Like A Passle Of Puerile 12-year-olds

The calloused heart of Douglas Wilson never ceases to amaze me.

Recalling the fake "Topless Lecture" series stunt he chortled over one April Fool's Day a few years ago; his Credenda/Agenda magazine cover with a buff, romance-novel-style hero with battery cables attached to his nipples; the Serrated Edge of his usual discourse with non-believers; and his buddyhood with the sexually driven and ineffably crude Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll, I imagined that Wilson would be titillated by the travails of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.

Weiners and weiners. Yikes. It's just too good to pass up for our local Pastor of the Puerile. And yet, jaded as I am, I'm still capable of being surprised.

Not by some of his trademark vitriol against Weiner, Democrats, and liberals. Wilson is disappointingly unoriginal and uninspired in his denunciations of the Left. He assures us that Democrats are hypocrites for not roundly condemning Weiner for both his perverse behavior as well as his lies in covering it up, ignoring the fact that virtually every Democrat in Congress, led by a livid Nancy Pelosi, has condemned Weiner, and most have called on him to resign. But one lone liberal loon insists online that Weiner's perversity is irrelevant because of our need for "heroes," and Wilson seizes on this as proof that "liberals" are hypocrites of the most glaring sort. The knee-slapping and howling continues, even though the rest of us know that it's the GOP that has anointed itself as God's coalition of "culture warriors," crows mightily about traditional family values, wails about a coarse and libertine culture, and yet produces the Vitters, Ensigns, Gingriches, Craigs, and Haggards of the world.

That there, fellas, is real Romans 2:1-5 stuff.

And no one ever looked to Anthony Weiner as a spokesman for conservative sexual values anyway. It doesn't mean he's not a sick guy with a bizarre predilection for exhibitionism and an unseemly pride in his package. He is. But he's not a Pharisee turned phreak, which even the classically trained Christian ought to be able to grasp.

But let's let the Pastor of the Peeny Joke speak for himself as he gleefully talks about how great it is that a Weiner got in trouble over his weiner:

"Just last night we were having some family discussion about the tribulations of Rep. Weiner. We were talking mostly about God's sense of humor. Here was a man who wanted the smart set to run the whole stinking economy, and he can't even run his own Twitter account. Not only was he not able to run his own Twitter account, he did not seem to have any control over what is appropriate to do with digital images of one's own briefs, never mind the propriety of how those images came into existence in the first place. All this was risible enough, okay, but look at how long God took to set this whole story up. This is the ultimate shaggy dog story -- it went on and on, until it cultimated (sic) in the exposure of one Weiner.

And so we also concluded, back in this family discussion of ours, that God can be pretty tasteless. Doesn't God know that there are children down here?

But my takeaway conclusion from our discussion was -- how can Christopher Hitchens still maintain that there is no God? I resolved to do something in the morning to chide Christopher. "Do you really believe that this sketch had no writer?" Thus far last night..."

-- Blog and Mablog, June7, 2011 (Editor's note: Hitchens, who is dying of cancer, is an atheist who debated Wilson a couple of years ago in a series of encounters marketed as "Collision").

I doubt Christopher Hitchens was wowed by the profundity of his correspondent's observation, and I'm utterly convinced that a Holy God is far more grieved than amused by Weiner's sin and the hurt he caused his wife. I'm pretty sure that God takes no delight in Wilson's serrated edge, whether wielded against Weiner or against anyone else. In fact, I'm certain of it -- something about living as peacemakers and agents of reconciliation, being careful of how we speak around non-believers, offering reasons for our hope with gentleness and respect, and other New Testament ideas apparently crowded out of Wilson's heart and mind by his current preoccupation with underpants and double entendres.

I'm beginning to think that Wilson and I worship a different God. Mine hates sin and loves Anthony Weiner, and Wilson's appears to be president of a testosterone-soaked fraternity. I'd invite him to re-think that view. Immediately would be preferable.

But here is the most striking, and the most damning, indictment of Wilson's character: He posted this paean to penis humor four days before he was to preside over the wedding of a young pedophile whose penis, rather than being the source of adolescent snickering and nasty rejoinders, has caused very real harm to many little children.

Let that settle in, and when your heart stops sinking, join me in pleading for the purifying wind of the Holy Spirit to blow through Wilson's ministries, destroying the foul and contaminated framework of a movement, and a man, gone terribly, terribly wrong. There's nothing to joke about here.