The Southern Baptist Convention’s Unconvincing Claims as to Why It Cannot Effectively Report or Prevent Clergy Child Abuse – and How Insurance Companies Can Exert Pressure to Ensure Better Systems
By MARCI HAMILTON
Thursday, Jun. 12, 2008
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has recently proven why it is that children are at risk for sexual abuse in our society: It’s easier not to protect them, and especially easy to issue ineffectual platitudes while looking the other way.
According to the Associated Press, the SBC has concluded that its decentralized structure of independent churches makes it impossible for it to establish a website of pastors credibly accused of child sexual abuse, or even to require the reporting of such crimes to the police. Yes, you read that right: The SBC is citing these lame procedural reasons for not taking the most basic steps to protect children from devastating abuse that can have repercussions that leave victims suffering for a lifetime (and that severely taxes society in medical and other resources).
In this column, I’ll rebut the Convention’s claims that policing and reporting abuse is an impossible task to put on its shoulders, and also describe how change in this quarter needs to come from what may seem like an unlikely source: the insurance industry.
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http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20080612.html
Sorry but this Protestant Pastor disagrees with you. He also believes Child Molestations by Pastors are being covered up. What say you?
You do have to realise that many protestant churches are not organized in a strict heirarchical fashion like other churches. Most Baptist churches are independent, and there is no “overseeing” group that has any say at all in who a particular congregation chooses for their pastor, or the discipline of that pastor.
That shouldn’t mean they can’t form a database or try to track people professing the baptist faith who are known pedophiles, but it does mean they can’t just form “rules” of tracking mere allegations, because the pastors aren’t employees of any huge “Baptist” organization such that they have to follow some nationwide or worldwide rules for employment that would include allowing such a database.