SUNLIT UPLANDS: Waldo Lydecker

Lindsay Taylor Thompson is a Disbarred Attorney

Lindsay Taylor Thompson - AKA Waldo Lydecker - in happier days before
he became a disbarred attorney and a Christophobic hate blogger.

Here at Sunlit Uplands we have been greatly encouraged by our steadily growing number of readers; by the good friends all over the world that we have made through blogging; and by our Number 1 ranking in the BlogNetNews "Weekly Influence Index." But of all the gratifying traffic stats and metrics we have looked at these past several years, the surest, most reliable indicator that we are on the right track, fighting the noble fight, and having a positive influence for good, has been the daily calumny and vitriol directed our way by South Carolina's darkest, nastiest, most prolific, Christophobic, homosexualist, hate blog known as Waldo Lydecker's Journal.

Waldo Lydecker's Journal aptly takes its name from a character in the 1944 movie, "Laura." The Waldo Lydecker character in that movie, a homosexual newspaper columnist played by Clifton Webb, famously states: "I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom." In another line, the Lydecker character declares: "I'm not kind, I'm vicious. It's the secret of my charm."

Of course we're not the only blog that the heretofore anonymous hate blogger chooses to attack. Indeed, he has pet names for each member of what he has dubbed "the Algonquin Round Table of the conservative SC blogdom -- the big swinging bloggers."

Many of his attacks are directed at FITSNews, and its editor, Will Folks. dubbed by Waldo as "Anaconda." A sampling can be seen here. His ridicule of the Palmetto Scoop and its editor, Adam Fogle, dubbed by Waldo as "Scoopy" or "Boy Fogle," is here. And his always negative comments about Jamie Jeffords and his popular "Eye of Polyphemus" blog can be seen here. Jamie, who has only one good eye, has been dubbed by the charitable Waldo as "Cyclops."

But as BlogNetNews records on a weekly basis, we bow to no one as the target Waldo most loves to hate. It is clear that Waldo has a robust hatred and bigotry toward all things Catholic. He has called the Pope "the devil," and we are a large target for his "Know-Nothing," nativist rants. A sampling of this bigotry is on daily display and can be seen here. In his ignorance, he has dubbed your editor "Savonarola," an appellation we humbly and happily accept. Regardless of what Hollywood and pulp fiction novelists may have to say, that great religious and political reformer spoke truth to the highest earthly and religious powers, spoke of God's love and law in the midst of moral corruption and dissolution, was martyred for defending the Truth, and is being promoted for canonization by many in the Dominican Order.

Since Waldo is publishing as many as forty venomous posts per day, we believe it is time to shine some sunlight into the darkest corner of South Carolina's blogosphere. Those who read his many angry, hateful posts deserve to know through whom all the spiteful rage flows. And now, at long last, we can reveal to you the identity of the devil's own blogger.

It may not surprise many of our readers to learn that he was a lawyer. But this lawyer was found to have acted unethically, and in 2009 he was disbarred by order of the Washington State Supreme Court.

Waldo Lydecker is the pseudonym for Lindsay Taylor Thompson. He hails from the Fayetteville area of North Carolina, where -- in a presumably less-benighted phase of his life -- young Lindsay attained the rank of Eagle Scout.

Today, the bitter and forlorn 54 year old lives alone on Halcyon Circle, in Greer, South Carolina.

He is a graduate of Saint Andrews Presbyterian College, where he received a B.A. degree in 1978, and his J.D. degree is from the Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. (Although he claims, in his entry in the Martindale-Hubbell legal directory, to have graduated from the "Northwestern School of Law.") In any event, Thompson was admitted to the Washington State Bar on November 4, 1985.

Over the years he served as editor of the Washington State Bar Association News, and he served as the "openly gay" member of the Washington State Bar Board of Governors from 1998 to 2001.

While he edited the State Bar's newsletter, he tended to refrain from showing his contempt for his Southern roots; for his home state, which he has dubbed "Jessehelmistan"; and for those he calls "Christianists." But this excerpt from an October 2003 column provides a foretaste of the Christophobic hate blogger he would become:

Born and raised a Southerner, I have a high tolerance for religious enthusiasms. I've seen snake-handlers, dirt eaters, tent revivalists of all stripes (tents and revivalists), even some charismatic Episcopalians who took up in an abandoned gas station to roll in the aisles and speak in tongues. My own history is pedestrian. I was raised a Presbyterian. In the South, I was once told, that's a Baptist who can read.

Southerners take their religion seriously.

I have to admit, though, I've never seen anything quite like Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, he of the 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments and other Christian edicts. Installed by him two years ago and more lately removed from Alabama's Judicial Building by some maintenance men and a federal court order, "Roy's Rock" picked up where gay marriage left off as the late-summer cause célèbre.

Beginning in 1993, Thompson partnered with Anthony D. Gipe in a firm known as Thompson Gipe. The firm promoted itself as: "Seattle Business and Trial Lawyers. Also practicing employment and civil rights law."

But when he wasn't writing snarky articles about journals in competition with the one he edited, Thompson devoted himself to the radical homosexualist movement. Among his clients was the Reverend Karen Dammann, a lesbian minister accused of violating church law prohibiting "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals" from being ordained or serving as pastors. According to the Seattle Times, she was supported by the liberal Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church, which was at odds with the larger national Methodist Church on issues concerning homosexual clergy.

Thompson's only financial contribution on record to a federal campaign is a $500 donation to lesbian Grethe Cammermeyer, who ran for Congress in Washington's 2nd Congressional District in 1998, and was defeated by the incumbent, former Congressman Jack Metcalf. At age 46, Cammermeyer, a Colonel in the Washington National Guard and the mother of four, ended her fifteen year marriage, declared herself a lesbian, and was discharged from the National Guard.

When the Seattle Times featured a story on "How to Shack Up Smartly," Thompson provided authoritative legal advice on the best practices for no-risk fornication.

He also represented Robert Allan Soloway, an internet marketing spam and scam artist, who operated a company called Newport Internet Marketing Corporation (NIM). During the course of a trial in which Microsoft Corporation sued Soloway, Thompson was replaced as counsel.

Thompson was also a leader and has remained active in an organization called More Light Presbyterians, a network of homosexuals that lobbies the Presbyterian Church USA to embrace and affirm the sinful homosexual lifestyle.

The once promising career of Lindsay T. Thompson began to fall apart when, after ending his partnership with Anthony Gipe, a series of ethics violations prompted his disbarment, effective June 12, 2009, by order of the Washington State Supreme Court.

According to the Washington State Bar, the decision was based on "conduct in two matters involving lack of diligence, failure to communicate, trust-account irregularities, and failure to protect clients' interests, as well as noncooperation with a Bar Association investigation." The Bar Association, on whose board he once served, published the findings leading to Lindsay Thompson's disbarment here.

With his legal career in a tailspin, Thompson moved to Port Angeles, Washington and attempted a career as a freelance writer. He published an article in Law Technology News on the subject of video conferencing. However, his career as a freelance writer appears to have stalled as well. An intensive internet search for the Lindsay Thompson byline will prove fruitless.

Thompson also attempted to peddle for $40 per year a no frills journal called Thompson's Monthly. The promotional flyer stated:

In a world with a billion screaming blogs, Thompson's Monthly is cheerfully retro. It's printed on paper. It comes in the mail. It has lots of words and not many pictures. It approaches content from the perspective of some thought having been given to the subject - well, more, at least, than it takes to flame a blog entry.

TM's pages bring you the sort of features you've seen in my work for other publications over the last thirty years: sharp commentary, shaggy dog stories, digressions over the weather, interesting books, trudges through the Gobi of American political discourse - a gallimaufry of stuff, including a lot I couldn't address as the paid hack of others. Memoirs, travel tales, good cigars, music, and how to make geoduck sashimi.

We haven't seen Thompson's Monthly on the shelves of Barnes and Noble yet, and we suspect the venture ended as abruptly as his freelance writing career, because just a few months later he was here in South Carolina, having joined the ranks of those "billion screaming blogs."

Thompson states on his LinkedIn profile that "after a quarter century in the law and in the Pacific Northwest I've relocated to the Carolinas to be closer to family and to pursue writing full-time." Given that he has also written that his poor embarrassed mother wants nothing to do with him, one suspects that the former lawyer simply wants to be close at hand -- if and when it becomes necessary to challenge his estranged mother's will.

Flash forward to 2010: Lindsay Thompson spends his days hiding in the shadows behind a pseudonym, ridiculing faith and those who, albeit imperfectly and sinfully, strive to live according to the law that God has placed in the hearts and minds of each of us. Thompson's sad and failed life, his obvious anger and unhappiness, flow from a rejection of the One who is "the way, the truth, and the life." He has lived his life in rebellion against a loving God -- who came so that all of us, including Lindsay Taylor Thompson, might "have life and have it more abundantly."

Lindsay Taylor Thompson, posing as Waldo Lydecker, is a living witness to the death and destruction implied by the lifestyle he promotes. It is sad, perhaps tragic, that someone possessing so many gifts has used them merely for his own destruction, and for the attempted destruction of others.

But it is never too late. God's ocean of mercy is always available -- even to the most miserable and hardened of sinners. Imagine all that could be accomplished if Waldo Lydecker's frenetic energy were directed toward the building of the Kingdom of God -- instead of hammering nails in His Cross.