When Men Will Be Boys

My attorney has very high standards for my speech:

When I referred to my daughter as “wicked smart,” he scolded me for glorifying an adjective that gave the devil credit.

When he saw an email in which I referred to my abusive, philandering ex as “a douchebag,” he asked me if I thought that was a good way for a Christian woman to talk.

He routinely tells me I’m too aggressive (though he’s secretly learned to appreciate it and has told me I’d make an excellent lawyer), and I find myself walking on colloquial eggshells in his presence.

So while waiting for a court appearance, he and I had a few minutes to kill, and we started talking about Donald Trump, a man, who, according to my attorney, is the answer to a long offered prayer- the spine the Republican Party has lacked for decades.

Then, before I could possibly disrupt his moment, as if anticipating my reservations, he dismissively waved his hand and offered, “And all that stuff they were trying to punish him for, that was just locker room talk.” (Yes, he literally used that phrase.) “You might not like it, but that’s just reality. Guys talk like that all the time.”

I looked at him blankly for a long while before finally saying, “And that’s a problem.”

He looked annoyed.

I continued, “Can you honestly look at me and tell me that if your son grew up to talk about women that way, you would be proud of the man you had raised?”

“You don’t understand, Kaeley. That’s just the way men are. Boys will be boys.”

The problem is that I do understand. And it’s not okay.

Why does he have higher standards for the way I talk about my violent ex-husband than he does for the way our former Commander-In-Chief talks about women?

This post isn’t an invitation to bash or excuse Trump. In fact, if you walk away from this thinking the point has anything to do with Trump, you’ve missed the point entirely. And it’s not an invitation to criticize my attorney. I appreciate the work he’s done on my behalf, and he’s hardly the only person I know with this mentality or massive blind spot.

I’m just trying to offer a snapshot of an isolated situation that reveals a much deeper problem. Boys will be boys as long as men refuse to be men.

None of us should ever be so blindly loyal to a leader that it renders us unable to tell the truth about his conduct. This is true in politics, and it’s true in the church. Good contributions to a shared goal do not negate, justify, or excuse terrible behavior. And yet, wherever we look, we see this happening all the time. We saw it in the widespread denialism of Ravi Zacharias’ abusive conduct. We see it with John MacArthur and Doug Wilson and other heavy hitters in the evangelical world- men who get a free pass to behave abominably because we really like some of their other work. We think we need their leadership more than we need their integrity.

And hear me say this: When it comes to presidential elections, I am fully aware that there are no fully ethical options. I understand what it means to plug your nose and vote for a train wreck instead of a plane wreck. But for the love of mercy, call it what it is. Don’t pretend the bad option you’re picking is basically God’s holy gift to the western world. One of the reasons our options are so poor is because our standards are so compromised.

We need to elevate our standards. We can all do better, but first we have to believe it’s important to try.