Guilty by Marriage

Virgil Walker | Sola Veritas

A Georgia school district is investigating its superintendent for bias. The real charge is that she married a man who said God made us male and female. Full disclosure: that man is my friend, and I have been a guest on his podcast.

In Decatur, Georgia, a school board has hired an outside investigator to examine its superintendent for bias. Strip away the procedural language, and you find something older underneath: a household on trial for the convictions of the man one of them married.

Dr. Gyimah Whitaker recorded a podcast at a studio her husband, Jason, owns. That raises a fair question about money, and I will come back to it, because honest people do not flinch from a clean audit. But the money is not what brought the cameras to town. Jason Whitaker hosts his own podcast, on his own time, and on it, he said something a progressive city has decided no one may say. On July 16, 2022, he wrote, “God made man and woman.” His critics add that he has spoken about Islam in ways they find offensive.

Let me tell you what the news will not. Jason Whitaker is my friend. I have supported what he is building, prayed for his family by name long before his wife became a headline, and talked with him about this very mess. So read me as a man with a stake, not a bystander at a safe distance. Weigh what I say knowing that.

A community with no power to hire Jason or fire him has reached instead for the one person it can touch, the woman who shares his name and his table. The conviction belongs to him, and the cost is being routed to her.

The mechanism deserves a name. Guilt by association treats nearness to a belief as proof you hold it. You buy coffee from a company that funds causes you reject, and someone decides your receipt is a confession of faith. The local editorial runs the same logic without blinking, calling the officials who appeared on the superintendent’s podcast “permanently connected” to her husband’s statements.

I am not speculating about that. I have been a guest on Jason’s podcast more times than I can count, and I have publicly backed what he does. I have never once set foot in the Marietta studio at the center of all this. By the logic now running in Decatur, that does not matter. The headphones alone make me a carrier, convicted the moment I agreed to come on. If association is guilt, hand me my sentence. I will be in good company.

Her case runs deeper than a coffee receipt, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. She did not patronize a stranger’s business. She married the man. The accusation is not that she bought something from someone with an embarrassing opinion. The accusation is that she goes home to him. Hold that against your own life. Imagine losing your job because your spouse holds a conviction your employer finds offensive, one you have publicly said you do not share. That is the standard Decatur is reaching for.

Scripture closed this door a long time ago. The son does not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father the guilt of the son (Ezekiel 18:20). Each one dies for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16). And if association were guilt, the church would have to throw out its own Lord. The religious experts had a charge they thought devastating: “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). They counted every shared meal as evidence against him. The God we worship was prosecuted by association. A Christian, of all people, should know this move on sight and refuse to run it on anyone.

Now look at what my friend actually said. He said God made us male and female. That is not a slur. It is the first chapter of the Bible (Genesis 1:27) and the answer Christ gave about marriage (Matthew 19:4). Here is what the outrage cannot afford to notice. The same verse that says God made them male and female says he made them in his own image. The doctrine behind Jason’s claim about men and women is the doctrine that commands him to honor the dignity of every neighbor the city says he despises. Dignity is not a wage you earn by agreeing with me. It is owed to people because of who formed them.

I have talked with the man. The Jason Whitaker I know does not hate his Muslim neighbors. He believes their religion is false, which is a different thing, and a thing every serious Christian has believed since the apostles. To call a religion false is a claim about that religion. To call a man a man states a fact about reality. Neither is contempt, and treating them as contempt is how you manufacture a heretic out of an honest man. Offense is not a trump card. A society that punishes a citizen for saying what he believes about God and creation, because the saying offends, has not risen above orthodoxy. It has swapped one orthodoxy for another and lost the honesty to admit it has one.

I have talked with Jason about the money, too. Let me state the allegation plainly, because the coverage keeps it vague. Dr. Whitaker used her husband’s facility to record a podcast, and the charge is that district money was paid to him for it. Everything I know, including what Jason has told me directly, says no district money was used. The investigation will land in the same place, and when it does, watch how fast the outrage migrates to a new charge. The money was never the point. This was never about a studio invoice. It is about leftist politics, and that politics has stopped behaving like policy and started behaving like a faith, a religion with a doctrine of the human person and a procedure for removing anyone who breaks it. Jason confessed a heresy against that religion when he said God made man and woman. His wife is being made to answer for it because the faith demands a sacrifice, and she was within reach.

Look at what the activists wear. The shirts carry a creed, the same litany you have seen on a hundred yard signs: pro-black, pro-brown, pro-queer, pro-trans, pro-Muslim, pro-science (right up until science speaks about male and female), and pro-choice. It is a confession of faith that you can order in a size medium. Read the whole creed, then notice the one line that never makes the shirt: “pro-Christian.” The religion that names itself “inclusion” keeps a list, and the Christian is the name left off it. The same coalition that wears pro-Muslim to the march is ready to end a woman’s career because her husband questioned Islam, and because he said aloud what the church has always confessed about men and women. They are pro every faith except the one on trial.

I know what I am doing by writing this. The moment it publishes, I am bound to Jason the same way the city is binding his wife, and someone will decide that defending him is the same as being him. I have felt the pull to avoid that before, the quiet urge to let a little daylight open between myself and a man the room had already chosen to punish, so none of it would land on me. That instinct is self-protection in the costume of prudence, and I have obeyed it more than once. I am refusing it here. Loyalty that waits for the verdict before it speaks was never loyalty.

I think about Tomeka, too, who reads every word I write before anyone else, and who would carry the weight of any conviction that ever cost me my seat at a table. She did not choose my positions. She chose me. If the world ever moves to bill her for what I believe, it is running the same play I am watching run against the Whitakers now.

Be fair to the critics, because not every hand raised in that city is running this play. Some have honest questions about spending, and former black residents of the Beacon Hill community want a historic site preserved. Those concerns deserve a hearing on their own terms. But the energy that turned a budget fight into a morality trial did not rise from a zoning dispute. It rose from a podcast.

So she should be supported, and I want to be precise about it. Support her against the creed test, against the demand that she prove the contents of her own heart and disown the man she married. Let the audit run, because the audit is not the injustice. The injustice is a town deciding that nearness to a Christian conviction disqualifies you, then dressing that decision in the language of equity.

If you want to do something with this case beyond feeling vindicated, start close to home. Name the mechanism out loud the next time it runs in your own circle, when someone’s standing is suddenly at risk for the convictions of a spouse or a friend. Refuse to read a rented room or a marriage certificate as a confession of faith. I will keep praying for the Whitaker family by name, and I am asking you to do the same, because there are children in that house watching their parents get sorted into safe and unsafe. Then sit with the question that costs you something. Ask whether you have ever billed someone for a conviction that was never theirs, and whether you owe them a word you never said.

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Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

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