Before we get to this week’s youth pastors, dear reader, please watch the video above. On Friday Chris Matthews repeatedly tried to get Travis Weber, anti-LGBT spokesbigot for the Family Research Council, to answer a simple question: Should Chris’s other guest, trans writer Jenny Boylan, use the men’s room or the women’s room? Even though Weber was on MSNBC to defend North Carolina’s HB2—which requires Boylan to use the men’s room—the little shitstain can’t bring himself to answer the question. Not with Boylan sitting there—not with Boylan empowered to respond to him directly, personally, publicly, and immediately. Watch as Weber’s bigoted “convictions” and “sincerely held religious beliefs” wilt in the presence of one of the people he’s trying to stir up bigotry against.
So what I predicted in this post—a post some dismissed as too hopeful—is coming to pass faster than even I imagined it would:
Those ridiculous lies [they told about same-sex marriage] won ’em some battles — they carried the day before the Washington State Supreme Court — but they didn’t win ’em the war. Because their lies couldn’t survive us. They couldn’t survive us getting out there and speaking for ourselves, they couldn’t survive the scrutiny of decent and reasonable people, they couldn’t survive our lawyers, and they couldn’t survive satire and ridicule…. The [anti-trans] haters are winning some battles right now, and that sucks, and their hateful rhetoric makes an already dangerous world for trans people even more dangerous. But their “wins” are putting trans people in the spotlight. Trans people are speaking for themselves, disproving the lies, and joining in or leading the joyful mocking of the haters — just as the fight against same-sex marriage put same-sex couples (some half or wholly trans) in the spotlight. We spoke for ourselves, we mocked the haters, we gathered supporters, and we won the war.
I’m not arguing for complacency—we won the fight for marriage equality because we got out there and fucking fought it. We’re gonna have to fight this fight too. And we are fighting it and we are going to win. We are winning.
More evidence that they’re losing:
A CNN/ORC poll released Monday found a majority of Americans (57 percent) don’t agree with bathroom bills like the one North Carolina is defending that restrict where transgender people can use the bathroom, while 38 percent do…. But almost half of Republicans are opposed to laws requiring transgender people to use the bathroom for the gender indicated on their birth certificates. In fact, according to the CNN poll, Republicans are actually split 48-48 about whether to support these bills.
It goes without saying that we would’ve killed for those sorts of numbers at this stage in the fight for marriage equality. Okay! On to the real threat to children: America’s rapey youth pastors.
FLORIDA: “The former youth minister of a Stuart church was sentenced Thursday to 45 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to coercing an underage girl into explicit sexual activity and then distributing photos of her on the Internet. Jeffrey Bryan Mobley, 24, was youth minister at The Grace Place for about two years until he moved to Ocala in December 2014 with his new wife… Mobley pleaded guilty on March 10 to six charges — four related to creating depictions on his cellphone of the 15-year-old girl in sexually explicit activity from Aug. 4 through Sept. 18; and two for distributing onto the Internet depictions of a minor engaged in sexual conduct in February and July.”
NEW JERSEY: “A former assistant youth minister, who served in multiple capacities at the Macedonia Freewill Baptist Church in Piscataway, was sentenced to state prison Friday morning for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. Ronald Wilcox, 60, of Fruitland, Md., was sentenced to 10 years in state prison by Superior Court Judge Alberto Rivas…. “Mr. Wilcox took advantage of a 13-year-old girl,” Rivas said. “That’s what he admitted to in this courtroom. Any sexual assault of a child is terrible, horrible. It inflicts a lifetime of psychological damage. What made this worse was that it took place in a church setting, a setting that was supposed to be safe.” The judge said he was particularly disturbed that in his interview with the probation officer for his pre-sentence report, Wilcox indicated that the victim ‘somehow instigated this.'”
INDIANA: “Police say a man serving as a youth pastor at Emanuel Baptist Church in South Haven had inappropriate sexual contact with two girls from the church, including one who had confided with him that she had suffered abuse at home. Timothy Lawrence, 30, of the 700 block of McCool Road in South Haven, is charged with three felony counts of sexual misconduct with a minor. He had not been arrested yet as of late Friday morning. The abuse allegedly took place between November 2013 and July 2014, according to court records. One of the girls, who was at least 14 but younger than 16, told police Lawrence was a big part of her life because of her bad home life. She considered church her escape, police said.”
Two bonus ordained creeps who don’t quality for YPW: the rabidly anti-gay Catholic priest in Northern Ireland famous for his fiery anti-gay sermons who was setting up gay sex orgies on Grindr and got caught asking a teenage boy if he could come over and fuck him while he mother was out and the anti-gay pastor of a church in Arkansas who was arrested last week on “70 counts of distributing, possessing, or viewing child pornography.”
Youth Pastor Watch is back because pious shitstains like Ted Cruz and Travis Weber want you to think trans men and women are exploiting civil rights protections to prey on children in public restrooms. Bigoted religious conservatives don’t want you to think about the people who are really preying on children and where children are being preyed on.