I didn't get to bed until almost midnight, my kid's football game was tough to watch, I'm busy at the office, and I'm battling a headache.
But I need to respond to the Groeschel situation. Readers know that I've long been a fan. See, for example, this recent entry. In fact, be sure to see that entry and focus on the penultimate sentence: "He's getting older and he's had some health problems, so you might get frustrated with his halting speech."
I should've also said that "you might get frustrated with his tendency to lose his train of thought." I can't tell you how many times I've been listening to Groeschel and I just kind of smile, realizing he's mixing two ideas in the same monologue. It's not common on his show, but it's certainly not rare. If I had to guess, I'd say he does it once or twice an hour.
And he undoubtedly did it in this case. He took the example of a pretty 16-year-old girl dressing inappropriately and acting flirtatiously with a vulnerable priest and applied it to a conversation about Jerry Sandusky. It is, quite frankly, a WTH moment, and if I didn't feel like I knew Groeschel, I'd be outraged. And I don't blame the secular press for being outraged (a partial list of secular publications that have wasted no time blasting away: HuffPo, New York Post, New York Magazine). There is, from what I can see, no way to defend the substance of what Groeschel said, but I also don't think he meant it. You're dealing with a man who was hit by a car a few years ago and almost died, suffered one or more strokes, and has had other health problems. You're also dealing with a guy who probably hopes Hitler was saved in the afterlife: he genuinely seems that merciful. In this case, he probably genuinely feels bad for Sandusky, in the sense that Sandusky is obviously a tortured worm of a man that needs a lot of grace, then bizarrely combined it with the problem that pretty teenage girls occasionally entice young priests. It wouldn't be the first time his trains of thought got confused.
That's my guess, anyway, and if we could prove it, I'd bet a thousand dollars that my guess is right.
