Dear Pastor Doug Wison,

A satirical letter of power, temptation, and JD Vance’s plea for spiritual guidance.

Dear Pastor Doug,

We have never met. You shepherd Pete Hegseth’s soul; I am merely his colleague, Vice President of the United States.

I first encountered your name when Pete reposted that CNN segment where you called for women to lose the right to vote and for “household voting” to replace it. I thought: Here is a man who understands order.

Then I kept reading, and I discovered your mission to “recriminalize sodomy.” That’s when my blood ran cold—not because I misunderstood the word, but because I knew exactly what it meant.

I am aware, Pastor, that in the eyes of the law before Lawrence v. Texas, “sodomy” was not just men with men, or the lurid fever dreams of 1950s morality police. It included oral sex. Heterosexual oral sex. Any oral sex at all. That part, frankly, doesn’t trouble me. My wife Usha has made it abundantly clear that she would sooner drink a room-temperature Diet Mountain Dew out of a gas station Big Gulp than engage in anything of that nature. The only lip service in our home is political.

No, Pastor, my fear is not for the acts you imagine. It is for the acts you cannot imagine without losing your lunch: my relentless, ungovernable lust for couches.

A chaise longue in the corner of a hotel lobby? My pulse quickens. The gentle slope of an armrest on a camelback sofa? My knees give way. The scent of fresh leather on a Chesterfield? I black out like a Victorian maiden and come to hours later with a throw pillow clutched to my chest. I have ogled sectionals like other men ogle swimsuit models. I have whispered unspeakable things to a mid-century modern loveseat. I have treated futons in ways that would get me banned from the state of Utah.

It’s constant. The ache. The temptation. I cannot pass an IKEA display without breaking into a cold sweat. Every press conference, every policy meeting—if there’s upholstered seating in the room, my mind is gone. I’m tracing seams with my eyes. I’m imagining the give of the cushions under my weight. I am, in every sense, a man divided.

Earlier this year I tried to seek wisdom from Pope Francis himself. I sat across from the Holy Father in the Apostolic Palace and confessed my longings for corduroy and microfiber. I told him about the recliner in Indianapolis that changed me. The sofa in Toledo that ruined me. The futon in Anchorage that lives rent-free in my mind. He gripped my hand, looked into my eyes, and whispered something in Italian. I didn’t catch all of it, but I’m pretty sure it ended with “…and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Pastor, I am desperate for guidance. You have Pete convinced that outlawing pleasure is the way to holiness. But what of the man whose temptation is not in the bedroom, but the living room? What of the man who feels the serpent’s whisper in the den, not the dance club? If you bring back sodomy laws, will they come for me next? Will Pete’s military police storm my house, rip the slipcovers off my couches, and drag me away for crimes against upholstery?

Do I burn the couches? Or do I kneel before them and beg forgiveness after every… encounter? Do I sleep on a hard pew until my lust is broken? Or do I accept that this is who I am, and pray for a nation that will make space for both moral order and a man’s God-given attraction to well-crafted furniture?

Pastor, I beg you: deliver me from temptation—or at least deliver me a theology that will keep me out of prison. Because as I write this, there is a sectional across the room with my name on it, and I fear it won’t be there much longer.

In trembling upholstery fever,
JD Vance
Vice President, sofa supplicant, enemy of warranties

P.S. Please don’t show this to Pete.

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Satire keeps us sane—and nothing will purge your soul like Pete banning pleasure, Doug preaching Gilead, and JD Vance confessing his carnal crimes against upholstery. Subscribe before reality outpaces the joke.