David French at National Review is right and Wrongthink Radio at RedState is wrong

I read the RedState piece first.

Lately when I stop by RedState, I think back to the purge of its writers that happened when Salem Communications took it over. I did notice the shift in editorial tone that was all the inside-baseball talk of the punditsphere, but I felt that talk was a bit overblown. There were still a number of writers who insisted that the full picture regarding Donald Trump must be presented, and that that included his problematic traits.

But at this point, I think that shift has become as marked as the original assessments. It went from being a Trump-skeptical conservative outlet to a shill rag.

The piece that is the subject here is entitled "Where is David French's Article on Pete Buttigieg?" and its point is to take French to task for pointing out Franklin Graham's hypocrisy - castigating Bill Clinton in the 90s but giving unwavering support to the Very Stable Genius in our own time.

The byline is Wrongthink Radio. I guess that's a person. RedState has an increasing number of writers who go in for odd nom de plumes. There's someone called "Bonchie" whose stuff appears a lot lately. Streiff, who has been there a while, seems to be the editorial gatekeeper.

WR's rhetorical angle is lame indeed. His basic thrust is that French is presumptuous trying to be the arbiter off Christian morality for everyone (which French is not doing; he's deferring to the authority of doctrine to discuss morality) and convince his readers that French has some kind of moral obligation to write pieces about all the clearly flawed Democrat presidential candidates:

French’s consternation with Evangelicals was that they would dismiss sinful behavior, and he championed himself to be the judge of what behavior is acceptable for a Christian voter in the United States, so naturally, I wonder where French’s article is regarding Pete Buttigieg, a homosexual candidate running for President, or his vociferous condemnation of Kamala Harris for having an open affair with her former boss?

I bring these examples up because French felt he was qualified to impose judgement on American Christians, but suddenly seems to have lost his voice when that opinion would be deemed unpopular by the Liberal press. French only chastised Evangelicals because he knew he could take a moral position that the Left would celebrate, and he could condemn his detractors as members of the “Trump cult”. This all came into perspective this week following Franklin Graham’s criticism of Pete Buttigieg and his call for Mayor Pete to repent for his sins, and French responded with his ever popular “but Trump though” style. 

French makes the statement that marriage is “between a man and a woman” but can’t seem to bring himself to state that Franklin Graham is correct that homosexuality is indeed a sin according to Christian doctrine. French can call Graham a hypocrite all he wants, but since French appointed himself as the expert on Evangelical voting, does he not have an obligation to speak out against the moral behaviors of Democrats with the same ferocity with which he attacked Trump?

French of course is rudderless when it comes to morality, his morality is as subjective as anyone else in the media. French merely used Evangelicals as the straw man to attack Trump. His thinly veiled criticisms were nothing more than a coping mechanism to convince himself that not supporting Trump was a good decision and that his requirement to double down is also a good decision. French doesn’t actually care about whether Christian morals are reflected in national leadership, he merely cares that he will be able to tell everyone how morally sound he feels about his decisions, no matter what true societal effect they have on our country. 

Now, for the piece that launched WR's "refutation.  You tell me if this sounds morally "rudderless" and "subjective":

It’s hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son. His commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity.

Let’s look at the record. In 1998, at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, the younger Graham wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal combating Clinton’s assertion that his affair was a “private” matter. Clinton argued that his misdeeds were “between me, the two people I love the most — my wife and our daughter — and our God.” Graham noted that even the most private of sins can have very public, devastating consequences, and he asked a simple 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?”

Graham was right: Clinton, it turned out, wouldn’t just lie to mislead his family. He’d lie to influence courts, Congress, and the American people.

Fast-forward 20 years. By 2018, Donald Trump was president — and helping to win important policy victories for religious conservatives — and Graham’s tune had changed dramatically. He actively repudiated his condemnations of Clinton, calling the Republican pursuit of the then-president “a great mistake that should never have happened,” and argued that “this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”

Graham was wrong: Trump, it turns out, doesn’t just lie to mislead his family. He lies all the time to influence courts, Congress, and the American people.

So is this the “new normal” for Evangelicals? Is politics entirely transactional now? Do we evaluate politicians only on their policies and leave the sex discussions to the privacy of their own bedrooms? 

Apparently not, according to . . . Franklin Graham. Now that the Democratic primary is gaining steam and a gay candidate is surging forward, Graham has rediscovered his moral voice. Yesterday he tweeted this:

Franklin Graham‏Verified account @Franklin_Graham

Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian. As a Christian I believe the Bible which defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized. The Bible says marriage is between a man & a woman—not two men, not two women. 2/3

Yes, marriage is the union between a man and a woman, but Trump married a woman, then married his mistress, then married a third woman, then had an affair with a porn star while that third wife was pregnant with his child. Yet Graham says, “God put him” in the presidency and we need to “get behind him and support him.”

The proper Evangelical position toward any president is not hard to articulate, though it is exceedingly difficult to hold to, especially in polarized times when one party seems set on limiting religious liberty and zealously defending abortion: We should pray for presidents, critique them when they’re wrong, praise them when they’re right, and never, ever impose partisan double standards. We can’t ever forget the importance of character, the necessity of our own integrity, and the power of the prophetic witness.

In other words, Evangelicals can never take a purely transactional approach to politics. We are never divorced from our transcendent purpose, which always trumps political expediency. In scripture, prophets confronted leaders about their sin. They understood a core truth, one clearly articulated in the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” 

Wrongthink Radio is on seriously flimsy ground with that "rudderless" and "subjective" stuff as you can see.

If asked about it, I'm sure French would say that, of course Pete Buttigieg is wearing his sin like a badge of honor. But that's not the topic here.

I see this tactic employed a lot in my own polemical tussles. "If you're going to write about such-and-such problem with such-and-such figure, you have to write about these other people with the same, or similar, problems."

No, opinion writers get to select their subjects for given columns and narrow or widen the scope as they see fit. It may well be that David French will have something to say about Buttigieg at some point. But the topic here was Franklin Graham's cringeworthy turnabout and its harmful effects on evangelism's ability to participate in the public square. And he did a fine job of covering it.