Sex And The SBC

 

 

The Southern Baptist Convention recently hired a group called Guidepost Solutions to investigate several sexual scandals if you haven't been following along.

The group issued a report and revealed a consistent pattern.

1) Somebody did something wrong to somebody else.

2) Somebody else told a Baptist big wig.

3) The big wig hemmed and hawed

4) The bad guy left the church and went to another church.

5) If it made it into the Baptist press, it was a big story, and if the victim were a woman, someone would walk up and call her a whore.

6) Repeat.

Part of the mess is that the Southern Baptist Convention has a hierarchical structure that theologians call "Loosey-Goosey."    Despite what some of their Preachers think, there is no Pope in the Southern Baptist Convention. Things are left up to the local church and they can hire anybody they want to hire. Sometimes they hire people who have "issues" that are never "dealt with" because they work at the church.

The report also contained an investigation of a local Baptist preacher, Johnny Hunt. Until 2018, Hunt was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia.

First Baptist is a big old church. I have inlaws that have been members there for years. I have friends that have been members there for years. 

Until last week, I had never heard of a bad thing about Johnny Hunt as a person.

I mean, Hunt was one of those hellfire and brimstone types of preachers, at least the times I listened to him. He would shout. He would stomp his foot. He would clap his hands. He would give alter calls that lasted for days, if not weeks. 

Despite this, his church grew and grew. The people I met there were amiable, and outside of the pulpit, Hunt seemed like a nice, personable guy. But there was something about him I just couldn't put my finger on.  I chalked it up as he wasn't my cup of Joe. A lot of people would talk about Hunt's positive influence in their lives. Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong.

He would hold weekend retreats for men. I went to one. The sermons were about being a good Christian man.  A lot of it was about avoiding temptation because men can resist anything but temptation. I remember one sermon in which Hunt described turning on the TV and learning the cable had a free HBO weekend. So he said,  "I called the cable company and said I didn't want that filth in my house."

Keep that in mind as you read this narrative from the report. 

"Dr. Hunt then moved towards Survivor and proceeded to pull her shorts down, turn her over and stare at her bare backside. He made sexual remarks about her body and things he had imagined about her. During this time, Survivor felt frozen. Survivor said these were some of the longest moments of her life. She mustered the courage to ask him could she turn back over, and Dr. Hunt said yes. When she turned back over, she began to pull up her shorts. Dr. Hunt then pinned her to the couch, got on top of her, and pulled up her shirt. He sexually assaulted her with his hands and mouth. Suddenly, Dr. Hunt stopped and then stood up. Survivor pulled down her shirt. Survivor said she did not want him to ruin his ministry, at which he responded he did not want to ruin hers. But he then forced himself on her again by groping her, trying to pull her shirt down, and violently kissing her. Survivor did not reciprocate, but rather stood eyes open and very stiff, hoping he would just stop and and leave. He finally stopped and left."

Well.

I'm sure that was hard to read because it is at least sexual assault.

I don't know how you can go from telling men that you can't watch movies that have dirty parts to pulling down a woman's pants. 

Of course, there's two sides to every story.

For his part, Hunt has admitted to a light kiss, touching the woman's breasts over the clothes and trying to pull her shorts down. However, he calls the report "sensationalistic."

Come on guys, he just lightly kissed a woman, copped a feel, and merely tried to pull her shorts down.

I don't know how you write a report about a former President of The Southern Baptist Convention pulling down or trying to pull down a woman's shorts and not be sensationalistic.  It is pretty wild stuff.

Hunt has his defenders.  One on Facebook didn't like the terminology of "survivor" to describe the woman.   The woman has to share some of the blame because she let a MAN that was NOT HER HUSBAND in her condo.  Yadda, yadda.

Whatever. I'm not one of those "believe all women" types.  Women lie, just like men lie.  But her story sounds credible me. 

But only two people know what really happened.

Is it too much to ask for a preacher to keep his hands to himself. 

Amen?!

Mini Concerts Review

 

I started this month going to two concerts on the same weekend.

If you know anything about me, you know I'm not too keen on anything I have to do twice on any weekend.  Yes, my indigenous American name is "Stick In The Mud."

The first concert was by Michael W. Smith.  Smith is huge in a genre of music known as Contemporary Christian Music, or CCM. 

His primary instrument is the piano, and frankly, the guy can flat out play the piano. He has written several songs that are now in hymnbooks. If churches even use hymnbooks anymore.

The concert was terrific—no two ways about it.

At first, I thought it would be a little bit hokey.  He came out, sat a the piano and said a few words, and played some snippets of his songs.  

The audience was er, older saints who loved and appreciated this artist.  The artist loved and appreciated his aging audience. 

The second concert was by Van Morrison, who I am not sure even likes his audience even though they have made him very rich and a legend.

Everybody knows Van Morrison, but they don't know Van Morrison.  

Everybody has heard "Brown Eyed Girl," his most famous song, which came out in the '60s. Unfortunately, due to some contractual issues, Morrison never made a lot of money from this song, and for years, he never played it.

He plays it now. It doesn't sound like the record.

Van doesn't care.

He's sort of like Bob Dylan because he's always working on his songs and he gets bored playing the same thing the same way all the time.

He's Van [insert bad word here] Morrison and he doesn't care if you like it. 

His music can be described as a sort of jazz.  It is not rock and roll.

Here is a transcript of my wife and me during the Van Morrison Concert.

My wife: "What's this song called?"
Me:  "I don't know."

I have been a big fan since 1970.

Even though I didn't know many of the songs, I enjoyed the concert.  I have always wanted to see Van Morrison.

It was great.  He wasn't introduced. He just meandered onto the stage with his saxophone wearing an Auqa Blue suit with a scarf and an Aqua Blue fedora.  My wife said he looked like a garden gnome.

He didn't talk to the audience except to say "Give  it up for the band" after the last song.

I'm not sure he knew he was in Alpharetta, Georgia.

That's okay.  He's Van You Know What Morrison and he doesn't have to talk to me.

Pay Off Your Own Freaking College Loans

 

 

 I'm sorry the title of this week's post is too vague.  Next time, no more beating around the bush. I'm going to say exactly what I think about this topic.

If you take out a loan to pay for your college expenses, you should pay it back.  I'm not sure why this is even a discussion.

If you take out a loan to buy a car, you are expected to pay it back.  If you take out a loan to buy a house, you are expected to pay it back.  

A  credit card is just a plastic loan. You are taking a loan to pay for something and you are expected to pay it back.

With interest.

However, over the past several years, people have noticed that it costs a lot to go to college and most people don't have that type of scratch lying around the house.

Some examples of college costs. This is for tuition only.

Harvard:  $54,002 a year
Yale:  $57,000 a year
University Of Georgia (Georgia resident) $12,068  (out of state) $31,108.
Ouachita Baptist University:  $29,120
Kennesaw State University:  $6436 (Georgia resident)

So you see, Kennesaw State is a bargain. However, Kennesaw State did not win the NCAA College Football Championship and that's why the University of Georgia costs almost twice as much for a resident of the state of Georgia.

Therefore, students and their parents must take out loans from the Federal Government to help pay for the cost of college.   It is an expensive undertaking to train the leaders of tomorrow in the desks of today to become lock-in step members of the Democratic party.

One of the dirty little secrets of college is that if you stay long enough, you can graduate. Sure, you won't be a part of any college ad campaign, but you'll graduate.  But along with the graduation comes the bill for the college loan and Lordy Mercy, people have to make payments on the loan they freely took out. 

The newly graduated students soon realized that they can't buy that $650K house, or the $56K car, or the G.I.Joe with the Kung-Fu grip.  And they began to complain.

Well, Uncle Sugar, President Biden, heard their complaints.  If there's one thing we've learned about President Biden, he'll be in favor of anything as long as it might help him pick up a few more votes.  

So President Biden is working on a plan that will forgive $10K of a student's federal college loan.   Most of the pushback came from the "progressives" (i.e. those that majored in 15th Century Bavarian Hygiene at Ursinus College, tuition $55,210 a year) who said the forgiveness is just a drop in the bucket and wouldn't help that much.

If I know the current Democratic Party and the zeitgeist of the times, people like me (Hey, pay your bills) will soon be considered mouth-breathing troglodytes that want to keep women in chains.

Yet nobody is asking this question:  Why does it cost so much to go to college?  I went to college and I didn't see the expense.  I guess you have to pay the professors. You just can't get that snottiness for free, buddy. 

It is not just the cost of the professors.  When I went to school, colleges had dorms. Usually, the dorms were cinder block structures and smelled terrible.  The boys had communal showers where they took showers with other male students and soon learned that all men are not created equal. 

Now they have these living structures that resemble apartments.

When I was in school, there was only one place to eat: the college dining room. It served food. When my son went to Georgia Southern University, they had several different places to eat.  They even had a Chick-fil-A.

A significant expense of college is the Greek Fraternity and Sorority system. There, young people learn how to binge drink and score with members of the opposite sex. 

What about those that take out the loans and actually (hold on to your hat) pay them back?  Like my son.  Like his parents.  Explain how this doesn't make us look like a bunch of chumps.

But President Biden doesn't care about that.   Just use a magic wand and wipe out a bunch of debt of some richy rich kids who hate the idea they can't upgrade their iPhone when the new one comes out.

No new ideas about building back a better way of going to college.   Just let the kid who went to vo-tech to become a plumber pay for the education of the English major.

Seems fair.