In case I was ever tempted to return to my Fundy roots...

I’ve been reading up lately on the Chuck Phelps situation, since he just resigned from his position as board member of Bob Jones University. Phelps, in case my audience doesn’t have as much free time as I have at the moment to follow the situation, is the guy who was the pastor of the church where one of his congregation members, Ernie Willis, raped and impregnated a 15-year-old girl and knew about it and did nothing!

Sorry, “nothing” is the wrong word - after the girl, Tina Anderson, and her mother informed Phelps of the situation, he had Tina stand in front of the congregation and apologize for being a stumbling block and he refused to believe she was raped - it was an “adulterous affair.” He arranged for Tina to spend her days of pregnancy in Colorado with a preacher friend of his and the baby was given up for adoption. Then she was sent back home and continued to attend church with the perpetrator, her rapist.

Yeah, because he was still permitted to come to church! Phelps said that the church is to encourage struggling Christians, but Willis was beyond struggling - he was a criminal and a pervert, only most of his fellow church members didn’t know this.

The case was reopened recently - this happened in 1997 - and Phelps was subpoenaed to testify and was caught lying under oath. He said up a website defending his honor and insisting that Tina was the one being dishonest. Willis was convicted of forceful rape.

Sometime during the trial, Bob Jones University invited him back to the board, since he had been given the boot by Maranatha Baptist, where he had been president. Of course, there has been quite a bit of pressure to BJU to give rid of Phelps, but Bob Jones III officially backed up Phelps in a recent chapel, proclaiming that Bob Jones University would never endorse a man who swept sexual abuse under a rug, - "we're not Penn State, folks."

Phelps actually just handed in his resignation, but he never apologized or indicated that he was wrong in any way. He just didn't want to interfere with the "university's mission."

On one of the websites I was reading, I came across a link to the transcript of Bob Jones III's interview with Larry King in 2000, when the university was getting all that bad press on account of its interracial dating ban. I was disgusted, although not surprised, at Jones's words:

“ I've learned that religious freedom, and particularly Bible-believing Christians, that maybe we're the most unprotected and misunderstood and maybe despised minority in America. I think some of this is frightening. I think the hostility toward Christianity that has been exhibited in all this should frighten all freedom-loving people and certainly should frighten Christians. And I believe it has. I believe that somehow the university's been allowed of God to be brought into this thing through no fault of our own, and I think as a result a lot of people have had a wake-up call that maybe we're about to lose tolerance toward religious freedom in this country. And I am really, really concerned about that.”

What?! Delusional much? No, because I know ,poor little Bob Jones III, how you have been agonized by the many trials, tribulations, and persecution you've been through. You and your fellow Christians, all 80-something percent of Americans, have suffered indeed! How arrogant, to wine about his non-existent problems and imply that the horrors other minorities in American are trivial! No wonder he didn’t want blacks marrying his Caucasian students - he must have a low opinion on all they’ve been through and are even still experiencing. Dude, the gay community is getting much more crap than Christians - but then he thinks homosexuals are perverts and sinners and so need not be mentioned.

But they are people, too. And maybe he’d better get rid of that beam in his own eye, his own pervert-concealer in residence, Chuck Phelps.