Here’s a Guy Who Doesn’t Get It

Several weeks ago, Kwame Kilpatrick, former Detroit Mayor and current prison inmate, said this regarding his perjury about the text message scandal that brought down his corrupt administration.

I certainly believe that telling the truth right would have saved my own butt and would have saved a lot of turmoil and trouble, but I don’t know if I would have done anything any different, because I was trying to stand up for my wife and children at the time.

This is unfortunately all too typical of the kind of thing that passes for husbands and men these days.

The notion that you are protecting your wife and children by lying about another woman is beyond bizarre. It comes only from a sense of entitlement that you should get what you got at home, and get some on the side as well. It is the sense of entitlement and arrogance that underlay the whole sordid mess known as the Kilpatrick Administration in Detroit.

If you had been wanting to protect your wife, you would have limited yourself to her. You would have kept the promises and the commitments you made to her when you married her. There would have no been no text messages, no relationship with your chief of staff, or other women.

You would have taught your boys by example that a real man loves the woman he married and he keeps the promises he made to her.

The truth is you were trying to protect yourself from your wife, from the possibility that she might infringe on your fun, take your family and your life savings, and leave you behind.

And now your boys are growing up without their daddy.

Now, the Detroit Free Press runs another story with this as the lead paragraph:

Carlita Kilpatrick says her husband is distressed and depressed, angry and resentful, has trouble sleeping and fears the future – mainly because his text messages were released, according to a now-disclosed interview with a psychiatrist.

Again, this is just evidence that he, and she, just doesn’t get it. The problem isn’t that the text messages were released. The problem is that there were text messages to be released. His anger, fear, resentment, trouble sleeping, and depression is because he did something wrong, he knows it (which is why he wanted to hide it to begin with), he got caught, and now is paying the price for it.

Here’s the cold hard truth: If you don’t want salacious text messages or emails being made public, then don’t send them.

Instead, cultivate a heart of respect for the woman you married.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, I guess. And one that more than a year in prison has not yet taught him.

His mother, former Congresswoman woman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick chimes in calling it “judicial misconduct” and “prosecutorial misconduct.” She says it’s “helplessness and slavery,” which is an embarrassment to her and disrespect to generations of African-Americans who were actual slaves for reasons other than getting caught sending illicit text messages to someone they weren’t married to and lying about it while spending $9 million dollars of someone else’s money to hide your own mess.

Fortunately, the gentle congresslady is unemployed now.

Unfortunately, she’s living off her government pension, which means you and I are paying her to pontificate like this..

And by the way, Kwame, your greatest fear should not be the already released text messages.

It should be the federal corruption trial that awaits you and some of your cronies.

Because long after your sentence on perjury and violation of probation has passed, your sentence for corruption and bribery will keep you away from your family.

And my bet is that you still won’t get it.

But let’s not kid ourselves. This is not a Kwame problem. It’s not a Detroit problem. It’s a human problem.

All of us have within us the seeds of self-destruction that have manifested themselves in incredibly ugly ways in this situation.

We are sinners by nature. We are possessed by an extreme sense of entitlement and a deep and abiding gullibility.

We are tempted to satisfy our own lusts and then cover our tracks with dishonesty—whether implicit or explicit, whether only to ourselves or also to those around us.

We would all do well to consider the instructions of Proverbs: Guard your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life (Proverbs 4:23).

Only the gospel can save us from ourselves.

So run to Christ.