Black Collar Crime Catch-Up 2010, Part 2
Mark Holick • Daniel Moore • Herbert and Catherine Schaible • Hal Turner
Here we catch up with the Conservative Babylon Class of 2010 — some we covered previously, some Babylonians we missed entirely, but all of whom deserve recognition (read: exposure) as holier-than-thou right-wingers who can’t seem to live up to the impossible “family values” standards they demand of everyone else. (No, we don’t know how many parts there will be to our year-end catch-up.) In no particular order…
There Ain’t No Justice — But There’s Always an Alford Plea
There’s nothing particularly spectacular about the case of 65-year-old Roman Catholic pedo-priest Michael Lowell Barnes (see Black Collar Sex Crime Round-Up: October 8, 2009), other than the miniscule sentence he received in September — a lousy six months behind bars after entering an Alford plea (i.e., “I’m not pleading guilty, but I know you have enough evidence to convict me”) to one count of child sexual abuse — despite facing 16 original charges of similar crimes that allegedly took place over more than five years.
Seventh Circle of Hell: Stephen Carter
For eight years after returning from a mission to spread the Gospel in Belize, Stephen Wayne Carter was the director of the Southern Baptist-affiliated Cale Retreat and Conference Center in Hertford, North Carolina (operated by the Chowan Baptist Association) — whose mission “is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible while striving to be used by God to transform those lives for His purposes and His glory” and “provide a sanctified place for people of all ages to escape from life’s distractions and to experience the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ.” In the summer of 2009, he was charged with two counts of engaging in sexual activities with a child, two counts of first-degree sex offense of a child and two counts of indecent liberties with a child, all felonies, involving three different children. In May, 2010, while awaiting trial, Carter killed himself by sucking carbon monoxide from his pickup truck. Carter was married for 26 years, and was the father of two.
But the Church is More Concerned About a Drop in Membership
In October, the senior pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Waterloo, Ontario, Paul Hartig, was arrested and charged with stealing more than $5,000 from his church. He was suspended without pay from his job “until the allegations are resolved” — which means at least until January 17, 2011, his next court date.
And If the Muslims Had Descended on His Church to Force Copies of the Q’uran into the Christians’ Hands…?
In August, during the holy month of Ramadan, Mark Holick, anti-choice extremist and Islamophobic pastor (who insists Barack Obama is a Muslim, and that Obama’s election is a “sin against the Lord”) of Spirit One Christian Center in Wichita, Kansas, was arrested accosting Muslims with Christian tracts and DVDs outside the Islamic Society of Wichita. After police asked Holick and “about a dozen other people to move farther away from the building,” Holick was arrested and charged with loitering and failing to disperse. [KWCH].
Incidentally (or not), Radical Right Wing organizations were outraged when the Rhema Ministerial Association International (Kevin Gain Ministries) revoked Holick’s ordination in 2002, after one too many abortion-clinic protests, specifically that of Dr. George Tiller, who, seven years later, would be slaughtered in cold blood in the vestibule of his own church by anti-choice extremist Scott Roeder.
“Counseling”: Southern Baptist for “Let Us Prey”
In March, Daniel Moore, 50-year-old former pastor of New Whiteland Baptist Church, New Whiteland, Indiana, pleaded guilty to molesting a 15-year-old girl he was supposed to be “counseling,” and in April was granted the deal that got him ten years in the joint.
Putting the Fantasies of False Prophets Above the Life of a Child
What can anyone say about Herbert and Catherine Schaible, he a teacher at the school run by First Century Gospel Church, and she a former teacher there, and they the “fundamentalist Christian couple who relied on prayer, not medicine, to cure their dying toddler son,” allowing two-year-old Kent to die of pneumonia? We know what we’d say, but we don’t use that kind of language here. We will say that we’re relieved the murderous morons were convicted of gross negligence in early December, and, if there is any justice in this world, will be sent to prison come sentencing February 2, 2011. Not, mind you, that we believe in prison as punishment (we don’t), but just to keep these maniacs away from their other six children, any one of whom could suffer the same fate as poor little Kent. (At the very least, the prosecutor intends to “ask the judge at sentencing to put the couple’s other children under a doctor’s care.” [Yahoo! Health]
We’d Rather Have Seen Him Judged By a Jury of His Peers (e.g., the Aryan Brotherhood, the Ku Klux Klan, etc.)
White supremacist, űber-Christian (hey, who are we to say he’s not?), Holocaust denier and radio shock jock Hal Turner, who turned FBI informant, was convicted in August of threatening the lives of three federal judges via the Web, and — we can’t say it with any more relish than the SPLC does — “will spend 25 months in prison worrying about white racists he believes will be eager to snuff him for having been an FBI informant.” The SPLC’s profile of Turner notes that on his radio show, “Turner has ranted about ‘bull-dyke lesbians,’ ’savage Negro beasts,’ ‘faggots,’ and even joked about a ‘portable
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