Who Grooms And Abuses Kids? Conservative Christian Leaders Groom And Abuse Kids.

A new project of The Moral High Ground.

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OK, now let me tell you about this new project I’m doing here!

The tweet above from Tennessee Democrat Christopher Hale went viral in 2023. Welcome to a new project from The Moral High Ground.

On Monday, the country will inaugurate Donald Trump, a 34-times-convicted felon with a history of credible sexual assault and/or harassment accusations, as president for the second time. The judge in one of the civil E. Jean Carroll defamation cases explained that, in layman’s terms, and despite the idiosyncrasies of New York law, Trump was found liable for raping Carroll. Among more than one of Trump’s nominees for Cabinet positions, there are myriad credible sexual assault and/or harassment accusations. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s SecDef nominee, was accused of rape in 2017, and paid the accuser off for her silence. Despite Hegseth’s protests to the contrary, he was never “cleared” of those allegations. The mere fact that charges were not brought do not mean someone has been “cleared.”

Millions of the voters who have chosen to put these people in power are conservative Christians and Christian nationalists, who absolutely love to accuse LGBTQ people and drag queens of being groomers and sexual abusers. They’ve gone to war against drag performers and gotten performances banned in several fascist states, and spread lies that drag performers reading to kids in public libraries constitute a danger to them. They accuse trans people of being predators simply for wanting to pee in the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

They’ve declared war on trans girls in youth sports, with House Republicans passing a bill this week to ban their participation. There are hardly any trans athletes participating in high school sports, of course. These monstrous buffoons are literally passing laws targeted at like 15 specific kids.

Speaking of laws and rules and holy crusades directed at literally a handful of people, or just one person, deranged South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace has been obsessed like a cat chasing a laser pointer — and desperate that we all watch her and clap for her — with attacking one (1) new member of Congress, Sarah McBride of Delaware, who is the first trans member of that body. Nancy Mace will not rest as long as McBride is able to legally take a shit within a two-mile radius of the US Capitol!

Marjorie Taylor Greene, for no reason besides how she is a vicious, lying, mouthbreathing bigot who’s going to hell when she dies, called McBride a “groomer” and a “child predator” this very week.

Oh also! Trump’s border czar Tom Homan is asking American citizens to turn in migrant children under the guise of protecting them from trafficking. And why does he want people to turn in adults who are here illegally? Totally different, unrelated, but definitely also non-Nazi reasons, we are sure!

The MAGA right is full of QAnon conspiracy theories about liberals trafficking children and Democrats feeding off the adrenochrome of children, conspiracy theories that distract and detract from real efforts to fight real child trafficking, which certainly exists.

And yet.

AND YET.

And yet all the available evidence suggests that the most dangerous place for a child to be in the United States of America is alone with a conservative Christian pastor, youth group leader, Christian school teacher or other similarly positioned figure of religious authority.

It’s in the news constantly. Drag queens aren’t abusing kids, but local news every week is teeming with white straight Christian pastors and youth leaders being arrested, charged, sued, sentenced for, and accused of sexually abusing kids. Statistically, that’s where kids are liable to be unsafe.

Honestly, I think some Christian leaders aren’t even in denial about it. I think for some unknown number of them, it’s a convenient set-up and a protection racket. Look at the Southern Baptist sex abuse scandal, for fuck’s sake. Look at the Roman Catholic Church. Smearing LGBTQ+ people as groomers and predators is deflection and projection.

Dan Savage used to have a thing called Youth Pastor Watch, where he documented on a weekly basis the atrocities committed by youth pastors and regular pastors and other Christian leaders. He updated it regularly when conservatives were trying to keep gay marriage illegal to protect the children, and he brought it back when the attacks on trans folks using the bathroom really got going. He wrote in 2016, “If kids got raped at Denny's as often as they got raped at church, it would be illegal to take your kid to Denny's.”

These days there are some excellent resources for aggregating and drawing attention to such stories. The Roys Report tells these stories in painstaking detail, as does BishopAccountability.org, which focuses on the Catholic Church but tells other stories too.

The longrunning Joe.My.God blog — which honest to God I consider to be my assignment editor half the time, he’s got such a keen nose for news — does a fabulous job of highlighting these stories as they happen all over the country. From time to time at Wonkette, when I get pissed off about some kind of conservative Christian motherfucker like Lauren Boebert or Ron DeSantis or some other cohort of Republican psycho Christian fascist trash attacking LGBTQ people or drag performers, I go to Joe’s site and grab all his headlines just from the most recent week about conservative Christians abusing children, just to make the obvious point. I always make sure it’s just from the most recent week.

Pretty much every time I’ve done it there have been at least six stories. Often more. And I’ve often thought, you know, I should do that every week. And there’s some specific information I want to track if I ever do that.

So Here We Are.

Here we fuckin’ are. Going to do this every week. And there’s some specific information I want to track in the process.

I’m going to make one post that will get updated throughout the year. (Either this post, or a new one I make that will stay pinned to the front page.) I’m going to use those sources I mentioned and others, and your tips (which you may leave in the comments), and I’m going to make a list.

Why? Well, again, there are people doing the work of tracking and reporting on these stories and doing it prolifically, so I want to highlight their work, and expose and aggregate it to new audiences who might not see it all the time. I want there to be a single link people can click that shows, in a visual way, how widespread and common the problem is, you know, 11 months from now, when there are hundreds of entries in the post, each one about a different religious leader who either has been convicted of or accused of preying on children.

So I want to be able to count, and I want there to be a visual representation.

One of my additions to this is that I want to collect data on exactly which kinds of churches and institutions are most represented on the list, which denominations and movements seem to be the most prime magnets and/or breeding grounds for child abuse. I happen to know a lot about the World of Jesus in America, so I can give quick context other outlets don’t always provide, for people who might not know, for example, what a “PCA” church is. (It’s one of the most prominent arch-conservative arms of Presbyterianism, not to be confused with PCUSA, which is nice and normal and not vile and hateful.)

Because sometimes it’s not as obvious to everyday people as “Catholic” or “Southern Baptist.”

I want this information for pure list-making data collection purposes, but I also want to be able to easily cite it when one of those absolute pieces of shit decides to attack LGBTQ people as groomers and predators. If I know the Christian fascist making the accusation is again, for instance, a right-wing Presbyterian or some other type of “reformed” evangelical — as so many of the Theobros and their allies like Pete Hegseth are, and like moral scolds like Sen. Josh Hawley have been affiliated with — I’d like to be able to say, “Cool, here is a list of conservative Presbyterians who have been arrested, accused or sued for child sex abuse and/or rape this year. And where is your similar list of LGBTQ+ people? Oh you don’t have one? Fuck you.”

Do other people commit such crimes? Certainly. There are horrible people in any group, no matter who they are. But I am arguing, and I believe the vast trove of evidence bears out, that the very lifestyles of conservative and fundamentalist religious institutions are much more conducive to child abuse and grooming than pretty much anywhere else in our society. (And yes I said religion. The United States is a predominantly Christian country, and most of our problems are with conservative Christians. But if it happens in other religious congregations/institutions and it makes the news, I’ll include them.)

The general parameters will be simple: it will be people in positions of spiritual authority in churches and Christian schools and any other related institutions. In other words, because I am excessively fair, I will not be including it if the janitor at a megachurch is arrested for something that happened away from the church, unless that janitor also happens to volunteer with the youth choir.

I’ll also occasionally include stories where the victims aren’t necessarily children — there’s one this week — but where it fits within our theme for another reason.

That’s it. Won’t it be interesting to find out what we find out when we tally it all up?

I think this sort of research fits right within the remit of a newsletter dedicated to affirming who precisely has the moral fuckin’ high ground, and who does not. Don’t you? If you agree, please become a paying subscriber to help fund this extra work! This could be a whole new division of the site someday.

Again, I’ll likely create a separate post that will be updated and pinned to the front page throughout the year. I’ll link to it in the weekly newsletters, and from time to time I’ll send out updates. Unfortunately I’m sure I will miss some stories, because there are so many, and I am but one person who works one million hours per week, and I’m not sure whether I’ll update it weekly or semi-daily or what. I’m sure it will depend on my workload and, well, how many stories there are. But for now we’ll start with these stories, all of which have been in the news since January 1.

TRIGGER WARNING: Some people may not want to actually read the list in detail, for obvious reasons. In that case, just consider it the resource it is. You can always just search keywords, like for instance to see how many times “Tennessee” comes up.

So without further ado:

The List.

We begin with nine entries:

1. Arturo Laguna Camas, a pastor at Iglesia Casa De Adoración in Phoenix, Arizona. Affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. Accused of recording women in the bathroom. Not about children, but related because of the war on trans people using the bathroom.

2. Jackson Gatlin, former young adult pastor at the Duluth Vineyard Church in Duluth, Minnesota, has been named in nine civil lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse of minors, aged 11 to 16 at the time. He pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault of a minor in 2023, while taking Alford pleas on four other counts. Also named in the suits are his parents, Michael and Brenda, who are respectively the former senior pastor of the church and a former church leader. Vineyard USA appears to be somewhere between evangelicals and Pentecostals.

3. Michael Ronald Goble, a 76-year-old retired pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Adrian, Michigan. Accused of molesting multiple young boys under 13. Various sources have listed the church as “Methodist” (but not United Methodist) and also Mennonite.

4. Michael Howard, a worship leader connected with Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Confessed to sexually abusing a teenage boy over the course of several years, beginning when the victim was 15. Has been part of TrueSong, which is The Ark Encounter’s and the Creation Museum’s resident praise and worship band, because of course the Ark Encounter has one of those. Went to Florence Baptist Temple in Burlington, Kentucky, and was a worship leader there too. It appears to be an independent Baptist church, and is listed in this directory of KJV churches, AKA churches that are obsessed with the idea that the King James Bible is the only real Bible, because I guess God is only able to communicate in the King’s English, and cannot understand these newfangled slang Bibles like the NIV.

5. Frank Gough II, friar at the Resurrection Anglican Church in Shalimar, Florida, arrested for possession of child pornography. Resurrection is affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), which stomped away from the normal Episcopal church in a huff because the Episcopalians are too nice to gay people.

6. Rodolfo Martinez-Guevara, former priest associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic parish in Oxnard, California, among others. He “pleaded no contest to sodomy with a person under age 16 and a lewd act with a child age 14 or 15, according to court records,” and was sentenced to a year in jail. Also doing time concurrently for possession of child pornography.

7. Bernabe Leon-Alvarez, a former pastor in Racine, Wisconsin, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for “attempted sexual exploitation by a therapist and child enticement.” Groping two teenage girls, in layman’s terms. His church, which no longer exists, was called Esperanza en Cristo, and he also worked at other churches in the Milwaukee and Illinois. I am unclear on what kind of affiliation this church had, if any.

8. Bruce Hollen, 63, a former pastor in The Woodlands, Texas, sentenced to two years for possession of child pornography. His former church was a Calvary Chapel. These are charismatic evangelical churches.

9. Lindsey Whiteside, Hernando, Mississippi. The first woman on this list. Former youth leader and coach at the Getwell Church. Charged with sexually assaulting an underage girl. Getwell Church Hernando, which appears to be a campus of Getwell Church Southaven (both are suburbs of Memphis), is non-denominational, and its website says they believe in biblical infallibility and ascribe to “orthodox” beliefs in the Wesleyan tradition. So conservative, evangelical.

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