On the reaction to Rep. Massie’s second marriage

I’m a writer. I’m also a reader. More, I read history, contemporary and otherwise. The sum of this is: give me facts about a person, and I can come up with some ugly explanations. Something as innocuous as a woman wearing her hair up could be foundation for the allegation that it keeps it out of the way when murdering her latest victim in that alley over there. Such a story has the same basis in fact as your average Communist propaganda poster, possibly less, but it does technically connect to reality.

Such a story is the essence of gossip. I may not, in fear of God and reverence for His law, dare to spread that story, not as fact or insinuation. Spreading it as an absurdity may be fine, so long as I am sure it will not be taken for insinuation, but the moment I knowingly allow it to be taken as a factual possibility, I bear false witness against my neighbor, contrary to the Ninth Commandment (Ex. 20:16).

All this to say: I despise the internet’s reaction to Rep. Thomas Massie’s marriage.

The facts (re-marriage c. 16 months after Massie’s widowing to a good-looking woman he’s been acquainted with for around a decade) can easily be made into scandal. As I demonstrated above, that’s no great achievement, and ‘scandal’ only gets easier to create when we’re dealing with such soul-near issues as marriage (and marriage’s accompaniments). I could write a hundred tawdry novels off of that bare outline (and a thousand such have been written), if I were a hack writer; I could write a hundred actually substantial stories matching the pattern. The fact that I can write the story doesn’t mean it’s true.

We are called, in Scripture, to uphold accusations only on evidence proportional to their seriousness. The threshold of evidence for ‘He’s a little careless with throwing away his straw wrappers’ can be quite low. The threshold of evidence for sins like adultery, murder, fornication, and marital infidelity must be much, much higher. The first two, at least, reach the Biblical standard of “two or three witnesses” in Deuteronomy 17:6. This standard, note, also requires that the witnesses actually show relevance. Massie’s X post may rustle some jimmies, but it’s hardly proof of any of these sins. At most it shows the bare possibility, which already existed, and gave it slightly more detail. Re-marriage after some months does not proof of adultery make, any more than marriage after some months of courtship makes proof of fornication.

Indeed, the New Testament explicitly expands the standard implied in Deuteronomy 17:6. In Matthew 18:6, Christ requires two-to-three witnesses to substantiate my charge in any dispute with a brother in Him (and shall we be less strict in witnessing His truth before unbelievers, when the controversy is proper? See Titus 2:7-8). 2 Corinthains 13:1 applies the same standard. 1 Timothy 5:19, meanwhile, commands the same standard be applied for elders in the church, a command which can properly be read as applying the standard to all leaders (which Massie is, as federal Representative) and all men of so-far-good (moral) character (which Massie, in this context and to my knowledge, is).

But do the people peddling scandal actually know the full circumstances? Do they have substantial evidence?

I wot not. So far as I’ve seen, the mudslinging is entirely built on insinuation and suspicion. Men and women are all but accusing Massie of adultery (outright accusations, sometimes) on the basis of an act which, in the blunt facts of it, is perfectly moral, perfectly Christian, without so much as a prior record of infidelity or immorality. Ruth re-married (remember, Boaz was her second husband and Naomi her mother-in-law), and all indication in her story is that the act was righteous.

Such gossip is vile. It is allied in Leviticus 19:15-17 with perversion of justice, with partiality in judgement, with hatred of my neighbor’s life. Psalm 140 warns the slanderer, moreover, in clear terms: “Let not the slanderer be established in the land; let evil hunt down the violent man speedily!” (v11).