Credit When It's Due

In this era of hyperpartisan conclusion-jumping, we need to acknowledge when a person does something good that our assumptions weren't expecting.

Of course I have known about Bianca Jagger for years. Who my age hasn't? But if I am being honest, all I have really known about her could be summed up in three bullet points:

1. She once was married to Mick;
   
   
2. She has lent her name to a number of trendy causes; and
   
   
3. She and Mick once spent an evening with Billy Joel, during which her behavior inspired a hit song about a woman with Dom Perignon in her hand and a spoon up her nose waking up the next morning with her head on fire and her eyes too bloody to see.

As knowledge goes, that is very, very little -- yet it was enough for me to assume she's probably nothing more than a dime-a-dozen limousine liberal with more money than morals and more self-absorption than self-awareness. 

Until this week rolled around and I learned that the 77-year-old native of Nicaragua has named names.

Technically speaking, Jagger took aim at one name, not names, but her aim is notable because it is focused on a notoriously wicked man. It's focused on a man who has been free to wreak havoc for many years because the First World stopped paying attention to him three decades ago: Daniel Ortega.

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Ortega is the Sandanista strongman who ruled Nicaragua with an iron fist throughout the 1980's (behind a fig leaf of dubious elections).

Ortega returned to power in 2007 and has been strangling civil and religious liberty ever since. One of his bravest critics in Nicaragua is 56-year-old cleric Rolando Jose Alvarez Lagos, who was appointed Bishop of Matagalpa 12 years ago by Pope Benedict XVI.

On August 4th of last year, government forces arrived at Lagos's house and prevented him from leaving to attend mass at the city's Catedral San Pedro. They kept him trapped within his home from that day forward, and on December 13th the government charged him with "undermining national integrity and propogation of false news...to the detriment of the State and Nicaraguan society."

He was schedued to be tried last month, but on February 10th the government stripped his citizenship and sentenced him to 26 years in prison without trial.

Lagos has not been seen or even accounted for since. Although he is rumored to be at the infamous La Modelo Prison, Ortega's regime has not confirmed this and has given his family no indication of his whereabouts.

Eight days ago Jagger released a video in which she directly addresses Ortega and asks him to provide "proof" that Lagos "is alive and in good health," and "to allow me to come to Nicaragua to visit Monsignor Alvarez Lagos."

She ups the ante by recollecting a time she went to Nicaragua while working for the British Red Cross and "asked the then-dictator Anastasio Somoza to allow me to visit La Modelo, the same prison where Monsignor Alvarez Lagos is supposed to be -- and he did," and also by recollecting an interview in which Ortega claimed "that the person you most admire was Jesus Christ."

Transitioning to referring to Lagos by first name, Jagger says to Ortega: "So now I'm asking you: Will you please let me come to Nicaragua to visit Monsignor Rolando Alvarez? It would be a wonderful action on your part, especially during this Easter season...In the name of Jesus Christ, let me see Monsignor Rolando Alvarez, and let him free. He is an innocent man whose only crime is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ."

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Materially speaking, Bianca Jagger has nothing to gain by this.

She is not doing it to gain points with the in crowd, or to get applause from the media.

She is calling out a tyrant nobody else in the West is paying attention to, and is putting her own neck on the line by offering to go behind enemy lines, so to speak.

She is doing this in explicit defense of a Christian believer, at a point in history when defending Christian believers is very much out of fashion.

And she is unapologetically grounding her request in Christ's name, at a time when doing anything in his name is monumentally out of fashion in chic circles.

Rolando Jose Alvarez Lagos deserves his freedom. And Bianca Jagger deserves recognition for having convictions, and, more importantly, for having the gumption to stand behind them.

Many thanks to Jay Nordlinger for highlighting Jagger's video in his March 20th Impromptus column.