Flimflammers

by J. Douglas Johnson

I’m a little frazzled as I write this, and let me apologize in advance for perhaps going on longer than I should. I hope you can stick with me to the end.

Many years ago, I was a regular visitor to a well-known political website that touts itself as conservative. It also publishes a magazine that was once highly esteemed and that I first started reading in high school. But I stopped reading the magazine and clicking on the website when most of its editors and senior writers started advocating for the redefinition of marriage about ten years ago.

It was a grave disappointment at the time, but it should not have surprised me. I had met and talked and corresponded with various editors of this magazine, and almost none of them were practicing Christians or Jews. And they could not figure out what in particular about marriage had to do with male and female and the union that brings new life into this world.

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote his Obergefell opinion, ending marriage in the United States (or at least, ending marriage in the eyes of our government), a senior writer for that same conservative magazine, who is also an avowed atheist, counseled his conservative readers that it was time to go with the flow on the government redefinition of marriage (I also heard him speak to this same effect in Chicago). So I went from visiting this website a few times a day to stumbling across it maybe once a year.

Political Scammers

I just paid my annual visit to this website, which, like us at Touchstone, is in the midst of its June fundraising campaign (unlike us, it is able raise money in the millions). The headline for its campaign this year is: “These people have to be stopped!” Who are “these people”? Why, the LGBT people, of course. “We reject their premises. We argue against their logic,” writes the executive editor. What nonsense.

It was at least ten years ago, Mr. Editor, that most of your writers adopted the worst of the LGBT premises, and now that we are living through the fallout of the destruction you helped usher in, you claim you were against the LGBT ideology all along. Puh-lease.

He goes on, “We do all of this out of a sense of obligation to defend the truth and common sense, and to protect our children and our faith.”

I’m sorry, but this is a political scam. And it is a scam of the worst kind because that magazine has used the money conservatives gave it to support the very groups it now claims to be battling against. And what is “our faith,” which the editor says his writers hold in common with their readers? Three top writers at that magazine have told me they are atheist. Years ago, another editor, who was its most popular writer at the time (he has since left the magazine), began a book of his as follows:

There is no God in this book.

The humans in this story are animals who evolved from other animals who in turn evolved from ever more embarrassing animals and before that from a humiliating sea of ooze, slime, meats, and vegetables in the primordial stew.

Enough already. I prefer my enemies on the left to my enemies on the right. The former are less likely to dress in camouflage, and they don’t ask us to give them donations only to use those donations against us.

Everything Goes, or Nothing

While that “conservative” magazine did all it could to end marriage in our country, Touchstone published a cover story this year making the case against contraception. I don’t believe there is another English-language journal in the world that would take such a wildly unpopular stand today. Why did we do it? We did it to remind our readers that up until the early part of the twentieth century, not just all of Christendom but pretty much the entire world spoke of contraception as a real threat to civilization. We told that story because the logic behind contraception is the logic of the sexual revolution, it is the logic of abortion and the fatherless home, it is the logic behind the collapse of marriage, and it is the logic of the LGBT and the sexualization of everything.

I have no doubt that issue cost us some readers, but we don’t care. We mean to tell the truth, and the truth is that there is no happy halfway point between the sexual revolution, the pill, marriage redefinition, and the whole of the LGBT. There is no ridding ourselves of half of it. Either it all stays, or it all goes. Is the latter politically impossible? I would say so, but we aren’t trying to win votes.

That’s who we are at Touchstone, and we only mean to become more so. Our subscriber base is growing (and our conferences run close to capacity), but we lose money with every subscription we sell. That means we need a donor supporting every new reader we sign up, and we need donors behind every student who attends our conferences. We hope you’ll have their backs.

We have only ten days left to meet our budget for the fiscal year ending June 30. Yesterday, a generous donor put up a $25,000 matching-grant challenge, which means that every dollar you give will be matched dollar-for-dollar up to $25,000.

Please, give what you can so that we can keep our bunch of Jeremiahs doing what they do.