Dinesh D’Souza was one of the brightest stars among reactionary intellectuals in the U.S. He came to fame with such books as Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, What’s So Great About Christianity?, and The Roots of Obama’s Rage, in which he links Obama’s alleged rage against the U.S. to his Kenyan father. InIlliberal Education (1991) D’Souza ranted about alleged liberal bias on college campuses and in the curricula of institutions of higher learning. Such bias, he maintained, threatened Western education and Western values.
In The End of Racism (1998), D’Souza contended that Blacks benefited greatly during the days of American slavery, and that African Americans were better off under the tutelage of White Americans than they would have been in Africa. He further argued that racism is no longer a serious barrier to African American success.
African American conservatives such as Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury were not amused. Loury said that racism against Blacks would increase as a result of D’Souza’s book. Woodson called D’Souza “the Mark Fuhrman of public policy,” referring to the former L.A. cop caught on tape spewing racist language, including use of the word “nigger,” during the O.J. Simpson double murder case.
In recent years, D’Souza has been a star debater on such topics as the existence of God, conservative versus liberal politics, etc. He was a much sought after and very highly paid public speaker. He co-directed the anti-Obama documentary “2016: Obama’s America,” which is the second highest grossing political documentary after Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” D’Souza has promoted the notion that Obama is a secret Muslim and a socialist that is out to destroy the U.S., a favorite paranoid conspiracy theory among the Tea Bigots and other White racists.
Perhaps D’Souza’s crowning achievement was his position as president of King’s College, an evangelical college that many consider to be little more than a diploma mill for reactionary religious fanatics. Little did D’Souza realize that it would all come crashing down in biblical proportions.
D’Souza was brought down by a story in World, a leading evangelical magazine. He spoke at an event in South Carolina promoting traditional Christian values. D’Souza has been married to his wife, Dixie, for 20 years. However, he shared a hotel room with Denise Odie Joseph II, a woman he would eventually introduce as his fiancee.
At first, D’Souza claimed that he did not share the room with the woman. He claimed they stayed in separate rooms. However, Alex McFarland and Tony Beam, two conference organizers, said this is not what D’Souza told them. Moreover, Beam said the couple checked into the hotel in his presence, and that they checked into the same hotel room together.
At some point, D’Souza was forced to concede that he did share the hotel room with the woman. However, he claimed that “nothing happened,” (that is to say, he did not have sex with her). Of course, this is all about as believable as Bill Clinton’s insistence that he “did not inhale” when he “experimented” with marijuana in his early years.
But wait, it gets worse! D’Souza said that he was divorced. However, though he and his wife were supposedly separated, as it turned out, he did not file for divorce until October 4th, a few days after the conference. He then claimed he had been working on the process of filing for divorce two weeks earlier. (Before all of this, D’Souza was preaching that married people must keep their vows to one another.) Complicating this fiasco is the news that Joseph, his girlfriend, reportedly has only been recently married!
So much for conservatives’ trumpeting of traditional Christian values. Still, Dsouza is always quick with the rationalizations. He claims that there is no legal problem with his filing for divorce and having a girlfriend. However, he of all people should know that good Christians are to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but to live a good Christian life. The Bible strictly forbids divorce, unless one married member commits adultery. (Even that is weak. Divorce is allowed in the case of adultery, but not in the case of spousal abuse. Talk about the need to get priorities in order.) It is amusing and bemusing to observe the Obamas, the epitome of the happy U.S. family, and the broken D’Souza hypocritically talking about the importance of traditional family values.
Poor Dinesh D’Souza resigned in disgrace as president of King’s College. The 51-year-old reactionary intellectual, originally from Mumbai, India, must now rebuild his shattered professional and personal lives. This is a classic tale of self-righteous spiritual hypocrisy, as opposed to mere moral weakness. Everyone has moral weaknesses. However, hypocrites act as though they are above it all. People such as evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, talk show host Laura Schlessinger, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, and Elijah Muhammad, former leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI) until his death in 1975, spent much of their time railing against premarital and extramarital sex, only to commit their own sexual “sins.”
It is great to see religious hypocrites hoist by their own petard. Is this schadenfreude I’m feeling? To quote another reactionary religionist, Sarah Palin, “you bectcha!”