Pooh's Think

This evening (Friday) I was working toward finishing an entry titled ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center, Harpers, & The Nation: Corruption at the Top Does Not Entail Corruption at the Bottom’. However, this will have to wait for Part 11 now that I have received an email from the notorious patriarchist Tim Bayly. This email provides some late and conclusive evidence for Bayly’s exceptional delusion or brazen deceit or, perhaps, a combination of both.

My goal here is not to inform the general public of Tim and David Bayly’s authoritarian, arrogant, censorious, and misogynist patriarchicalism. The general public – those who have had the least bit of exposure – already know this. Tim and David Bayly are also known as meek and mild ministers in the Presbyterian Church in America, but as I have discovered with Patriarch Wilson, this is often just the other side of the same spin-scum coin.

In what follows, I aim to offer updated evidence for the blatant deceit (or delusion) of Tim Bayly by way of introduction, since he appears well associated with the historic reconstructionist movement – including a somewhat recent, mutually-benefiting political association with Douglas Wilson. This entry is intended as background context for Part 11, which addresses the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new commitment to expose the reconstructionist movement and its children.  A bit laborious, but here it is for the record.

This is what happened: Today (Friday), I was led to Bayly’s popular blog for the first time in a few years. Once there, I found an unnamed magazine quoted and ridiculed on the issue of Calvin College, academic freedom, and homosexuality. The entry began, “A prominent evangelical magazine just did a piece on the complaint by Calvin College faculty reps that Calvin’s board has issued policy barring members of their faculty from promoting sodomy.” I was generally curious about this article, but I also wondered if the quotations were given in proper context. I attempted some keywords in Google but did not find the magazine or article in question. Not wanting to spend much time on this, I sent in a short comment asking for the source, assuming someone would provide at least the name of the magazine. Instead, Bayly sent an email informing me that he would not allow my blog address on his web site. Then, one of his readers claimed that I was likely lying about not knowing the name of the magazine. As a second comment, I offered what I thought was a fairly polite reply – considering – but then Bayly threatened to ban me from his blog. I posted two other comments on the importance of proper citation and censorship. These third and fourth comments were removed (Bayly was looming over the keyboard today I can tell you) and the majority of my second post was deleted. Bayly has now removed my last name so that his readers are unable to find me on-line, which includes altering the comments of someone else, replacing ‘Mr. Metzler’ with ‘Mr. Michael’.

So I sent an email to Bayly:

You are a piece of work. I truly did simply want to know the primary source after not finding it on google! You could have sent me this in your original email off-line.

The smear job you then did on me for your blog following, only after censoring me with selective craft and allowing one of your commenters to claim I was lying, is really too much! I am afraid this has reminded me of how I got in contact with you originally: it was precisely your bullying, slander, and censorship towards women expressing sincere opinions. I had to plead the case explicitly for one woman, and when I would not literally obey your extreme wishes on the matter (via our second phone discussion), you turned on me. . . .

Bayly responded with a meek pastoral note:

I’m sorry for the hit and miss nature of our correspondence. You forget that our first, and by far longest, conversation concerned you and Doug Wilson, and ended with me cautioning you against a life consumed with bitterness. You made the call, you appreciated my caution, and the call ended cordially.

There was only one other call, and that one resulted from my seeing you publicly consumed with the very bitterness I had warned you against a year earlier. You refused my warning during that second call, and afterwards said things publicly about that call which I thought wrong.

So, you can see our memories are quite different. I’m sorry for this, but it’s often the way in relationships and I must follow my convictions concerning what is best for those who read Baylyblog. I hope someday you will understand.

Yes, indeed, our memories are quite different. Spin-scum clerics have an amazing knack at getting the facts just enough wrong right where it matters. Here’s the real story:

On September 14, 2006, I wrote an entry titled ‘Bumped Into Some Of The History Behind Ligonier’s Suit’:

_______________

At Tim Bailey’s Blog [ I provided the link] back in February, I poked my head into a comment section about the scandal following RC Sproul’s defrocking to put in my two cents (poised with a silver dollar follow up). I wrote:

I’m very disturbed at the waffling here. The judgment was made. Certainly the defrocked men have the right to appeal [the charges included pastoral abuse]. So why haven’t they? If they don’t, then what’s the ‘controversy’? All this looks like all the guys in the club just shrugging their shoulders and turning the other way; and yes, the discussion here on this blog does in principle call into question the actions of the RPCGA. And yet I don’t see any reason presented to think their actions should be called into question. Thank you.
Michael Metzler
www.poohsthink.com
Posted by Michael Metzler at February 12, 2006 05:00 PM

Bayly replied:

Time will tell, but please do not think that I’m assuming the session of St. Peter has failed in their duties any less than our session or I myself have.

So I offered a second comment:

So then you admit that you are fully disregarding the weight of a formal ruling by the RPCGA? Such a ruling does not give you any prima facie reason to suppose the four men might be guilty of something that you are not? How is this just? If these four men are not guilty of what the judicial ruling has promulgated, this is the last way we should be going about correcting such a ruling. This makes a sham out of any judicial process we might want to employ–if we don’t respect the RPCGA deliberations, then why should we expect anyone to respect ours?
Yours
Michael Metzler
www.poohsthink.com
Posted by Michael Metzler at February 12, 2006 05:11 PM

It was just today [September 14, 2006], while doing a search on the internet, that I discovered this thread again; it turns out that Pastor Bayly followed up the next day and wrote the following:

Dear Brothers, last night Mr. Metzler and I spoke by phone. He convinced me that it would be good to be more direct here in acknowledging what I said to him on the phone–that I have never intended to be dismissive of Westminster Presbytery’s action defrocking the four elders of St Peters. Westminster is a court of the church and, as such, must not simply be dismissed even when there seem to be obvious reasons for that judgment to be reviewed by another court. And it was for this reason that I referred to Mr. Wilson as “Pastor Wilson,” while referring to Mr. Sproul as “Mr. Sproul.”
Posted by Tim Bayly at February 13, 2006 01:39 PM

________________

So much for the first phone conversation, then. Bayly soaked in a warm bath during the full, lengthy discussion like any well-to-do southern patriarch would, and it was apparent that Bayly did not know much about my relationship to Wilson. Bayly confided in me with some of his own concerns about Wilson – noting that Wilson might turn out like Jonathon Edwards at the end of his career. But here again is Bayly’s new, ad hoc ‘recollection’:

You forget that our first, and by far longest, conversation concerned you and Doug Wilson, and ended with me cautioning you against a life consumed with bitterness. You made the call, you appreciated my caution, and the call ended cordially.

It is true that I “made the call”. I was returning his call to me (or email requesting a call). Bayly had contacted me to discuss my two comments about the defrocking of a pastor on the East coast by a Presbytery with no connection with Wilson. The purpose of his call to me had nothing to do with my relationship with Douglas Wilson, nor any alleged concern over ‘bitterness.’ Here again are his own words:

Dear Brothers, last night Mr. Metzler and I spoke by phone. He convinced me that it would be good to be more direct here in acknowledging what I said to him on the phone–that I have never intended to be dismissive of Westminster Presbytery’s action defrocking the four elders of St Peters.

Now for the second phone conversation.

The day after posting the entry above, on September 15th, 2006, someone sent me an informative email, and I posted it as an entry, titled ‘Too many reformed nincompoops too little time?’:

Michael,
You wrote in your blog yesterday that it’s of mild interest that Wilson has Bayly’s blog as a permanent link. Bayly also has Wilson’s link on his blog [me: good point, it is link number one!]. But it shouldn’t surprise you. These fellows are of the same ilk – it’s all about being right, authority, and delusions of grandeur. I’ve been following an exchange over the past week on Bayly’s blog in which Bayly is mocking and calling an egalitarian Christian woman who is commenting there “An Agent of the Evil One” . . . Bayly blatantly lies and says that she has admitted to not submitting to her husband. When challenged directly on it, he obfuscates in his best Wilsonian style. The threads and comments are here . . .

Five links were provided for my independent research.

Later that same day, I received an email from someone else, and posted it in an entry titled ‘Blog Abuse? — Reformed Pastors On The Web’:

An apparent victicm of this situation [I provided the Link] on Pastor Tim Bayly’s blog writes in. Please let me know your observations dear readers. You are linked to the primary documents and I don’t have time to read all of them currently:

Dear Michael,
I am the infamous Corrie that was able to post ONCE before being accused of being a liar and a feminist just for asking where it was that Light said that she refused to submit to her husband. I tried to explain myself in another post and that post was altered and then totally removed. I tried to resend another post and that post was denied and I was banned. I then received a note from Tim telling me that because I was banned by the CCC-forum [link provided] at Yahoo (more men cut from the same cloth in their treatment of others who happen to disagree with their “manful” religious views) I would not be able to participate on his blog. He based this on gossip and hearsay and without listening to anything I had to say. Even though I am not an egalitarian and I have stated so to no avail. It is just that I disagree with their extra-biblical interpretations of submission and their philosophy of extreme patriarchy and demeaning views of women. Just check out what was said by Martin in the thread titled “Mutual Submission”. Did you notice that not one of those guys disagreed with his misogynistic remarks? Martin planted those comments in their on purpose. I had written to him to tell him that they were offensive and he explained he was doing it on purpose in order to test them and prove something. Not one remark on the contrary about Martin’s comments demeaning women but plenty about Light and I.
Then, he went further and accused me (in the Math joke thread) of saying something that was “particularly evil in its opposition to scripture” . . . My husband wrote him and has asked him to send this alleged evil statement so that he could learn what his wife was saying on the internet. Tim has refused to email this comment. My husband requested that at the very least Tim should put this evil phrase alongside his accusation. He won’t do it. After all, he is an officer of the church and doesn’t have to submit to anyone but himself. . . .

Tim Bayly has both of my computers’ ips blocked out so I am unable to send any comments from any other email address. What is he so afraid of? After all, I am only a woman.

That same day, after receiving a bizarre phone call from Tim Bayly, I posted another entry, titled ‘Tim Bayly Gives Me A Call’:

I have tried giving Tim Bayly the benefit of the doubt in all of this to some degree. There were too many clear problems with what has happened in my view (just from a cursory read of the situation) for me to fully defend Tim Bayly as I have defended others . . . . I spoke to Corrie on the phone this morning and I encouraged her to write in more detail, backing up her statements more; and here in the Wood I expressed the sad fact that I did not have time to look into all the primary documents right now and I encouraged others to write in with any additions or corrections. As always, my blog is open for anyone to send in something for publishing. . . . . My default is to publish anything from anyone that seems cogently written and sufficiently relevant to the goals of this site. I posted Chris Witmer’s material recently without him even requesting I do so; he simply asked me to read the material.

Consistent with all this, when Tim Bayly called me up this afternoon, I listened to him charitably, with full intentions of having a profitable discussion. He explained that he had no intentions to litigate, which I thought was mighty nice of him. He was rattling off fairly quickly what were to him absolutely gross fabrications from Corrie’s letter, while taking many slower paced rabbit trails of autobiographical details and other points that at times seemed to be unrelated to the subject at hand. [ I was politely noting the rambling and the raving]. Tim told me that he was disappointed that I would say he was just like Dick, Wilson, and Sproul Jr. I read my post back to him and explained that I had said the exact opposite. It wasn’t clear if I was able to get Tim to see what was actually said in the post. My hopes for coming to close agreement with Tim started to disappear as he continued to make it very clear that he didn’t care what folks reading all this think about any of this. . . .

I interrupted and explained that he is in a very bad rhetorical spot right now and that I think he has said some unwise things. Tim clearly didn’t like me saying that and he did not allow me to complete my thought on the matter. Given the way Tim was defending himself in such a hyper manner, given the large doses of apparent emotion when decreeing how ludicrous Corrie’s letter was, and given his disregard for my attempts to explain my own worries, I was completely shocked when Tim ended with what was really an ultimatum. I’m not sure what Tim demands from me really, but when I explained to him that I don’t think it was morally wrong for me to merely post a letter like Corrie’s for further investigation he declared that our phone conversation had been entirely fruitless. I explained that I did not agree with that at all. I said that I didn’t even hardly say anything yet. To this Tim retorted that I certainly had and that I just didn’t know it.
During the ‘discussion’ he was at times reading from a paper and he had other folks in the room. He said he was getting off the phone and that he was satisfied that he had “given [me] all the information that [I] needed.” At this point, I lost my temper. The phone conversation had gotten silly at every stage, but now I felt like this was nothing but some kind of set up. Given me all the information I needed? I explained to Tim that either he would have to write up a response for my blog, or email the corrections for my own investigation, or I would have to spend my own precious time on his behalf. The idea that he had given me all the information I needed was not one of the options. . . . Instead of expressing any willingness to help correct any errors Tim rather concluded that I had a significant moral problem, which explained why our conversation was so ineffective.

About five minutes into the conversation I was hopeful of posting something nice about Tim Bayly, proving the value of investigative journalism. But now I am afraid that I am forced to prove the great glories of investigative journalism, not merely its value. Tim Bayly is off his rocker on this and how he treated me, consistent with what I so far see in the public, primary documents. I found him arrogant, rude, unreasonable, and unable to accurately represent my words during the course of our conversation. He has been significantly unwise in how he has dealt with the issue of “submission” and how he has treated those commenting on his blog, which included even censorship that I do not believe he successfully justified during the course of our conversation. What was remarkable was his continued use of “friend” in explaining the reason for his call, but when I didn’t submit to his understanding of the situation in full, which I found fraught with censorious ego, he declared our entire phone conversation vain and explained the reason for this to be my own immorality. Let us not doubt any more dear readers why Tim Bayly still boasts his primary link to Douglas Wilson’s web site.

I was just explaining to my wife last night that the level playing field of the internet, and the protection it affords to everyone, is creating what is really a different world. The kinds of hierarchical, patriarchal, and exclusive modes of story telling that have gone on in homes, big corporations, and churches are getting hammered. Old school guys like Wilson, Dick, and Bayly don’t know how to deal with public open discourse and publicity. This was my thesis last night, which I hoped to begin developing today; but Bayly decided to just illustrate and support my thesis far better than I could have imagined. As we got off the phone, I explained to Bayly that I was very disappointed that he didn’t care what all the folks on the world wide web thought about his public actions. He said that he was not accountable to them. Ah, yes. Rather, he explained, he was accountable to a board of elders. “Oh, great, your buddies. Give them a back rub for me” I said in reply. I’m sure Tim Bayly has been judicially investigated by his elders about all this.

Welcome to a new world.

Again, I would recommend reading Glen Reynold’s essay  he linked to from his post on Frank Vance (Instapundit.com ).

I continued to offer commentary on Bayly’s behavior towards women on his blog and so I was eventually given the death sentence – literally. Tim Bayly’s brother offered a full entry dedicated to me and my immorality. I had committed patricide and the implication was that I deserved the death penalty. My name was not explicitly mentioned of course; otherwise, Bayly’s well-shepherded customers could find my competitive response on the world wide web.

So that is what our second phone conversation was all about. But recall Bayly’s written testimony as of today, regurgitating Wilson’s spin :

There was only one other call, and that one resulted from my seeing you publicly consumed with the very bitterness I had warned you against a year earlier. You refused my warning during that second call, and afterwards said things publicly about that call which I thought wrong.

Bayly was still referring to me as a “friend” during this second phone conversation, hoping to turn me against the woman that wrote the material I had posted. My alleged ‘bitterness’ had nothing to do with the purpose of the call or the content of our discussion. Not until after I refused to blindly submit to his interpretation and remove my entry did Bayly conclude I was immoral. Bayly called me to manipulate me over his own imbroglio, but now claims he was calling for pastoral reasons given my alleged bitterness towards Douglas Wilson. Further, this is not just a false ‘recollection’ but rather a direct denial. This is Bayly’s direct response to my accusation today, when I wrote:

I am afraid this has reminded me of how I got in contact with you originally: it was precisely your bullying, slander, and censorship towards women expressing sincere opinions. I had to plead the case explicitly for one woman, and when I would not literally obey your extreme wishes on the matter (via our second phone discussion), you turned on me.

Two phone conversations, two claims, two lies. Two strikes and you are out on this one, pal.

Now back to the regularly scheduled program, where we take a look at these reonconstructionist Dear Leaders from a more bird’s eye view: ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center, Harpers, & The Nation: Corruption at the Top Does Not Entail Corruption at the Bottom’.

Stay tuned . . .

Posted by metzler on Saturday, November 7, 2009, at 1:53 pm.
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