I honestly wasn’t going to comment on this. Seriously, I was purposely ignoring the whole affair (woops, a pun) but since it’s now escalating a bit, I’m chiming in.
As someone once active in the Christian world, I’ve watched Dinesh D’Souza (the 2016: Obama’s
America dude) situation with fascination. First we have the World publication breaking the news that…
After a meteoric rise in the evangelical world, The King’s College president Dinesh D’Souza now faces his board’s likely questions about his relationship to a woman not his wife.
Ok. Nothing real new here. Here’s what allegedly happened:
Finally, near 11 p.m., event organizer Tony Beam escorted D’Souza and Joseph to the nearby Comfort Suites. Beam noted that they checked in together and were apparently sharing a room for the night in the sold-out hotel. The next morning, around 6 a.m., Beam arrived back at the hotel and called up to D’Souza’s room. “We’ll be down in 10 minutes,” D’Souza told Beam. D’Souza and Joseph came down together, and Beam took them to the airport.
The next day another conference organizer, Alex McFarland, distressed by D’Souza’s behavior, confronted him in a telephone conversation. D’Souza admitted he shared a room with his fiancée but said “nothing happened.” When I called D’Souza, he confirmed that he was indeed engaged to Joseph, but did not explain how he could be engaged to one woman while still married to another. When asked when he had filed for divorce from his wife, Dixie, D’Souza answered, “Recently.”
Again, no big deal, except Christians don’t do take kindly when they catch this behavior. After the event, DeSouza apparently said, “I have decided to suspend the engagement.”
Now, all this is fine and good except DeSouza has been a vocal opponent to gay marriage. I particularly enjoyed his “they’ll soon want to marry dogs” slippery slope argument in the article I linked. He also says:
The point is not that gay marriage is indistinguishable from child marriage or polygamy.
Please note he excludes “serial monogamy,” or “adultery” from his list. But since he’s evidently denying both, I suppose that’s moot.
My point in posting today is that he’s given an interview to Christianity Today where he denies:
…allegations published in World magazine that he has been involved in an inappropriate relationship with a younger woman while still legally married to his wife.
The article goes on to say:
“The approach in the [World] article … is a clear effort to destroy me and my career,” D’Souza said. “To me, that is a kind of viciousness masquerading as righteousness. That’s what makes this deplorable and sad.”
Smith said any speculation that World published its report as a vendetta against D’Souza and TKC is irresponsible.
“It is simply not true,” Smith said. “It’s a story we did not pursue, but once we came across it, we made a pretty straightforward journalistic determination that this is a newsworthy story.”
Smith said conference organizers McFarland and Tony Beam observed D’Souza’s “highly irregular” behavior and shared the information with Smith, who was speaking at the same event.
So, we’ve got a bit of drama now. Another quote:
When CT asked D’Souza directly for his response to charges of infidelity, he responded: “It’s absolutely not the case, um, that, um, that, um, um, you know, it’s…. Look, the issue here is that World is attributing to me an admission that I never made—is attributing to me a quotation that I never said. That to me is the problem. … They are just claiming based upon my non-assertion that I did something that I didn’t do.”
World responds this way:
… Smith stands by his reporting.
“The article came about 100 percent because of his behavior at a public event, a Christian conference that we happened to be at because I was a speaker,” he said. “We are 100 percent confident in our reporting.”
Finally, D’Souza has responded with this on his webpage:
So why would World write such a misleading, sensational story that we would normally expect from the tabloids? Actually there is a back story here which was noted by Amy Sullivan at the New Republic, as well as numerous other sources. Marvin Olasky, the editor of World, is the former provost of the King’s College. Olasky was on the search committee when I interviewed to be president, and he vehemently opposed my candidacy. Olasky publicly admitted that he was resigning his position as a consequence of my appointment. The reporter who wrote this story, Warren Smith, also used to work as a consultant for King’s until I decided not to renew his contract. And what was Olasky’s gripe against me? As he put it, I was seeking to make King’s a non-denominational “mere Christianity college” in the image of C.S. Lewis. This for Olasky was simply intolerable. Having nursed his grievance for two years, now apparently Olasky is using World to continue his vendetta.
This is a fascinating situation as it unfolds.
*Update*
