TexaCan,
You've really made yourself look ugly.
Go Back to the OPP FRS Forum troll Home, and stay there.
Back to your evil sniveling whining evangelical fundamentalisms self.
Since you ruined the OPP FRS Forum, with the 5 Horse-men Horse-women of the Protestant Apocalypse
Now you and rose are
Religious Stalkers Go get a life, you're an ugly baptist deep inside, and your opinions are really childish.
Here is the problem that Baptists hid things that they are ashamed of.
02/10/2019 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms
Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php First of three parts
Thirty-five years later, Debbie Vasquez's voice trembled as she described her trauma to a group of Southern Baptist leaders.
She was 14, she said, when she was first molested by her pastor in Sanger, a tiny prairie town an hour north of Dallas.
It was the first of many assaults that Vasquez said destroyed her teenage years and, at 18, left her pregnant by the Southern Baptist pastor, a married man more than a dozen years older.
In June 2008, she paid her way to Indianapolis, where she and others asked leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and its 47,000 churches to track sexual predators and take action against congregations that harbored or concealed abusers.
Vasquez, by then in her 40s, implored them to consider prevention policies like those adopted by faiths that include the Catholic Church.
In this 2007 file photo, Debbie Vasquez holds a photo of herself at age 14, when she says she was first molested by the pastor of her church in Sanger, about one hour north of Dallas.
(Donna McWilliam/Associated Press)
"Listen to what God has to say," she said, according to audio of the meeting, which she recorded.
"... All that evil needs is for good to do nothing. ... Please help me and others that will be hurt.”
Days later, Southern Baptist leaders rejected nearly every proposed reform.
The abusers haven't stopped.
They've hurt hundreds more.
Prosecutors, convicted pastors discuss sexual assault.
Media: Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle
In the decade since Vasquez's appeal for help, more than 250 people who worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches have been charged with sex crimes, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News reveals.
It's not just a recent problem:
In all, since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the newspapers found.
That includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned.
More of them worked in Texas than in any other state.
They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives.
Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.
About 220 offenders have been convicted or took plea deals, and dozens of cases are pending.
They were pastors. Ministers.
Youth pastors. Sunday school teachers. Deacons. Church volunteers.
How we did this story:
In 2007, victims of sexual abuse by Southern Baptist pastors requested creation of a registry containing the names of current and former leaders of Southern Baptist churches who had been convicted of sex crimes or who had been credibly accused.
That didn't happen; the last time any such list was made public was by the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
It contained the names of eight sex criminals.
In 2018, as advocates again pressed SBC officials for such a registry, Houston Chronicle reporters began to search news archives, websites and databases nationwide to compile an archive of allegations of sexual abuse, sexual assault and other serious misconduct involving Southern Baptist pastors and other church officials.
We found complaints made against hundreds of pastors, church officials and volunteers at Southern Baptist churches nationwide.
We focused our search on the 10 years preceding the victims' first call for a registry and on the 10-plus years since.
And we concentrated on individuals who had a documented connection to a church listed in an SBC directory published by a state or national association.
We verified details in hundreds of accounts of abuse by examining federal and state court databases, prison records and official documents from more than 20 states and by searching sex offender registries nationwide.
In Texas, we visited more than a dozen county courthouses.
We interviewed district attorneys and police in more than 40 Texas counties.
We filed dozens of public records requests in Texas and nationwide.
Ultimately, we compiled information on 380 credibly accused officials in Southern Baptist churches, including pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers and volunteers.
We verified that about 220 had been convicted of sex crimes or received deferred prosecutions in plea deals and sent letters to all of them soliciting their responses to summaries we compiled.
We received written responses from more than 30 and interviewed three in Texas prisons.
Of the 220, more than 90 remain in prison and another 100 are still registered sex offenders.
Find our records that relate to those convicted or forced to register as sex offenders at HoustonChronicle.com/AbuseofFaith.
Nearly 100 are still held in prisons stretching from Sacramento County, Calif., to Hillsborough County, Fla., state and federal records show.
Scores of others cut deals and served no time.
More than 100 are registered sex offenders. Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today.
Journalists in the two newsrooms spent more than six months reviewing thousands of pages of court, prison and police records and conducting hundreds of interviews.
They built a database of former leaders in Southern Baptist churches who have been convicted of sex crimes.
The investigation reveals that:
At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.
Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.
Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.
Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors.
Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors' studies and Sunday school classrooms.
A few were adults — women and men who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.
Heather Schneider was 14 when she was molested in a choir room at Houston's Second Baptist Church, according to criminal and civil court records.
Her mother, Gwen Casados, said church leaders waited months to fire the attacker, who later pleaded no contest. In response to her lawsuit, church leaders also denied responsibility.
Schneider slit her wrists the day after that attack in 1994, Casados said. She survived, but she died 14 years later from a drug overdose that her mother blames on the trauma.
"I never got her back," Casados said.
Others took decades to come forward, and only after their lives had unraveled.
David Pittman was 12, he says, when a youth minister from his Georgia church first molested him in 1981.
Two other former members of the man's churches said in interviews that they also were abused by him.
But by the time Pittman spoke out in 2006, it was too late to press criminal charges.
The minister still works at an SBC church.
Pittman won't soon forgive those who have offered prayers but taken no action.
He only recently stopped hating God.
"That is the greatest tragedy of all," he said.
"So many people's faith is murdered. I mean, their faith is slaughtered by these predators.”
August "Augie" Boto, interim president of the SBC's Executive Committee, helped draft the rejection of reform proposals in 2008.
In an interview, he expressed "sorrow" about some of the newspapers' findings but said the convention's leadership can do only so much to stop sexual abuses.
"It would be sorrow if it were 200 or 600" cases, Boto said.
"Sorrow. What we're talking about is criminal.
The fact that criminal activity occurs in a church context is always the basis of grief.
But it's going to happen.
And that statement does not mean that we must be resigned to it."
Gwen Casados, mother of Heather Schneider, says her daughter’s life was ruined by a pageant director at Houston’s Second Baptist Church.
Media: Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle
'A porous sieve'
At the core of Southern Baptist doctrine is local church autonomy, the idea that each church is independent and self-governing.
It's one of the main reasons that Boto said most of the proposals a decade ago were viewed as flawed by the executive committee because the committee doesn't have the authority to force churches to report sexual abuse to a central registry.
TexaCan wrote:
No one has berated you! No one! Nor did he say that all Catholic priests are sex offenders etc.!
That is a lie!