Southern Baptist Leaders Covered Up Sex Abuse

The sad reality is that institutional religion always puts the institution and protecting its money and power/control over members ahead of the religious principles that are claimed to be espoused and the wellbeing - and very lives - of individual church members.  We saw this reality in stark detail as the world wide  sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church exploded in 2002 (it continues even today) with coverups extending all the way to the Vatican and the far from saintly Pope John Paul II.  Now, with luck, a similar bomb shell will wrack the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") in the wake of letters from a former high leader in the SBC that were leaked to the media.  Many have long known many SBC churches had sexual abuse problems, but the leadership always looked the other way and claimed that the denomination's lack of a feudal hierarchy system like the Catholic Church made it impossible to track instances of abuse and/or to hold sexual predators in pulpits accountable. The author of the letters - Russell Moore - exposes the lies.  Moore recently left SBC leadership over frustration with the denominations sex abuse coverups, the denomination's racism, and its blind allegiance to Donald Trump, a thoroughly morally bankrupt individual.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the revelations.  Here are highlights:

New allegations about the mishandling of sex abuse claims at the highest levels of the Southern Baptist Convention were made public in a recent letter between two high-profile leaders that was obtained Friday by The Washington Post.

While such allegations have been made by several women in the past, the letter includes new details from internal conversations, alleging that some institutional leaders bullied a sexual abuse victim, who was called a “whore,” and described in detail how many leaders resisted sexual abuse reforms.

In a dramatic turn of events this week, two letters written by Russell Moore, who recently left his position as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, have been made public. The new allegations are contained in a May 31 letter Moore sent to the current president of the SBC, J.D. Greear, that appeared on Friday on the site the Baptist Blogger, which has published other internal documents and recordings from Southern Baptist leaders in the past.

“You and I both heard, in closed door meetings, sexual abuse survivors spoken of in terms of ‘Potiphar’s wife’ and other spurious biblical analogies,” Moore wrote to Greear. “The conversations in these closed door meetings were far worse than anything Southern Baptists knew — or the outside world could report.”

In the ancient biblical story, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph and falsely accuses him of having assaulted her.

On his last day as a Southern Baptist professional, Moore, who has served as one of the highest-profile leaders in the convention, decided to reveal specific names of key individual leaders involved in what he described as intimidation tactics.

Moore’s letter took direct aim at several members of the SBC’s Executive Committee, the group based in Nashville that runs the business of the convention and handles its finances. He described the “spiritual and psychological abuse of sexual abuse survivors by the Executive Committee itself,” as well as “a pattern of attempted intimidation of those who speak on such matters.”

Three employees who work in SBC institutions, who said they needed to remain anonymous to keep their current jobs, corroborated several of the factual details of the letter. Details in the letter were also confirmed by a former employee, an abuse survivor and a prominent abuse advocate.

Moore describes enormous rifts behind the scenes over the issue of how to handle sex abuse within SBC institutions. He wrote in his letter that during the last few years, he tried to smile and pretend everything was all right through his experiences.

“What [people involved] want is for us to remain silent and to live in psychological terror, to protect them by covering up what they do in darkness, while asking our constituencies to come in and to stay in the SBC,” Moore wrote.

In the letter, he refers to a “disastrous move” by some leaders to “exonerate” churches with credible allegations of negligence and mistreatment of sexual abuse survivors. “You and I were critical of such moves, believing that they jeopardized not only the gospel witness of the SBC, but also the lives of vulnerable children and others in Southern Baptist churches.”

Moore also spoke of a sexual abuse survivor whose words, he alleges, were altered by the Executive Committee staff to make it seem as though her abuse was a consensual affair. The Washington Post generally does not name victims of sexual assault without their consent, but the woman, Jennifer Lyell, a former vice president at the SBC’s Lifeway Christian Resources and once the highest-paid female executive at the SBC, said in a text message that she agreed to be identified.

Lyell, who says she has lost her job, her reputation and her health, confirmed Moore’s account of “bullying and intimidation” by the Executive Committee.

Moore’s account of Lyell’s experience was confirmed by Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed team doctor Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assault and has since been a prominent advocate for church abuse survivors and has helped bring attention to Lyell’s case.

“It shows the level of corruption and vile behavior that comes from the leaders in the SBC, the ones who really have the power,” said Denhollander, whose husband is a PhD student at the flagship SBC seminary Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Earlier this week, a 2020 letter by Moore first published by Religion News Service detailed Moore’s descriptions of racism within the convention and intimidating behavior among members of the Executive Committee. He described threats he says he has received from white nationalists and white supremacists.

In his letter, Moore calls Trump spiritual adviser Paula White, who led that advisory group, “a heretic and a huckster not representative of evangelical Christianity.”

The last annual meeting of the convention, held in 2019, put the spotlight on sex abuse, and survivors like Mary DeMuth were put onstage. In a blog post this week, however, DeMuth wrote that she has felt used, “like I was part of a reactionary PR machine responding to the very real trauma of sexual abuse and cover up in our midst.”

The SBC suffered historic membership losses last year.  With luck, this moral bankruptcy of the leadership and the filth they spew at victims of abuse coming into the open may well accelerate membership losses.  The hypocrisy of these modern day Pharisees is stunning.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

With Travel Back, Virginia Courts the LGBT Dollar

I've written on this topic before and the idiocy of states and countries that continue to persecute LGBT individuals and/or make themselves inhospitable to those who love differently.  Statistics show that LGBT travelers spend an estimated $63.1 billion on domestic and international travel.  Yes, billion, with a "B".  The husband and I love to travel and consciously avoid destinations that are not-LGBT welcoming - as do many other LGBT travelers.  Any sane and responsible tourism effort should seek a piece of the $63.1 billion LGBT travel market.  As a piece WTVR-Channel 6 reports, Virginia is seeking to capitalize on its new LGBT nondiscrimination protections and the Commonwealth's rich history.  Reactionary regions of the state - think Southwest Virginia and parts of Southside Virginia - would be wise to reject religious based bigotry and start welcoming all travelers.  Here are article highlights: 

RICHMOND, Va. -- June marks the start of Pride Month for the LBGTQ+ community which commemorates years of struggle for civil rights and equality.

On Wednesday, the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth hosted “Pride Month Series: Virginia is for Tourism Lovers” virtual roundtable. The event was led by Virginia Tourism Corporation along with members of the LGBTQ+ tourism industry discussing marketing efforts for 2021.

“The number one reason for travel is visiting friends and family and that doesn’t change within the LGBTQ+ community,” said Wirt Confroy, director of business development for Virginia Tourism.

According to Virginia Tourism, queer travelers in Virginia stay longer compared to all travelers. On average, 6% of visitors to our state identify as LGBTQ+ and they bring their wallets with them.

LGBTQ+ travelers spent an estimated $63.1 billion on domestic and international travel.

“It’s not just about the money. It’s about making a place, it’s making a community,” said Rita McClenny, president of Virginia Tourism.  McClenny highlighted the work of Virginia’s lawmakers who passed 11 pro-equality bills this session, which is considered a rainbow sign to visitors.

“This is all to make our visitors, our citizens, our community feel welcome and whole and positive,” she explained.

Virginia has taken the lead among Southern states to attract more communities to the Commonwealth. Virginia was the first Southern state to provide sweeping anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people following the passage of the Virginia Values Act in 2020.

To attract queer visitors, non-profits across the state have highlighted the histories of their communities.

Dr. G. Samantha Rosenthal has organized walking tours of Roanoke’s gay neighborhoods, including Old Southwest where the LGBTQ+ make up a disproportionate number of the population.

For some localities, the goal is to encourage visitors to settle down especially in rural areas. The Arrow Project in Staunton provides safe spaces and free counseling for residents.

“I would like to think the support we provide to new coming members of our community does make them feel situated and want to stay and be a part of our community,” said Sabrina Burress.

But regardless of how you identify, Virginia Tourism shared the following simple advice.  “The grand welcome in tourism is to just be nice to everybody and help them get them what they need,” Confroy said.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

I have long been interested in ocean liners and famous warships, including the HMS Hood which was lost in the Battle of Denmark Straits where it faced off against the Bismark.  I came across the image above of  above of Henry Sergeant, born 24th May 1920 and who died on 24th May 1941 along with all but three of Hood's 1400+ member crew.  I find the image haunting and representative of the millions of lives lost in war. RIP Henry Sergeant.

The Thin Veneer of Normalcy

It's summertime and social events and interactions on the surface are at last returning to a semblance of normal.  Here in Virginia, we face yet another election cycle, this time for state offices, and the political and social malaise that continues to hang over the nation are visible in the form of many on the GOP ticket, starting with the Trump endorsed gubernatorial candidate who beneath the surface is a right wing fanatic loved by Christofascists.  Down ballot, the GOP is fielding anti-vaccine nuts and others who are using the smoke screen of supporting "freedom" to justify discrimination and abuse as they seek to take Virginia back to the 1950's.  At the national level, things are even worse with many in the GOP - which has thankfully shrunk in numbers - whole heartedly supporting Trump's lies and seeking to enshrine permanent minority rule by whites and myth believing, morally bankrupt evangelicals and Christofascists. Those who support democracy and true morality should not be lulled into a false sense that the insanity and lawlessness of the Trump/Pence regime is finally behind us as a piece in The Atlantic argues.  Here are excerpts:

Squint the right way and things look almost normal. The barriers around the Capitol are gone. People are taking off their masks and going out. The Nats and Orioles are in the basement. Most of all, politics is boring again.

That’s not to say Washington is working well, mind you. Consider this week’s negotiations between President Joe Biden and Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a Republican, over infrastructure spending—a priority that both parties (theoretically) support but one that has nonetheless been stuck in purgatory for months. Things are broken in the most normal of ways, though: Mindless partisan deadlock is the sort of dysfunction Americans have long accepted.

But this appearance of normalcy is a thin veneer. Just below the surface, the United States faces a set of perilous, unresolved threats. The former president refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the election he lost. His party’s leaders are abandoning their commitment to democratic majority governance, and its voters insist that he won. Domestic terrorism threatens the nation’s tranquility, and ordinary violent crime is on the rise too. Relaxing about the state of the country feels irresistible, but doing so would be unwise.

A series of reports has shed light on the bizarre situation of the Old Pretender as he continues to stew over the election. The journalists Maggie Haberman and Charles C. W. Cooke report that Donald Trump is saying, and perhaps truly believes, that he will be “reinstated” as president this summer, after it becomes clear that he rightfully won the election . . . .

Several barriers will prevent this: Trump didn’t win, no evidence can prove otherwise, and there’s no constitutional mechanism for such a reinstatement. Many losing candidates have griped about election results, and insisted that they were cheated. . . . . But the current situation is unprecedented: No former presidential candidate, much less president, has ever so flatly refused to accept the results or expected to be reinstalled.

Reality has never constrained Trump’s statements. The problem is how far this thinking has spread beyond him. Large portions of the Republican electorate purport to agree in opinion polls that Trump rightfully won the election, and the on-again, off-again Svengali Steve Bannon claims that staying in lockstep with Trump will be a “litmus test” for future GOP candidates.

[O]pposition both to majority rule and to the notion that Democrats can win elections fairly is on the rise in the Republican Party. These rejections of the system’s basic tenets have consequences. In March, FBI Director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee) warned, “January 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon.”

The early months of the Trump administration birthed a new mantra. “This is not normal,” resistance types warned, sometimes ad nauseam. They hoped to prevent Americans from being lulled into a sense that the Trump presidency’s abuses and lawlessness were somehow typical and acceptable. But even then, despite the constant flow of outrages, it was hard to ever feel like anything was normal, and any nascent complacency was shattered by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic. Now that the nation has begun to move past some of that, the temptation to relax is stronger. But below the veneer, this too is not normal.

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Kyrsten Sinema's and Joe Manchin’s Nihilistic Bipartisanship

The vast majority of the congressional Republicans and that Party's base are now fully detached from objective reality and put allegiance  to Trump ahead of all else - much as many German politicians supported Hitler in the late 1920's and early 1930's - ahead of all else no matter how big or delusional Trump's lies may be.  Frighteningly, two Democrat U.S. Senators - Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin - appear to be equally detached from objective reality and cling to a myth of bipartisanship which is simple lunacy given the bad faith and anti-democratic efforts of today's Republican Party and GOP U.S. Senators.  How else to explain their insane defense of the filibuster, a tactic which traces its history to pre-Civil War slave state senators and later Southern state opponents of desegregation and 1965 Voting Rights Act.  A column in the New York Times looks at Sinema's and Manchin's self-centered/unrealistic response the GOP bad faith and very real threats to continued democracy in America.  Here are column excerpts:

We are in the eye of the storm of American democratic collapse. There is, outwardly, a feeling of calm. The Biden administration is competent and placid. The coronavirus emergency is receding nationally, if not internationally. Donald Trump, once the most powerful man on earth and the emperor of the news cycle, is now a failed blogger under criminal investigation.

Yet in red states, Trump’s party, motivated by his big lie about his 2020 loss, is systematically changing electoral rules to make it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote and, should Democrats win anyway, easier for Republicans to overturn elections.

You’ve probably heard the details already — Democrats are repeating them ad nauseam, with a growing sense of desperation. States are accelerating voter roll purges and empowering Fox News-addled partisan poll watchers to roam election sites searching for signs of malfeasance. They are stripping the authority to administer elections from those who stood up for the rule of law this past year.

Republicans have an excellent chance of gerrymandering their way to control of the House in 2022, whether or not they increase their vote share. A Republican-dominated House is unlikely to smoothly ratify even a clear Democratic presidential victory in 2024. We may be living through a brief interregnum before American democracy is strangled for a generation.

Two Democratic senators, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, could save us by joining their colleagues in breaking the filibuster and passing new voting rights legislation. But they prefer not to.

This is nonsense. The filibuster was created by mistake when the Senate, cleaning up its rule book in 1806, failed to include a provision to cut off debate. (A so-called cloture rule allowing two-thirds of senators to end a filibuster was adopted in 1917; the proportion was reduced to three-fifths in 1975.) The filibuster encouraged extremism, not comity: It was a favorite tool of pro-slavery senators before the Civil War and segregationists after it.

More than any other type of legislation, the filibuster was used in the 20th century to derail civil rights bills, from anti-lynching measures to bans on housing discrimination. During Barack Obama’s administration, Republicans began using it to an unprecedented degree to block his nominations. According to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report, “Out of the 168 cloture motions ever filed (or reconsidered) on nominations, 82 (49 percent) were cloture motions on nominations made since 2009.” The filibuster’s history is both ignominious and ever-changing.

Both she [Sinema] and Manchin are committed to bipartisanship as a supreme good, which in practice means bowing to the wishes of a party that doesn’t believe Joe Biden is a legitimate president and wants above all to see him fail. (“One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said last month.)

Democrats hope that Manchin, who has said Democrats should have faith that there are “10 good people” in the Republican caucus, will lessen his opposition to filibuster reform when Senate Republicans repeatedly prove him wrong. It’s harder to know what Sinema actually believes and thus what could sway her; she seems above all dedicated to a view of herself as a quirky maverick, and delights in trolling the Democrats who elected her.

This gap between the scale of the catastrophe bearing down on us and the blithe refusal of Manchin and Sinema to help is enough to leave one frozen with despair. Democrats have no discernible leverage over Manchin and little over Sinema, though they ought to consider primarying her. (Unlike Manchin, she’s not the only Democrat who could win a Senate seat in her state.) Those who want our democracy to endure have no choice but to keep asking, imploring and cajoling these two lawmakers to value it above the false idol of bipartisanship, but so far there’s little sign they will.

So we’re stuck. The overarching story of American politics right now is that Republicans are laying the groundwork to accomplish legally what they failed to do by force on Jan. 6. Sinema could help fortify our country against a tide of Trumpist authoritarianism that could soon wash away everything that makes it worthwhile. Instead she’s showing us her ring.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

UVA Is Investing $100 Million To Work to Save Democracy

Those who are not alumni of the University of Virginia or residents of Charlottesville likely cannot grasps the anger that still simmers over the invasion of the university grounds and one of Virginia's most progressive cities by the white supremacist's - who Donald Trump described as "very good people" - in August 2017.  In retrospect that event in Charlottesville foreshadowed the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, another event condoned, if not incited by Trump and populated by members from his white supremacist and Christofascist base of support.   Now, with Republican controlled state legislatures seeking to disenfranchise voters and make voting more difficult for minorities in particular, American democracy remains under serious threat as noted by 100 scholars of democracy in a statement this week.  Some billionaires have taken note and one couple has made a $50 million donation to the University of Virginia to fund an effort to work to save American democracy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the effort.  Here are excerpts:

Bruce and Martha Karsh are names that may not sound familiar, unless you follow the world of educational philanthropy, where they have been major, if quiet, players over the past couple of decades.

Through their foundation, this billionaire California couple — he is the founder of the investment firm Oaktree Capital Management — has given more than $300 million toward programs and scholarships that largely focus on lifting disadvantaged students.

Politics was something they largely avoided, figuring they had better things to do with their fortune. “I think pre-Trump we kind of took our democracy for granted, frankly,” Bruce Karsh, who rarely gives interviews, told me. “We were pretty apolitical, I guess, and we’ve supported candidates on both sides of the aisle. We made some contributions, but very small, and not meaningful.”

All of that began to change for them in 2017, when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, the college town where the couple met four decades ago as law students at the University of Virginia. In 2018, they gave $43.9 million to U-Va.’s law school — its largest gift ever — to fund scholarships and set up a center there to promote the rule of law and democratic ideals.

But their anxiety about the state of democracy only grew in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when President Donald Trump refused to accept the clear fact that he had lost, and then egged on a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

“It just made us decide that we were going to go bigger and deeper, because this was a much more serious problem than we had thought, even two years earlier,” Bruce said.

On Friday morning, the University of Virginia will announce that the couple is giving $50 million, which the university has promised to match, to establish what will be known as the Karsh Institute of Democracy.

The institute will aim to elevate the practical understanding and promotion of democratic principles. One of its missions is to coordinate the expertise currently spread in a disjointed fashion across more than a half-dozen programs on the campus.

I can’t think of a more fitting place for such an endeavor than this storied public university. It was founded by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe — three U.S. presidents who hailed from Virginia — were all present when the cornerstone for U-Va.’s first building was laid in 1817.

The goal, she explained, is to “start to put ideas into the bloodstream, in such a way that they start to shape the way that policymakers, and business leaders, and grass-roots leaders in the public are thinking and talking about them, so that they can in turn then shape legislation and policy and practice."

The fragility of our system of laws and rights has rarely been more apparent than at this moment. Every day, we see people who describe themselves as “patriots” mobilizing to overturn election results and make it harder for people to vote.

It is an urgent situation, which is why more than 100 scholars of democracy signed a “statement of concern” this week calling upon Democratic senators to suspend the filibuster and pass a national set of voting protections.

Set against the ugliness of the current political climate, can even a $100 million investment in the study, teaching and promotion of democracy really make a difference?

“I think you have to start with educating people,” Martha Karsh said. Thomas Jefferson, who more than 200 years ago designed the “academical village” where this experiment in revitalizing democracy will take place, would no doubt agree.

Trump's Growing Delusions

Donald Trump has likely not been mentally sound in many decades. Stated another way, Trump has likely been mentally ill - as noted by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a neurologist by profession, in 2017 during campaign ads and a Washington Post interview.  But Trump's detachment from objective reality seems to be intensifying as set out in a New York Times column and confirmed by a piece in National Review, the latter being anything but a liberal media outlet. Trump's latest delusion - fueled no doubt by Q'Anon lunatics and right wing Christian "prophets" is that he will somehow miraculously be reinstated as president in August, 2021. Republicans pandering to Trump's insanity are little better than politicians in ancient Rome who pandered far too long to the seriously insane emperor Nero who  was over thrown and may have taken his own life when faced with capture.  The National Review piece is particularly blunt in call out Trump's delusions.  Here are excerpts:

Two days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news.

Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

It will be tempting for weary conservatives to dismiss this information as “old news” or as “an irrelevance.” It will be tempting, too, to downplay the enormity of what is being claimed, or to change the subject, or to attack the messengers by implying that they must “hate” Trump and his voters But such temptations should be assiduously avoided. We are not talking here about a fringe figure within the Republican tent, but about a man who hopes to make support for his outlandish claims “a litmus test of sorts as he decides whom to endorse for state and federal contests in 2022 and 2024.” Conservatives understand why it mattered that the press lost its collective mind over Russia after Trump’s fair-and-square victory in 2016. They understand why it mattered that Hillary Clinton publicly described Trump as an “illegitimate president” who had “stolen” the election. And they understand why it mattered that Jimmy Carter insisted that Trump had “lost the election” and been “put into office because the Russians interfered.” They should understand why this matters, too.

The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government. There is no Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. Hell, there is nothing even approximating a Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. The election has been certified, Joe Biden is the president, and, until 2024, that is all there is to it. It does not matter what one’s view of Trump is. It does not matter whether one voted for or against Trump. It does not matter whether one views Trump’s role within the Republican Party favorably or unfavorably. We are talking here about cold, hard, neutral facts that obtain irrespective of one’s preferences; it is not too much to ask that the former head of the executive branch should understand them.

Just how far out there is Trump’s theory? Consider that, even if it were true that the 2020 election had been stolen — which it is absolutely not — his belief would still be absurd. . . . there is no mechanism within the American legal order for a do-over of any sort. In such an eventuality, there would be indictments, an impeachment drive, and a constitutional crisis. But, however bad it got, Donald Trump would not be “reinstated” to the presidency. That is not how America works, how America has ever worked, or how America can ever work. American politicians do not lose their reelection races only to be reinstalled later on, as might the second-place horse in a race whose winner was disqualified. The idea is otherworldly and obscene.

There is nothing to be gained for conservatism by pretending otherwise. To acknowledge that Trump is living in a fantasy world does not wipe out his achievements or render anything else he has said incorrect. It does not endorse Joe Biden or hand the Republican Party over to Bill Kristol or knock down an inch of the wall on the border. It merely demands that Donald Trump be treated like any other person: subject to gravity, open to rebuttal, and liable to be laughed at when he becomes so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him.