>
>Better sit down before you open your next Con Ed bill: Rates are set to
>soar, starting next month - and double over the next two years.
>

DeSanctimonious wants to distract everybody from the right wing pedophile
scandals.

Rightwing Christians are raping children everywhere yet only rightists
protect them.

Southern Baptists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pastors

Investigation: SBC Executive Committee staff saw advocates' cries for help
as a distraction from evangelism and a legal liability, stonewalling their
reports and resisting calls for reform.

Armed with a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors, Southern
Baptist leaders chose to protect the denomination from lawsuits rather
than protect the people in their churches from further abuse.

Survivors, advocates, and some Southern Baptists themselves spent more
than 15 years calling for ways to keep sexual predators from moving
quietly from one flock to another. The men who controlled the Executive
Committee (EC)-which runs day-to-day operations of the Southern Baptist
Convention (SBC)-knew the scope of the problem. But, working closely with
their lawyers, they maligned the people who wanted to do something about
abuse and repeatedly rejected pleas for help and reform.

"Behind the curtain, the lawyers were advising to say nothing and do
nothing, even when the callers were identifying predators still in SBC
pulpits," according to a massive third-party investigative report released
Sunday.

The investigation centers responsibility on members of the EC staff and
their attorneys and says the hundreds of elected EC trustees were largely
kept in the dark. EC general counsel Augie Boto and longtime attorney Jim
Guenther advised the past three EC presidents-Ronnie Floyd, Frank Page,
and Morris Chapman-that taking action on abuse would pose a risk to SBC
liability and polity, leading the presidents to challenge proposed abuse
reforms.

As renewed calls for action emerged with the #ChurchToo and #SBCToo
movements, Boto referred to advocacy for abuse survivors as "a satanic
scheme to completely distract us from evangelism."

Survivors, in turn, described the soul-crushing effects of not only their
abuse, but the stonewalling, insulting responses from leaders at the EC
for 15-plus years.

Christa Brown, a longtime advocate who experienced sexual abuse by her
pastor at 16, said her "countless encounters with Baptist leaders" who
shunned and disbelieved her "left a legacy of hate" and communicated "you
are a creature void of any value-you don't matter." As a result, she said,
instead of her faith providing solace, her faith has become
"neurologically networked with a nightmare." She referred to it as "soul
murder."

Another victim, Debbie Vasquez, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by an
SBC pastor starting at the age of 14. When one assault led to her
pregnancy, she was forced to apologize in front of the church but
forbidden to mention the father. The pastor went on to serve at another
Southern Baptist church, and when Vasquez reached out to the EC, her
entreaties were ignored and evaded for years until a Houston Chronicle
investigation three years ago.

Over the past 20 years, meanwhile, a string of SBC presidents failed to
appropriately respond to abuse in their own churches and seminaries. In
several instances, leaders sided with individuals and churches that had
been credibly accused of abuse or cover-up. One former president-pastor
Johnny Hunt-sexually assaulted another pastor's wife in 2010,
investigators found. This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse
Public Theology
This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse
The abuse investigation has uncovered more evil than even I imagined.
Russell Moore

At the annual meeting in Anaheim, California, next month, one year after
they voted to launch the investigation, thousands of Southern Baptists
will decide if they are ready to make the dramatic and costly changes the
report recommends for the sake of survivors and church safety.

"Amid my grief, anger, and disappointment over the grave sin and failures
this report lays bare, I earnestly believe that Southern Baptists must
resolve to change our culture and implement desperately needed reforms,"
said SBC president Ed Litton in a statement to CT. "The time is now. We
have so much to lament, but genuine grief requires a godly response."

Guidepost Solutions, the third-party investigative firm, wants the
13.7-million-member denomination to create an online database of abusers,
offer compensation for survivors, sharply limit non-disclosure agreements,
and establish a new entity dedicated to responding to abuse. The
directives in the 288-page report will sound familiar to survivors and
advocates, who have been calling for those measures all along.

"How many kids and congregants could have been spared horrific harm if
only the Executive Committee had taken action back in 2006 when I first
wrote to them, urging specific concrete steps? And how many survivors
could have been spared the re-traumatizing hell of trying to report clergy
sex abuse into a system that consistently turns its back?" asked Brown in
a 2021 letter. "The SBC Executive Committee's longstanding resistance to
abuse reforms has now yielded a whole new crop of clergy sex abuse victims
and of survivors re-traumatized in their efforts to report."

As they anticipated the release of the report, current interim EC
president Willie McLaurin and EC chairman Rolland Slade quoted
Ecclesiastes: "God will bring every act to judgment, including every
hidden thing, whether good or evil" (12:14, CSB).

The current leaders urged Southern Baptists to be receptive to the bad
news.

"This is a time and season to search out our shortcomings, a time to
embrace the findings of the report," they wrote last week, "a time to
rebuild the trust of Southern Baptists and a time to heal by meeting the
challenges required with the necessary changes expected." Largest
investigation in SBC history

The report represents a $2 million undertaking, involving 330 interviews
and five terabytes of documents collected over eight months. The EC also
committed another $2 million toward legal costs around the
investigation-making it a total investment of $4 million, funded by
churches and conventions giving to the Cooperative Program.

Advocate Rachael Denhollander, who advised the SBC task force that
coordinated the investigation, tweeted that "the level of transparency is
.. unparalleled." It's the largest investigation in SBC history; it's
already changed the makeup of the EC and stands to determine the
trajectory of the 177-year-old denomination.

The Guidepost inquiry included privileged legal communications on abuse
over the past 20 years, a provision that led EC president Ronnie Floyd to
resign in October and the law firm of Guenther, Jordan & Price to withdraw
their services after 60 years. Southern Baptists Agree to Open Up to Abuse
Investigation News
Southern Baptists Agree to Open Up to Abuse Investigation
Executive Committee decision comes after weeks of heated debate and
division. Kate Shellnutt

According to the report, the law firm actively advised the EC against
taking responsibility for abuse. Guenther worked alongside Boto, an
attorney who was involved in the EC from the 1990s to 2019, serving as a
trustee, vice president, general counsel, and interim president. He was an
ally of Paige Patterson during the Conservative Resurgence. (Last year,
Boto was barred from holding any positions with Southern Baptist entities
as a result of a legal settlement involving financial moves after
Patterson was fired from an SBC seminary over mishandling a rape
allegation.)

Boto and Guenther turned every discussion of abuse to a discussion of
protecting the EC from legal liability, making that the highest priority,
the report said.

"When abuse allegations were brought to the EC, including allegations that
convicted sex offenders were still in ministry, EC leaders generally did
not discuss this information outside of their inner circle, often did not
respond to the survivor, and took no action to address these allegations
so as to prevent ongoing abuse or such abuse in the future," the report
said. "Almost always the internal focus was on protecting the SBC from
legal liability and not on caring for survivors or creating any plan to
prevent sexual abuse within SBC churches."

The Southern Baptist Convention proudly says it's a group of autonomous
churches. They join together for mission work, fellowship, and training,
but the convention has no hierarchy. It doesn't ordain or appoint pastors,
nor does it hold authority over the 47,000 churches that have chosen to
affirm its faith statements and give to its Cooperative Program.

That lack of oversight means that when something goes wrong at an SBC
church or entity, the EC can claim it's not to blame; the churches are
independent. The legal counsel argued that the more denominational leaders
directed churches to deal with abuse, the more it would assume liability
for mistakes and mishandling.