Religion Roundup

It’s been a while since we visited the wild, wacky world of religion, but the time has come. Hold onto your hats.

• We’ll start with a classic organ grinding story. According to The Smoking Gun, Jerry Childress, organist at the Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church, stuck his penis through a hole in a public bathroom stall “and waited” for a moment of glory from the street sweeper in the next stall. That moment of glory never came, and neither did Childress. The street sweeper wasn’t amused, called the cops, and Childress was subsequently arrested for indecent exposure. And, yes, you’ve already guessed the state in which this incident took place.
• On a more serious note, according to The Daily Beast, “suicide is now the leading cause of death among 10- to 17-year-olds in Utah.” Could this have anything to do with the Mormon Church’s overt homophobia? In less than three months after the Church ramped up its bigotry last November, declaring that same-sex married Mormons are apostates and that the Church will not baptize their children, 26 Utah LGBT young people committed suicide.
• In 2014, Kessler Lichtenegger, at the time a vacation Bible school volunteer at the Westside Family Church in Lenexa, Kansas, and now a convicted sex offender, sexually assaulted two under-14 girls on church property. Subsequently, the girls and their families filed suit against the church. On June 15, that Southern Baptist church asked the presiding judge to refuse to allow the lawsuit to proceed unless the underage sex-abuse victims and their families publicly identified themselves. This is yet another example of a church making concrete the words of the Bible: “Suffer the little children.”
• Last November, members of the Word of Life Christian Church in Chadwicks, New York, including the victims’ mother, father, and half-sister, beat brothers Lucas and Christopher Leonard for 12 hours in the church. They killed Lucas and beat Christopher so badly he had to be hospitalized. The brothers’ “sin”? They wanted to leave the church. In June, their father Bruce Leonard, pleaded guilty to two counts of assault. Why was he allowed to plead guilty to these relatively minor charges? This devout Christian father agreed to provide state’s evidence in the trials of the  other defendants in the case.
• In another fine example of Christian parenting, Crimesider reports that in 2013 “the parents of a diabetic boy who died from complications related to starvation and neglect waited two hours before calling 911 in 2013 when they found him not breathing.” At the time of his death, 15-year-old Alexandru Radita, of Calgary, weighed 37 pounds. His parents, Emil and Rodica Rodita, have been charged with murder.
• From the Islamic world, CNN reports that “The leader of a Pakistani Islamic council has proposed a bill that allows husbands to ‘lightly beat’ their wives as a form of discipline. “
• Not to be outdone, Christian fundamentalist Steve Haymond is, according to Patheos, selling “chastening” instruments, in other words, child-beating sticks.
• And finally, speaking of assholes, Metro reports that a Turkish imam has been suspended after going to the hospital because of “bleeding in the anus and rectum and foreign object in the rectum.” The “foreign object”? A cucumber.

Religion is truly the gift that keeps on giving, so we’ll put up another of these posts sooner rather than later.