Judge Paul Pressler, 1930-2024
Judge Paul Pressler died last week. He was one of the greatest men of the last century.
In his last years, he was mercilessly defamed. And yet the evidence never made any sense, up to and including requiring you to believe that an elderly man in a diaper had raped a man in his 40s.
Sure. Who doesn't believe that.
As it happens, I can tell you who doesn't. Ben Cole and I disagree on many things, but we were both young men around the Judge in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Neither one of us ever saw a hint of impropriety in the man, personally or professionally, in all those many years. He conducted himself with integrity, godliness and grace at every point either of us ever saw.
The "proof" offered that he was the devil, as is so often the case, is that after years of fighting, he settled the lawsuit arising from the aforementioned absurd accusation. But it's not as though the man still had the energy of an NFL All-Pro. In these last few years, constantly near death, he rarely had energy to sustain a phone call for even ten minutes. You could hear it draining out of him, every time.
We are expected to believe that anyone who settles a lawsuit is "obviously" guilty, just as we are required to assert that all accusations are true. In Woke World, accusers never lie, and 94 year old men never want to avoid spending their very last days and the last of the inheritance they wish to leave to their children defending against a lawsuit that never ends.
Again, who doesn't believe that.
Paul Pressler maintained his innocence to his dying breath. In my lifelong experience, the man was a sinner like all of us, but less so than any other man I've known. He was a saint, who served the saints. And he is the only man in history to engineer the reversal of a leftist takeover of a major Christian denomination.
That's why they hate him. That's why they smeared him.
And that's no small part of why we'll see him again in Heaven, far closer to the Throne than most of us will ever get.