One More Word on the Downfall of Church Militant

I want to make one more statement about the ongoing dumpster fire at Church Militant, just to be absolutely clear, and then I hope I never have to write or think about them again.

Since the time I wrote that blog post, less than 24 hours ago, David Gordon has switched his video back to public, announced as much, and compared himself to Theoden. I think people who chose to work for a scandal rag for years and are only speaking up now that they’ve been fired shouldn’t be compared to any Tolkien character except perhaps Grima Wormtongue, but that’s another story.

Since the video is now public and everyone’s already talking about it, I don’t think it’s too salacious to come out and say that the accusations against Voris are of a sexual nature: that he was living an “active homosexual lifestyle” all along, that he’d been spotted at gay bars, that he made male staff feel “groomed,” that he had somehow posted a sexually explicit picture to the Church Militant dropbox and boasted about masturbating to it, and that Church Militant tried to cover all this up. And the crowd is going wild. There is nothing that Catholic social media likes better than beating the bully back once he’s been caught.

Voris himself posted that tearful apology video for unnamed sins last month, and nobody that I’ve seen has denied the accusations so far. But for the record, I don’t know that they are true.

Because I’ve already talked about this, I feel I need to make the following perfectly clear:

If these allegations prove true, I do not care that Michael Voris is gay. I couldn’t care less what his sexual orientation is. Anyone attacking or persecuting him because he’s gay is every bit as bad as he is. I care that he lived this double life WHILE participating, egging on and encouraging a moral panic against LGBTQ Catholics and everyone who looked too much like one. That’s the issue here. If he were a perfectly chaste straight man with a tradwife and eleven happy children, what he did would still be vile. He gets extra points for the crass hypocrisy, but what he did was bad enough.

I also care that, allegedly, he was sexually harassing his staff by “grooming” them and by making them all see the smutty picture and remark in the server. I have no respect for people who would work at Church Militant, but no one deserves to be sexually harassed. I also acknowledge that people queerphobic enough to work at Church Militant might well just assume they were “groomed” because they see the mere existence of a gay man as a sexual abuse against them. But if it turns out they were sexually harassed, that’s disgusting and Voris needs to make restitution to his victims.

I am not entitled to know about the sex lives of anybody in the Church or out of it. In fact, I’d rather not know.  But when frequent contributors to Church Militant have mocked my sexuality on social media and recruited their followers to do the same, and when my dear friends have been harassed and attacked by Church Militant’s personality cult for real and imagined shortcomings, it’s enlightening to find out that their boss was just compensating for his own shame.

I hope Voris takes a hard look at the humiliation he’s no doubt feeling right now, and comes to a realization about what he did for a living. I hope he doesn’t come to the conclusion that his sexual orientation is the real reason he’s a monster.

I hope Church Militant quietly fades into obscurity and I never hear from them again.