Baptist Clergy Sex Abuse - An Under Reported Story

This blog is unrelenting in taking the Roman Catholic Church to task for the world wide sex abuse scandal which deservedly has received much media coverage - none of which to date has lead to a serious house cleaning of the Church's morally bankrupt leadership, including Benedict XVI who clearly has dirty hands himself. But, sexual predatory clergy are not unique to the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") churches - the second largest denomination after Catholicism in the USA - are similarly plagued with predators, but lacking the Catholic Church's centralized hierarchy, the SBC sadly manages to escape the media thrashing that is so justly deserved. In my view, it's no coincidence that the Catholic Church and the SBC share problems of sexually abusive clergy - both institutions have an obsession with things sexual - especially gay sex - and preach that sex is vile, dirty and to be restrained except within limited parameters, and even then, one had best not enjoy the sex. Both churches specialize in hypocrisy to this viewer. The blog Stop Baptist Predators has a year end summary on the state of the SBC and its refusal to take meaningful measures to rein in and expel the sexual predators within the ranks of its clergy. Here are some highlights:
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“It would be a mistake to give in to the convenient temptation that this is ‘a Catholic problem’.” “Sex-abuse cases also rock Baptist churches. Individually they are just as bad, and collectively we are doing a lot less than the Catholics about resolution.
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"Southern Baptists as a national entity have nothing in place to prevent abusers from carrying their satchels of pain to another church or to yank credentials from an abusive clergyman.
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"A motion to institute a national registry of abusers was rejected by the Southern Baptist Executive Committee in 2008 on the basis of church autonomy. The Executive Committee recommended instead that churches run background checks through an already available U.S. Department of Justice system. That system contains names only of those convicted of a crime and not those times when a church forces a minister to leave and keep the reasons unstated to avoid lawsuits or embarrassment.”
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“Protecting the Baptist denomination and churches from public humiliation and discrediting has been a higher priority for many Baptist leaders than protecting children from the predatory ministers – ministers who move from church to church, state to state, without punishment, only to harm again. . . . The shield of local church autonomy is a false one that should not be used to protect predatory preachers. . . Baptist leaders know too well about the official church connectivity and ‘unofficial web of clergy connectivity’.
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As with the Catholic Church, the SBC - and its leaders such as Albert Mohler - needs to spend less time gay bashing and intruding on the religious freedom of other citizens and more time in cleaning up its own tawdry house.