Watching a portion of Oprah’s interview with Meghan and Harry (all I could manage), I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s take on the passing of a child in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, a selection the author would read to gatherings, its cloying sentimentality typically prompting tears: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” Yes, there has been a flood of pearl clutching in the Church of Oprah, but I resonate more with the Babylon Bee’s take on the affair: Meghan Markle Inspires Millions Of Young Girls With Message That No Matter How Famous, Rich, And Powerful They Are, They Will Always Be Oppressed.”

Turns out, Meghan attended Northwestern University in my early days there as director of Baptist Collegiate Ministry. I was a church planter in the City of Evanston, our congregation meeting a couple of blocks from the campus. It was a privilege to live and work in that Chicago North Shore setting, a handsome town and a distinguished university looking out over Lake Michigan. But it was definitely Meghan Markle country, as “woke” as the day is long.

While we there (2000-2011), the United Way threw out the Boy Scouts for refusing to field gay scoutmasters, and now I see that this month the city council will vote on the proposal that some tax revenue from the sale of marijuana will be used, in light of past housing discrimination, to pay reparations to blacks living in the city before 1969. The report says that 8^th Ward Alderman Ann Rainey serves on the reparations subcommittee bringing the proposal, and that stirs unhappy memories.

When we were launching Evanston Baptist Church, we had to go before a subcommittee of the city council to get permission to host a black choir in a lakefront park. In the course of that hearing, she asked me in a prickly voice, “Why are you here?,” adding that Evanston already had a batch of churches, hence the nickname, “Heavenstown.” Problem was, few were evangelical and none from the inerrantist Southern Baptist Convention. (Indeed, there were no Southern Baptist churches in a dozen contiguous communities, with a population of around 400,000, roughly the size of Wichita.) A year later, we returned to the subcommittee for permission to deploy another musical group (visiting on a mission trip) in the same park. When she suggested instead a remote park frequented by few, I said it wasn’t ideal for our purposes. She got huffy and succeeded in forcing us out there. Then, around 2010, she led a move to deny churches access to commercial property, which would have cast us out of our basement digs downtown. She was particularly concerned about immigrant startups in storefronts along her ward’s border, but she hit all of us ecclesiastical renters. Along with some others, I got to plead our case, and fortunately the council didn’t go along with her agenda. But she gave it her best shot.

I noticed that karma bit Ann when a Democrat mayoral candidate rejected her endorsement because she had said his black opponent was “scary.” She, repented, insisting that it was his policies, not his race that concerned her, but in the world of progressive cancelling, the woke eat their own. So be it.

Better watch out, Meghan. Somebody will out-grievance you, and you’ll be scrambling to prove that your hurts and indignation and retaliatory/self-justificatory maneuvers still meet the gold standard.