantages — not to say privilege — conferred on her by her father’s status as a university law professor, nor does she think of the career advantage she might have gained by marrying the CNN Moscow bureau chief. No one need disparage Shipman’s abilities and hard work in saying that her connections with high-status males (first her father, and then her two husbands) have been beneficial to her.

So, what about that “pay gap”? As Phyllis Schlafly says, any policy that could eliminate the “pay gap” would, of necessity, reduce the number of men in higher-paying jobs. Young women in the future would have less opportunity to access the kind of advantages that Claire Shipman derived from her association with high-status males.

Schlafly, a very influential and successful woman, cannot be stereotyped as someone who is opposed to female achievement. The rhetoric coming from the Left in regard to the “pay gap” instead reflects feminist hostility to male achievement, and proposes to inhibit male achievement by coercive government policies to bring about an artificial regime of “equality” — a condition that could only be implemented by discouraging the hiring and promotion of men.

Such policies probably would not much harm the children of the elite — Claire Shipman and Jay Carney’s son and daughter — but what would be the effect on the middle and lower classes?

Answer: The policy-making elite don’t give a damn about them.

As long as liberals can congratulate themselves on doing their part for Equality and Progress — Shipman and Carney decorate their  home with Soviet-era posters —  they are indifferent to the actual impact of their policies on the lives of the toiling masses.

And of course, there is a “pay gap” at the White House, as if anyone needed further proof of liberal hypocrisy.

 

Silly Ex-SECDEF Thinks He Has The Right To A Coherent Tax System

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Mr. Rumsfeld, sir:

The dry sarcasm of your recent open letter to the IRS, while exquisite, reveals naïveté about what has happened to our country the last century. This is somewhat ironic, given you spent a good chunk of the last ~50 years shaping those events.

We no longer begin with the individual as the unit of analysis, bubble up economic activity through 50 states, and have a federal government to manage interstate and international concerns. Oh no. Progress has meant that we have a permanent political class an a right monstrous federal bureaucracy (perhaps you still recall the DoD) currently eating out our substance (or, if you will, “borrowing it forward”) and burying us in regulations. In the continuous tradeoff between security and liberty, security for the bureaucrats currently has the upper hand.

Thus, there is irony in your dismay at the IRS. As Instapundit noted, Richard Fernandez wrote:

America was founded on the notion that most politicians can only be expected to be ornery, low-down, crooks. Nobody in those days was fool enough to believe they could be Light-workers, Messiahs and create a world without guns. Thus in the Founder’s view the only way to guard against rogues was to ensure that government remained as small as possible relative to its essential jobs; to change those in office frequently and often, like we change underwear.

Please help fight the good fight, sir, by calling attention to efforts such as the Convention of States, to give this federal leviathan a desperately needed trim.

Related: 8 Infuriating Facts To Remember On Tax Day

Confetti Bomber: Kooky Art Student Arrested After Boston Marathon

Posted on Comments

A mentally ill art student was arrested Tuesday at the Boston Marathon after he attempted a hoax on the first anniversary of the deadly bombing at the race. Kevin “Kayvon” Edson, 25, reportedly had a confetti-filled rice cooker in a backpack. Edson was charged with disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and possession of a hoax device, WBZ-TV reported.

Before his arrest, Edson had posted homosexual-themed tributes to jailed bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev on his blog and Facebook page: “Sexy til proven innocent . . . Boy-o-boy, I’d pressure cook him a meal n’ bring him homo to Mama. . . . Happy Anniversary, babe!”

The New York Daily News reports: “In a YouTube video posted by Edson in 2012, he describes himself as ‘a fashion designer, an entrepreneur, a performance artist, a mental patient, a blogger/bloggerist, a jailbird, a college dropout and a drag queen.'”

Edson “is, or was, a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design,” Samar Kalaf reported at Deadspin, where commenters noted that Edson’s videos make reference to bipolar disorder and McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Edson’s hoax caused a serious security scare at the Boston Marathon, as was captured in dozens of Twitter messages.

 

Police: Florida Teacher Told Boy’s Mother ‘No Regrets’ for Sex With Student, 17

Posted on Comments

No morals, no conscience, no shame:

A 29-year-old English teacher who allegedly had a four-month affair with her underage student and aborted his child, has been charged.
Jennifer Christine Fichter was arrested yesterday after allegedly confessing to the 17-year-old boy’s mother that she’d had sex with the teen up to 30 times, loved him and had no regrets.
The Central Florida Aerospace Academy teacher was arrested . . . last night and charged with six counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. . . .
According to The Tampa Tribune, police said the abuse began in November when the pair had sex in the early morning hours in Fichter’s Toyota pickup truck.
The teen told detectives he and Fichter met for sex three times in the parking lot of a Lakeland apartment complex and three times near New Tampa Highway.
He also said they had sex four times outside the city in Polk and Hillsborough [counties].  . . .
Last night, the mother agreed to speak to Fichter and record the conversation for investigators.
During the call, Fichter allegedly admitted she became pregnant with the teen’s child and had an abortion. Fichter also said she was in love with the student and wanted to continue seeing him.
‘The victim’s mother discovered this relationship after reviewing text messages from her son and she asked that Fichter respond to her residence to talk,’ a Lakeland police statement said, according to Orlando Sentinel. 
‘According to the victim’s mother, Fichter admitted to the sexual encounters and professed her love for him.’

It’s Florida. The whole state’s been overrun by degenerates.

 

RNC Sues IRS for Stonewalling

Posted on Comments

The Republican National Committee today filed a federal lawsuit, accusing the Internal Revenue Service of illegally failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests:

The RNC believes the undue delay in producing the requested documents is unacceptable and inexcusable, given that many of these documents have been already produced to other requesting entities. Release of the requested documents is in the public interest, as Americans deserve to know how the IRS interprets and enforces the tax laws—and why it would deliberately target people because of their values and beliefs.
“We’re filing this suit because the Obama administration has a responsibility to be transparent and accountable to the American people. The IRS has a legal obligation to answer our inquiry for these records,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. “On Tax Day especially Americans deserve to know whether they can trust the agency to which they’re sending their taxes.
“If the IRS and the Obama administration don’t have anything to hide, why not answer the request? Their delays and distractions make Americans think they’re trying to cover up their actions, just like ex-IRS employee Lois Lerner. We’re going to keep fighting to hold the IRS and Obama administration accountable because Americans deserve a government that treats them fairly and not one that harasses them because of their beliefs nor an administration that goes after its perceived political enemies.”

You can read the RNC’s complaint here.