I’ve previously mentioned my Malevolent Stalker, a curious fellow who, for roughly the past fifteen years, has sought to portray me as among the very worst people alive. To that end, he’s combed through IRS records, found forty-year-old anecdotes about me on websites of which I had never heard, scrutinized (and critiqued) the Amazon.com Christmas wish list of my then eight-year-old son, and so forth. His commitment to his life’s mission is really, in its remarkably odd way, quite impressive, as is the cleverness with which he systematically distorts, misrepresents, and twists everything I’ve ever done and said, fantasizes about things that I’ve never actually said and done at all, and attributes base motives to me for the horrible things I’ve supposedly done and the ghastly things I’ve purportedly said.
And then there’s the Mini-Stalker, a substantially less talented but equally driven individual, who chimes in with rather repetitious and distinctly less clever comments in the same place where his more able hero posts. His repertoire is quite a bit more limited, relying to a large extent on crude lies about me rather than on his master’s favored tools of spin, cherry-picked and decontextualized facts, and malignant mind-reading, but his motivation seems to be, if anything, more elemental: simple, obsessive personal hostility. He very rarely comments on any other subject than me.
So far as I’m aware, I’ve never met either of these two worthies, nor had any real-life contact with them.
Anyway, my visit here in Australia has discernibly inflamed and aroused them, and they’ve been inspired by it to a certain degree of new inventiveness. Stalker Sr., for example, professed sorrow over the disdain for my family shown by my being here in Australia on Thanksgiving Day rather than with them. But that trial balloon seems to have found little resonance with his target audience. Nor did his pious indignation over the fact that I had responded critically on Thanksgiving Day (!) to an atheist who comments daily on my blog. After all, Australia doesn’t celebrate American Thanksgiving and, anyhow, Australian time is a day ahead of the United States — which means that a post that appeared on Thanksgiving Thursday where Stalker Sr. performs his labors was, most likely, written on post-Thanksgiving Friday in Australia.
Stalker Sr. had quite a bit more luck with his suggestion that the goofing off here in Australia that my wife and I have done comes at the expense of duped donors to the Interpreter Foundation. I take such accusations somewhat seriously, however, and feel that I should not let them remain on the public record unchallenged and uncontradicted. So I carefully explained that my wife is paying her own expenses, and that we’ve both paid all of our expenses for the parts of our trip here that can be considered “vacation.” However, the University of Notre Dame Australia, which invited me to deliver its seventh annual Religious Liberty Lecture, also picked up some of my expenses. And some of my other expenses were covered by a fund at BYU that was established several years ago by a good friend of ours with the specific goal of furthering work on religious freedom and of strengthening relationships with Muslims. Since I was speaking at Notre Dame on the subject of Islamophobia and religious liberty, I felt — and she agreed — that my lecture would fit her fund perfectly. And, yes, some very limited Church funds were used to help with my food and lodging in Sydney and Melbourne, where I presented firesides to large LDS audiences and, with Church leaders, met with local representatives of other faiths.
Still, even after that explanation, one of Stalker Sr.’s victims declared his disbelief in my alleged claim that I’ve paid for this entire trip out of my own pocket. (Sigh.)
Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
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