“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
Here’s the other piece of the Mark Driscoll plagiarism saga that’s not getting nearly enough attention: This all blew up after he appeared on Janet Mefferd’s radio show.
He did that. He agreed to appear as a guest on Janet Mefferd’s radio show. He did that voluntarily.
There’s only one reason an honest Christian leader should ever agree to appear on Janet Mefferd’s radio show, and it’s not to plug their book (whether or not that book includes plagiarized passages). The only reason any decent or honest person should appear on that show would be to do there what Jon Stewart did in his final appearance on Crossfire: To plead with Mefferd and her producers to stop lying, stop hurting America and stop destroying the church with her lying gospel of hate.
That’s not what Mark Driscoll was there to do. Driscoll was treating the Janet Mefferd show as though it were a respectable, decent, trustworthy media outlet.
It’s not that. It’s awful. Janet Mefferd lies. A lot. She tells the nastiest lies she can imagine about LGBT people, Muslims, feminists, poor people, liberals … about anyone she thinks the terrible people in her audience would enjoy hearing nasty lies told about.
Agreeing to chat with Janet Mefferd as though she were just your run-of-the-mill talk radio host is a far more serious moral failing than plagiarism. It’s like being a guest on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, or on Bryan Fischer’s radio show and treating either of them as just a decent, respectable human being.
Mefferd is being praised for confronting Driscoll with evidence of his theft of others’ words and ideas. After she quickly folded and back-pedaled due to pressure from Driscoll’s publishers and other advertisers, one of her topic producers resigned in protest. Ingrid Schlueter is being hailed for this as though she were a principled hero.
“There is an evangelical celebrity machine that is more powerful than anyone realizes,” Schlueter wrote:
You may not go up against the machine. That is all. Mark Driscoll clearly plagiarized and those who could have underscored the seriousness of it and demanded accountability did not. That is the reality of the evangelical industrial complex.
That’s well-put. Schlueter’s got a way with words. But she’s not a principled journalist or a hero. She worked for Janet Mefferd’s radio show. That makes her a fright-peddler, a promoter of lies, and an unprincipled hack.
The only principle involved in the production of the Janet Mefferd Show is the principle of demonizing the vulnerable in order to raise money in order to be able to demonize the vulnerable on a larger scale.
This show is corrupt from top to bottom.
There’s a chance you’re reading this and you’re thinking I’m overstating the case. Maybe you’re thinking I’m being too harsh.
Um, no. The Janet Mefferd Show is a platform for hateful lies.
• Mefford regards Rep. Louis Gohmert as an insightful, wise interpreter of reality, so she invites him on as a guest and the two of them work themselves up into a credulous frenzy about what they tell listeners is Obama’s secret plan for martial law under his Obamacare shocktroops.
• Michael Coffman is a fringe nutter who hates Muslims. He says a secret cabal of “radical Islamists” will turn America into a new Caliphate, with Obama as Muslim dictator, before 2016. Mefferd had Coffman on as a guest because she agrees with him. “Oh, absolutely” she says, bemoaning that the Justice Department is acting like Muslims have a right to build mosques right here in America.
• That wasn’t a one-hit wonder, either, Mefferd spends a lot of air-time worrying about Muslims. If Muslim Americans are allowed to enjoy the same religious freedoms as people like her, with a true religion, enjoy, then today Dearborn, tomorrow the world.
• No, no, no … you’re still not appreciating the extent of Mefferd’s vile, over-the-top hatred of Muslims. She has Pam Geller on as a guest. OK? That’s the level of venom and mendacity we’re talking about here. That’s how very far this show is from decency, clarity and honesty.
• And Mefferd hates LGBT people even more than she hates Muslims. Disgraced anti-gay activist Scott Lively is charged with international human-rights violations for advocating the execution of every LGBT person in Uganda. So Janet Mefferd invited him on her show to allow him to explain that the charges were part of a “Soros”-funded international Marxist conspiracy against God. Did she hum and coo her agreement with all of this, accepting Lively’s assertion that Christians must press on for the extermination of all black gays despite opposition from the Christ-killing Marxist financiers? Of course she did.
• Mefferd responded to the confirmation of the first openly gay judge on a federal appeals court with a rant that was as hateful as it was just clueless: “I mean, that was like a qualification, if you’re going to be on the appeals court you better be gay? That’s how it rolls now. … This is overrepresentation but they don’t care.” Because 7 out of 874 federal judgeships constitutes “overrepresentation” and the oppressive exclusion of Mefferd’s kind of people.
• Mefferd reads a quote from President Obama in support of ENDA in which he says, “millions of LGBT Americans go to work every day fearing that, without any warning, they could lose their jobs.” She starts snorting derisively half-way through then sneers, “First of all, I don’t believe that for a moment.” Her guest that day is infamous anti-gay liar Matt Barber. (He responds by saying Obama’s claim is hyperbole. “Hyperbole is responsible for all the world’s problems,” he says, and neither he nor Mefferd understands why that’s hilarious.)
• Liberals are theocrats, says Mefferd’s guest, The Liar Tony Perkins. “You’ve nailed it,” she gushes in response. “That’s exactly right.”
• Somebody wants to start an anti-gay alternative to the Boy Scouts? Mefferd’s gonna give that man a platform. “We are not going to tolerate someone who is ‘here and queer; loud and proud,’ all of that nonsense,” he says. “Absolutely,” Mefferd coos. It’s kind of her catchphrase whenever any of her guests says anything emphatically anti-gay.
• Does Mefferd invite anti-gay hate-group leader Peter LaBarbera on as a regular guest? Absolutely. And when he says things like “The homosexual agenda is about restricting people’s liberty and freedom,” does she murmur approvingly, as though she’d just heard a profound insight rather than a weird Mad Lib of bigotry? Absolutely.
• Mefferd says that marriage equality will mean “every Christian who supports real marriage might be made to wear a yellow patch on the sleeve, a ‘badge of shame’ to identify us as ‘anti-gay haters.’ Kind of like the Jews in Nazi Germany.”
• Here’s Mefferd’s explanation of the real motive of those seeking marriage equality: “It’s not about love, it’s not about equality, it’s not about civil rights, it’s about absolutely shaking the fist in the face of a Holy God and thinking that you’re going to get away with it.”
Luke Brinker offers a summary of Mefferd’s obsessive anti-gay focus and her relentless promotion of every anti-gay activist, no matter how disreputable:
Mefferd claims she’s giving viewers a “Christ-centered” look at issues like homosexuality, but her own words belie such assertions, revealing a woman whose distaste for LGBT people is rooted in unfamiliarity and feelings of disgust. When a group of Indiana high school students sought to organize a second prom where gay and lesbian couples wouldn’t be permitted, Mefferd took up the students’ cause. Gay rights, Mefferd said, should not “trump the rights of Christians” who do not wish to see gays. “I know this isn’t politically correct,” Mefferd said, “but not everybody wants to see that.”
After CNN host Anderson Cooper came out in 2012, Mefferd warned viewers that they might vomit listening to the story. God may have given Cooper “an ability to love,” Mefferd went on, “but not that kind of love.” “[T]hat kind of love,” she declared, is “a lie from the pit” of hell. It follows, Mefferd believes, that if the Supreme Court ever finds a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex couples, the country can expect divine wrath.
So let’s stop treating Janet Mefferd like she’s some kind of good, honest journalist for calling out Mark Driscoll’s plagiarism. She is not a journalist. She is not honest. She is not good.
Janet Mefferd hates Muslims. Janet Mefferd hates LGBT people.
Janet Mefferd hates. She does not love. Whoever does not love …
EDITED: To fix the misspelling of Janet Mefferd’s last name.
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