The next installment in the Houston Chronicle (and San Antonio Express-News) ground-breaking report on abuse within Southern Baptist churches and institutions has just come out. It's entitled "Offend, then repeat":
Southern Baptist churches hired dozens of leaders previously accused of sex offenses. ...
The sordid backgrounds of these Southern Baptist ministers didn't stop them from finding new jobs at churches and working in positions of trust.
They're among at least 35 Southern Baptist pastors, youth ministers and volunteers who were convicted of sex crimes or accused of sexual misconduct but still were allowed to work at churches during the past two decades, an investigation by the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle reveals.
Because I rather enjoy rattling the cage of the right-wing trolls at Religion News Service (some of them paid by right-wing interest groups to troll religion discussion sites, I have long thought — and some of those now at RNS formerly trolling National Catholic Reporter discussions), I have just left the following comment with the excerpt above:
Where have I heard that story before? Oh, wait: it must have been in reports about that other male-dominated church that excludes women from ordination and positions of governance and power, which we're told by right-wing hacks is absolutely nothing like the currently exposed male-dominated church that excludes women from ordination and positions of governance and power.
It's almost as if something binds these different religious groups together.
I wonder what on earth that might be?
Mind you, putting comments like this online invites some of the vilest hate communications possible by "Christians" trying to police these online conversations. I received an email yesterday creatively conflating very vicious homophobia, Islamophobia, and "Christianity." This gentleman accused me of refusing to admit that the abuse horror show originates with both the gays and the Muslims — though it somehow escapes me precisely how that creative analysis applies to the intensely homophobic and Islamophobic Southern Baptist churches.
The map at the head of the posting is produced by U.S. Religion Census and is online at the website of that group.
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