David French: Christians, Sign the Petition. Condemn . . . Me?

Source: National Review | May 7, 2019 | David French

One of the natural consequences of spending your entire professional life opposing abortion and defending religious freedom is that you find yourself on the email list of virtually every Christian conservative group of any size or consequence. Normally, you receive a fount of press releases and petition requests, mainly aimed at Planned Parenthood, Democrats in Congress, or various leftist universities. So imagine my surprise when I received a series of emails from the American Family Association aimed at your humble correspondent.

If you want, you can go to the AFA website and join more than 35,000 of your fellow citizens who’ve signed a petition condemning my “character assassination” and deploring my “yellow journalism.” My sin was writing a piece last month critiquing Franklin Graham for his selective moral outrage. In 1998, Graham wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that even Bill Clinton’s private sins can have serious, public consequences. He rightfully asked the key question: “If [Clinton] will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”

But in 2018 he reversed course. When the philandering Democrat Bill Clinton was out of office, and the philandering Republican Donald Trump occupied the White House, Graham told the Associated Press that the Republican pursuit of Clinton was a “great mistake that should never have happened.” He resurrected the old Clinton defense — that adultery is an entirely private matter. Graham said, “This thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”

Then, this year, he changed course yet again, this time publicly tweeting his opposition to Pete Buttigieg’s gay marriage.

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The AFA, of course, can’t quite defend the president’s conduct, but it sure can minimize it. “Certainly, no one would agree that President Trump’s past is a perfect model of morality,” says the AFA. Not ‘perfect’ is one way to characterize marrying one woman, having an affair, marrying his mistress, marrying a third woman, and then having an affair with a porn star while that third woman is pregnant with his child. But so what? The AFA says that since taking the oath of office, Trump has come “nowhere near” the “glaring moral indecencies of Clinton.”

Well, even by the AFA’s made-up standard, their argument fails. While president, Trump has lied to the public about his porn-star affair and there is strong evidence that he paid hush money as part of Michael Cohen’s criminal scheme to conceal the affair during a crucial phase of the presidential campaign. I think that’s a pretty glaring moral (and potentially criminal) indecency, but your mileage may vary. And those lies and deceptions are but a few of the torrent of untruths that have poured from the president’s mouth throughout his first term. It turns out that the answer to Graham’s 1998 question is clear — if a man will “lie to or mislead his wife and daughter” there is nothing that will stop him from “doing the same to the American public.”

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As I stated in my original piece, Graham’s double standard should not define him. He has done much good and preached the Gospel faithfully for many years. But his double standard is still a serious mistake, and it’s a mistake the AFA compounds when it uses my critique to raise money and collect new names for its email list. The Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 resolution was correct. “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders” does in fact “sear the conscience of the culture.” It has certainly seared the conscience of the AFA.

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  • Consistent May 7, 2019 at 5:56 pm #29337

    Consistent May 7, 2019 at 9:50 pm #29339

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