{"id":26479,"date":"2015-01-21T18:42:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T23:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=26479"},"modified":"2015-01-21T18:42:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T23:42:00","slug":"stairways-circle-back-to-where-youve-been","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2015\/01\/21\/stairways-circle-back-to-where-youve-been\/","title":{"rendered":"Stairways circle back to where you’ve been"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2022 Tyndale House, the Christian industry publisher of Left Behind<\/em> and the also-fictional The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven<\/em>, looks really, really bad in Michelle Dean\u2019s deeper dive<\/a> into the story of their cashing in on a blatant scam of a book<\/a>. One part of that article includes a summary from conservative blogger Phil Johnson, describing a dynamic that\u2019s all-too-familiar:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thread that runs through all their correspondence with Beth is that they wanted to corner her before they would be willing to investigate her concerns,\u201d he wrote to the Guardian. \u201cThey kept pressing her to agree to a meeting where she and Alex would have to face Kevin and a phalanx of editors who were determined to press ahead with the project, no matter what objections Alex and she might have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beth Malarkey simply kept complaining on the Internet. Tyndale House kept publishing a book with a quadriplegic boy\u2019s name on the cover, even though it knew he had substantial objections to the book. And for years, nothing changed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tyndale House and Kevin Malarkey kept their gravy train going by silencing Beth \u2014 portraying her as unreasonable and pitting a \u201cphalanx\u201d of editors, lawyers and influential people against her, so that the only avenue left to her was \u201ccomplaining on the Internet.\u201d That silencing was effective \u2014 until people started listening<\/em> to what she was saying on the Internet.<\/p>\n

OK, then.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx was the designated Laura Roslin<\/a> for last night\u2019s State of the Union ceremonies. I worked last night and haven\u2019t had a chance to read\/watch the speech and responses yet, but checked the news enough today to confirm Foxx is still just a cabinet secretary and not our new president. So that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cThe Black Country is an area of the West Midlands in England, north and west of Birmingham,\u201d Wikipedia says<\/a>. \u201cThe first trace of The Black Country as an expression dates from the 1840s and it is believed that it got its name because of black soot from heavy industries that covered the area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Congratulations, you now know more than the Fox News Press Team<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Meanwhile,\u00a0even after international hilarity and ridicule<\/a> forced Fox News to apologize and retract<\/a> its promotion of the far-right racist lie\/scary story about \u201cNo-Go Zones<\/a>,\u201d this nonsense is still being repeated as fact by Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal<\/a> and by his old friend The Liar Tony Perkins.<\/a>\u00a0TLTP is warning frightened white Christians to stay away from Minneapolis<\/em>, where he says that scary brown people have established an anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-white Prairie Home No-Go Zone.<\/p>\n

Rep. Keith Ellison, who represents Minnesota\u2019s 5th District, has invited Perkins to visit Minneapolis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Ellison\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That would be horribly embarrassing for The Liar Tony Perkins, except of course that The Liar Tony Perkins long ago proved that he was incapable of shame and embarrassment.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Wonketeer Shrill helps us calibrate our BS detectors by dissecting an example of how the media covers\/portrays white-on-white crime, \u201cWhite Teenage Criminals Are Cuddly and Cute and White and Not Really Criminals Really!<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n

There are several ways of editorializing about the relationship between an 18-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl he has taken from her parents\u2019 house. \u201cKidnapping,\u201d for instance, is one that comes to mind. \u201cBrainwashed\u201d is another term a writer might employ here. Then, too, is the fact that in Kentucky, an 18-year-old having sex with a 13-year-old constitutes second-degree rape. The writers choose none of these obvious descriptions of a relationship that we should intuitively see as predatory, and which is legally non-consensual. They don\u2019t even use the value-neutral term \u201cpair,\u201d but instead, ratify the relationship with the most quaint, chaste, and cutesy noun they could possibly have used: \u201csweethearts.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not possible that this story would have been covered in the same way if our two anti-heroes were black. The story wouldn\u2019t have framed a relationship between, say, an 18-year-old black male and a 13-year-old black female as one of \u201csweethearts,\u201d much less one between an 18-year-old black male and a 13-year-old white female. There\u2019s no chance the story would have gotten three paragraphs in without mentioning Dalton\u2019s criminal record or that he was fleeing prior burglary charges. The narrative of black criminality is the photo negative of those about white innocence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m glad to see Anthony Foxx is still transportation secretary. The closer you look, the less defensible Tyndale House seems. The Liar Tony Perkins warns against Prairie Home Sharia and gets invited to Minneapolis. And when is a kidnapper described as a “sweetheart”? When he’s white. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238,158,61],"class_list":["post-26479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-left-behind","tag-racism","tag-tltp"],"yoast_head":"\nStairways circle back to where you've been<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I'm glad to see Anthony Foxx is still transportation secretary. The closer you look, the less defensible Tyndale House seems. The Liar Tony Perkins warns against Prairie Home Sharia and gets invited to Minneapolis. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}