I’ve received several kind emails asking about the circumstances surrounding the closing of comments on the post containing my interview with Dr. Patterson. Apparently, my actions have inadvertently touched off a bit of controversy, so I thought it would be good to make the facts of the incident available to all. My wife is undergoing major back surgery this week, and I’ll essentially be “moving” to a hotel in Oklahoma City tomorrow and remaining there through at least Saturday, so I won’t be able to interact here very much. Therefore, comments are not enabled for this post. I welcome your emails, and will respond to them as I have opportunity. Click here to contact me by email.
Middle of the day on Thursday, I began to realize that the comments on the interview post needed closing, but I didn’t ever get around to it, as I was trying to get ahead in light of next week. As I got ready to go to bed Thursday night, a friend called and asked if I would, as a personal favor, close the comments. I agreed, and asked my friend for suggestions on what to say in a comment explaining the closure. The friend asked if they could think on it for a bit, and I agreed. I then immediately closed the comments and turned my attention to the television.
Something like an hour later, I received an email from the friend, asking if I would post a comment for them (as they could not post, since I’d already closed it) under their chosen pseudonym. The text of their desired comment was in the email. I returned to the site, logged myself out, posted my friend’s text as coming from “John 3:16,” then logged back in and replied to the comment’s request with the one-word response, “Granted.”
I thought no more about it, as Friday was also a busy day, but mid-afternoon, I began to wonder if someone might not be tempted to think that “John 3:16″ was my own pseudonym because the two comments were so close in time. So I logged in to the site and moved the “John 3:16″ comment back an hour, roughly reflective of the time of their phone call.
Later that afternoon, temptation got the better of me, and I wandered over to Wade Burleson’s blog, where I discovered that the commenters, apparently having little else to do, had elevated this edit of timestamps to a conspiracy akin to the Kennedy assassination, with myself in the role of the grassy knoll rifleman. Well, my mischievous (sinful?) side then got the better of me, and I decided to enjoy myself a bit, randomly adjusting the timestamp on those two comments several times over the course of the evening. I was enjoying myself a bit too much.
For my part, I’ve sworn off any contact with or acknowledgement of Wade Burleson and what he is doing. We’ve installed a plugin that allows us to block IP addresses, and I’ve set it up to block the range of IP addresses Wade Burleson has used to comment on our site in the past. And, with God’s help, I’ll do my best never to visit Grace and Truth to You again. I’ll do as I’ve done in the past, trying my best to write and facilitate blog posts that will serve the preservation of our biblical Baptist distinctives, but I’ll not be drawn in to this kind of silly controversy again.
