Southern Baptist minister, elders guilty of not reporting abuse

Failing to report child abuse is a crime for which there is no justifiable church exemption. And as Christa Brown brought to our attention, the consequences of failure to report fell on the heads of a New Hampshire Southern Baptist pastor and two elders last week.

She wrote:

In New Hampshire, [at Valley Christian Church] Southern Baptist pastor Timothy Dillmuth and two church elders, Richard Eland and Robert Gagnon, were found guilty of failing to report child sex abuse. ... According to the judge’s written ruling, pastor Dillmuth “had met with the parents of a child who had been molested by a member of the church, which he later confirmed after talking to the child.

“The information was shared with other members of the board of elders in September 2009,” and was discussed at some meetings of the church board.

A month later, when another member of the church urged the child’s parents to report the matter to authorities, pastor Dillmuth talked to the concerned church member and told him to “keep his mouth shut.”

They sought a religious exception to the law, the Union leader reported:

The three men, [District Court of Northern Carroll County Judge Pamela Albee] wrote, sought to have immunity from criminal liability in failing to report the case of suspected child abuse, "arguing that they acted in good faith in persuading the parents and the perpetrator to make report of abuse." The men were arrested in early February by Conway police and charged that they had reason to suspect a girl had been sexually abused but did not report it as required by state law.

Suppression of the sort they sought punishes the victim, is shameful and deserves legal action.

'Hare-brained game of pretending' to believe Obama is a Muslim

Campbell University Divinity School professor Tony Cartledge writes of President Obama's visit to Indonesia:

Unfortunately, since Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, Obama-haters have used the event to play up their hare-brained game of pretending to believe the president is a secret Muslim (this article cites a number of examples). I never cease to be amazed that so many people are so gullible that they believe believe some of the hogwash they read or hear: a recent Pew Research Center poll reported that 18 percent of Americans believe President Obama -- who self-identifies as a Christian and who reiterated his Christian faith while speaking in Indonesia -- is a secret follower of Islam. That's up from 11 percent in March 2009.

Why confuse a mean-spirited conspiracy theory with something as illuminating as facts and a man's word?

Good grief.

UK Baptist pastor faces up to 80 years in prison

Christa Brown writes about the case of Robert Dando:

• Dando was very closely connected to the highest levels of Baptists’ worldwide leadership. He previously served as executive assistant to the president of the Baptist World Alliance. This was a guy who ran with the big dogs.
• Dando “was embroiled in another child sex abuse scandal when he was a minister at Orchard Baptist Fellowship” in the United Kingdom. In 2001, when the leader of the church, Dr. Anthony Gray, was convicted of serious sex offenses against a 14-year-old boy, Dando said this: “All our youth work is carried out within proper guidelines.” Yet, we now know that Dando too was sexually abusing kids, and had been since at least as far back as 1995. (Do these guys run in packs?)
• At the time of his arrest, Dando was the prominent senior minister of Worcester Park Baptist Church in suburban London.
• Dando pled guilty to repeatedly abusing 2 boys in Virginia, starting when they were 7 and 8 years old. Virginia prosecutors said that, under questioning, Dando also admitted to sexually abusing boys in the United Kingdom.
• Dando had plenty of access to kids. His wife was a national vice-president of the Boys’ Brigade, a Christian youth organization with more than 500,000 members in 60 countries. Dando also worked for a children’s charity in India.
• Dando previously worked as a magistrate on a family court panel, which dealt with child care and child access proceedings.

Update: Dando target of UK investigation

Claire Fox of the Guardian writes:

A Baptist minister who admitted abusing children in the US faces a British police investigation after confessing to similar offences.

Reverend Robert Dando, 46, a senior minister at Worcester Park Baptist Church, pleaded guilty in Fairfax, Virginia, to four counts of sexually molesting the two young sons of family friends.

Dando sexually abused the boys between 1995 and 1999, from the ages of seven and eight.

Officials told Fairfax County Circuit Court one of the victims said Dando molested him by touching his genitals on 50 to 60 different occasions.

Fairfax County prosecutors have also revealed Dando admitted under questioning to touching young boys in the United Kingdom in a similar way.

What should Catholic politicians who support Roe v. Wade say?

Mark Silk led us to this from George Dennis O'Brien's new book:

Stop trying to avoid the issue by saying that you are personally opposed to abortion or that you accept the Church's views on abortion, but it is not your responsibility as a legislator to impose your moral will on the country. That is a cop-out. Any-slavery legislators in the nineteenth century did not retreat into personal opinion or religious cover--they thought that there was something wrong with the law of the land that needed radical change. The problem with abortion for a sensible legislator is not whether it is right or wrong, religious or impious; it is that it cannot be legislated away. When rounded on by one's local bishop for "supporting abortion," don't duck for cover--ask the bishop just what law he would recommend that would accomplish the prohibition of abortion. You won't likely get an answer.

Health reform delay's price in human lives

The Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land stumbled over the heels of the exit polls to argue without foundation that in the mid-term elections, "American voters" demanded the Republicans "repeal ObamaCare."

Land is wrong, as Dan at Bold Faith Type explained:

Edison Research's exit polls - which are used by the Associated Press, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox News - show that a minority of midterm voters (48%) wanted to repeal health care reform, with 31% wanting it to do more and 16% wanting to leave it as is. Furthermore, voters who turned out on Tuesday were more conservative than the country at large. Taking a wider view, a Gallup poll that was in the field last weekend showed that less than ¼ of Americans (23%) think repealing health care should be Congress's top priority after the election.

Inattentive to the polling data, Land appeared to be instead parroting the message of right-wing strategist Richard Viguerie. Both said the voters had decided "to give the Republicans one more chance" to cut the size of government, although the polling data shows that Americans' overarching concern is the economy.

Centers for Disease Control analysis suggests that any further health reform action should take the form of an expansion of benefits. Not repeal. As Reuters reported:

Nearly 59 million Americans went without health insurance coverage for at least part of 2010, many of them with conditions or diseases that needed treatment, federal health officials said on Tuesday.

hey said 4 million more Americans went without insurance in the first part of 2010 than during the same time in 2008.

"Both adults and kids lost private coverage over the past decade," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news briefing.

The findings have implications for U.S. healthcare reform efforts. A bill passed in March promises to get health insurance coverage to 32 million Americans who currently lack coverage.

Lack of health insurance kills at a rate of about one American every 12 minutes, Harvard Medical School researchers found.

How many would Southern Baptists like to see sacrificed on the altar of the Land/Viguerie political goals?

Southern Baptist Sharron Angle (& others)

Southern Baptist Sharron Angle misjudged the electorate in Nevada, and lost.

Amanda Marcotte makes a coherent argument that Angle's Mama Grizzly racism is to some conservatives an unbearable contradiction of her femininity. A deal breaker:

This contradiction exposed why it's so critical to the fundamentalist worldview that women stay at home and abandon ambition. In this world, women are supposed to be the light, the caretakers, the homemakers, those who smooth feathers and wipe brows. Aggression, meanness, ambition, and even lustiness are considered more masculine traits, even by the public at large. As Dave Weigel reports, the Republicans are beginning to feel that Sharron Angle, at least, spent too much time in the public eye. The longer the public stares at a Mama Grizzly, the more painful the contradiction between her ideals of femininity and her actual behavior.

Mark Silk makes the only slightly related argument that Angle and Christine O'Donnell would have done better if neither had been so much the culture warrior:

I would submit that Angle and O'Donnell lost not because of radical Tea Partyism but because they smelled too much of the unwanted social conservatism of yesteryear.

Who represents that social conservatism better than Angle's fellow Southern Baptist, SBC ethics czar Richard Land? His post-election analysis was first an echo of aging rightist Richard Viguerie (one more chance for the Republicans). Then, almost as though we held national referenda in this country, Land asserted a rejection of "Obamacare," a repudiation of judicial decisions with which he disagrees, a rejection of same-sex marriage and so on.

More about which, later.