Texas Baptist ‘Valleygate’ lawsuit settlement acknowledged

Dismissal of the Valleygate lawsuit filed by the Rev. Otto Arango alleging libel and slander by the Baptist General Convention of Texas and others has been reported by the Texas Baptist Standard.

The dismissal followed a mediated settlement, which we reported last month.

According to the Baptist Standard, the dismissal included a deposition from Arango confirming the accuracy of the Standard’s reporting on the issue.

It was Cavalry Baptist Church Pastor David Montoya, through his blogging as the Spiritual Samurai [now at Spiritual Samurai 2010], who first called attention to the issues involved.

The amount paid Arango was not disclosed in the Baptist Standard account, although the story by Ken Camp did say:

In the final settlement, Arango and his attorneys released all claims against the Standard and agreed to dismiss the suit.

“While the Standard would have preferred not to spend any more of our insurance company’s funds, we concur with our attorney and insurance representative that this settlement is a sound business decision,” Knox said. The settlement costs were less than anticipated expenses from the next round of legal expenses, which would have been an appeal to have the case dismissed on summary judgment

“We were happy to save the insurance company some money,” he said. “We also were relieved to remove this distraction, so we can focus more of our attention on telling the story of God’s work across Texas and around the world.”

North Carolina Southern Baptists pray ‘for’ (to criticize) President Obama

Prayerful smiles may have faded at the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and controversy later ensued at the Biblical Recorder after John Alden Tagliarini wrote to Tar Heel Voices:

I was disheartened to hear prayer-time during the Monday night session of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina subverted by a prayer for the salvation of a professing believer. While it may be that none of us agree with the policies or even the social ethics of our United States President, to presume his lost condition without acknowledging, with similar severity, our own culpability smacked of pride.

Most who responded sided with the commenter, although there were a couple like James Harrington, who said:

Seriously… I mean really, are we going to criticize a man who prayed for the salvation of the president. Then we are going to say that he professes to be a Christian and that’s enough. How many people have you ever witnessed to that began by saying they were Christians but just a few short minutes reveal that not to be the case at all. Can a believer make one of his very first courses of actions as the most powerful man in the world to be to move back towards partial birth abortions (murder moments before birth).

Seriuosly… and we call the platform preachers arrogant and hypocritical! Wow!! I am praying for the salvation of the president as I hit the send button to this message

The Rev. Todd Blake may have been most clear in his response:

Follow this link and read President Obama’s welcome at a Prayer Breakfast on April 6 of this year:

www.whitehouse.gov/…/remarks-president-easter-prayer-breakfast

In his remarks, President Obama stated as a matter of fact, the resurrection of Christ Jesus. He confessed that he and all of us are sinful. He confessed what many of us have: “we believe that redemption can be delivered — by faith in Jesus Christ.”

He publicly professed his own faith in Christ Jesus. If we read this address without knowledge of who delivered it, we would possibly think it was delivered by an evangelical pastor. His politics may differ from many who are gatered in Greensboro this week, but he publicly professes faith in the same Lord as we do.

Prayers like these and the ousting of faitful servants like Normaon Jameson are two of many reasons I am not in Greensboro this week.

Bob Felton at Civil Commotion is heartened by it all:

I know it will sound odd to people in the educated parts of the country, but this is progress; recall that Wiley Drake and Steve Anderson were praying for the president’s death not so long ago.

One likely goal of Jameson’s ouster, however, is to suppress such multi-faceted debate. After all, Jameson has been accusef of a “lack of sensitivity” because he expressed far less strongly worded views.

Will Tar Heel Voices remain the open, vigorous forum it has been since long before the dawn of the Web?

We shall see.

Cindy McCain joins the NOH8 campaign

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.

British 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.

No majority for repeal of health reform

His boss, Richard Land, misled the way. So it’s understandable that Doug Carlson of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Commission tried to extract a referendum on health reform from last week’s mid-term elections:

Aspects of health care reform faced a referendum as well. Citizens in three states—Arizona, Oklahoma and Colorado—had opportunity to express their feelings on the health care law rammed through Congress. Arizona and Oklahoma each supported an exemption from the mandate that almost everyone purchase health insurance or else face a fine. A similar initiative lost in a divided vote in Colorado. Nationwide, the number of people upset over Obamacare has not budged. Exit polling by Rasmussen shows that 59 percent of voters favor its repeal.

It isn’t that simple, as this week’s Kaiser Family Foundation poll made clear. There is a majority for repeal or alteration of one aspect of the health reform legislation — the requirement that all Americans have health insurance or pay a fine — but overwhelming support for the remainder of the legislation.

Kaiser Health poll answers regarding whether to keep or repeal specific provisions

Only 24% of those polled supported outright repeal of the law. The conundrum, more specifically:

Looking ahead, Americans remain divided about what lawmakers should do, with 21 percent of the public favoring expansion of the health reform law, 19 percent wanting to leave it as is, a quarter wanting to repeal parts of the law, and 24 percent wanting the entire law repealed.

Given the rising number of Americans, middle class and poor, who are without health insurance, the absence of a majority for outright repeal of the reform legislation is no surprise.

The cost in lives of Richard Land’s health reform repeal

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?

From Oral Roberts’ gay grandson: It gets better

Randy Roberts Potts, grandson of Oral Roberts, a letter to his gay Uncle Ronnie, who killed himself in June of 1982.

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, or better underlines the clarity of other analysts, 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.

Eddie Long files responses denying guilt: Resignation called for

In responses to the four lawsuits filed against him and New Birth Baptist Church, Bishop Eddie Long denied coercing the young men into sexual relationships, but admitted other key aspects of their accounts. The responses were filed in DeKalb County (Georgia) State Court on Monday.

Megan Matteucci of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote:

In September, four young men — Maurice Robinson, Anthony Flagg, Jamal Parris and Spencer LeGrande — filed suits against Long and New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. The young men claimed Long coerced them into having sex with him in exchange for lavish gifts, trips and jobs. In the filings, Long said it has been a practice of his to occasionally share a room with members of his congregation. However, he said “the plaintiff’s claims of sexual misconduct are not true.

…

He admitted that he took the men on trips, but he denied the complaints of sexual contact. He did admit to hugging some of the men.

…

Long also admitted to giving the plaintiffs gifts, including cars, and helping them financially, but he denied that it was in exchange for sex. He said he has “provided sporadic financial assistance,” and he routinely pays for rent and other expenses for New Birth members, according to the filings.

Almost 75 people led by Bishop “Prophet” H. Walker of True Light Pentecost Church in Spartanburg, S.C., called for Long’s resignation in a ralliy “on the steps of the Georgia state Capitol” Sunday,