I’m surprised D’Souza would not know it’s wrong to introduce his lover at a Christian conference while he’s still married as if that does not matter!
But it was catty of World Mag. to make it public in order to cause division and severely hurt the guy and everybody else. Someone with a brain and Christian leadership heart should have talked privately to him and gotten a couple at the hotel conference to split and bunk in a male room and a female room.
Catty stuff like this is incompetent and destructive.
What a mess.
3 posted on Thu Oct 18 2012 16:49:17 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by wideawake: “Interesting that World Magazine decides to do a takedown of D’Souza, the director of 2016, just three weeks before the election.”
I agree that the timing was terrible.
However, that timing was D’Souza’s choice, not the choice of the reporter. A Christian college president separated from his wife needs to avoid any public contact with **ANY** women, not take her into his hotel room while attending a Christian conference, let along as one of the speakers. Even if the hotel was all booked up, wasn't there any woman anywhere at the conference who could pay a few extra dollars for an extra guest to sleep in their room?
Granted, this looks really bad, and it smells of a Chicago-style attack.
However, that doesn't make sense. It was D’Souza’s decision to take the woman to the conference. If anything, since the editor of World Magazine, Marvin Olasky, used to be the provost of Kings College and resigned because of then-unexplained differences with D’Souza, it is quite likely that Olasky has been aware of the situation for some time and was exercising a lot of patience in **NOT** reporting it until D’Souza took this woman to his hotel room.
Under the circumstances, World Magazine really had no choice but to run the story and do it before the election.
Here's why.
What would you do if you were a reporter attending a Christian conference and found out that one of the speakers was sharing a room with a woman not his wife and was claiming to be engaged to her? (Yes, I know some of those facts are in dispute, but that's what the reporter believed to be true.)
I've been in similar situations several times.
A few years ago I discovered shortly before an election that the largest single donor to a Republican candidate for county prosecutor was the owner of a local strip club. His contribution was very large by the standards of local politics — more than many campaigns spend for their entire budget — and then I discovered that the former owners of the strip club were being charged with serious federal felonies involving sexual slavery. I had been cautioned by local law enforcement for a long time that there were real problems with that strip club, but didn't know the details until the federal charges started.
I had little choice but to break the story prior to the election. If I'd held the story, I would have been accused — correctly so — by local Democrats of holding the story to help the Republican get elected.
On top of all that, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke a major story on the federal charges against the former owners of the strip club. I'd already made my decision to run the story, but if I hadn't done so, the Post-Dispatch story would have made me look like I was trying to cover things up.
End result is the Republican won his race, the Democratic candidate was suspected of leaking me the story (he didn't, but I'm guessing his friends may have had something to do with it), and the county calmed down after a few weeks of some Republicans screaming that I'd gotten in bed with the Democrats.
The Republican prosecutor has known me for years, knows I'm no Democrat, and most people have forgotten. He wasn't happy (nobody would be), but as far as he's concerned, he won the election and now has even more reason not to let the campaign contribution affect his decisions on who to charge with crimes.
On the other hand, if I hadn't run the story, it would not have been forgotten and I would to this day be accused of covering up for Republicans accused of corrupt criminal ties.
World Magazine was essentially in the same position. They had to run this story before the election, and really had no alternative to doing so.
Frankly, the stakes were a lot higher for World Magazine than for me. I can get away with accusations that I'm biased toward Republicans (I don't hide my conservative positions, and in my community I can get away with that).
World Magazine's credibility would be destroyed, and correctly so, if it became known they had information indicating that a prominent Christian college president who was fighting against Barack Obama was in an problematic relationship, but World had covered it up right before the 2012 election.
Many of us in conservative circles would have demanded the heads of Joel Belz (founder) and Marvin Olasky (editor) — just like many of us are now upset that King's College apparently knew about D’Souza’s major marriage problems and let him remain in a position as head of a Christian college.
This was likely a disaster waiting to happen. It should have been handled quietly, but that would have required D’Souza quietly stepping out of public Christian leadership positions long ago as his marriage started to fall apart.