Save-the-Kid- from-Gays Pastor Arrested

Rev. Tom Daniels is pastor of the Rio Linda Baptist Church, a fundamentalist church in northern California. He was also an activist who urged the passage of Proposition 8, to ban gay couples from being allowed to marry one another. Somehow preventing gay people from marrying is supposed to protect children, from something.... what is never quite made clear to me.

Rev. Daniels in in jail and charged with lewd and lascivious acts with a child under the age of 14 as well three or more acts of sexual conduct with a child. But, the good news, Rev. Daniels isn't gay so the kid was protected! The molestations supposedly took place between 2004 and 2007. Originally Daniels was investigated in 2008 for molestation charges but police said they couldn't find enough evidence. A second child has since come forward with similar accusations and the two together apparently were sufficient to file charges this time.

Wasn't denying gays people from marrying supposed to magically stop children from being molested?

It hasn't been a good week for Religious Right types and their sexual hypocrisy.

If we go to the hotbed of Right-wing Republicanism, Maricopa County, Arizona another scandal is brewing. Fulton Brock is a far Right Republican Mormon. He is a member of the County Board of Supervisors.

In the last few days his wife, Susan, was arrested. Apparently Susan meet a member of her church and decided to seduce him. The problem was that this young Mormon was 14 years old at the time. For the last three years Susan has been engaging in sexual activities with the boy, though not full-on intercourse. In Bill Clinton lingo, it all depends on what sex means and this ins't sex, since it apparently was only blow jobs and masturbation.

Now, I am not one who thinks teenagers are children. But Republicans do, and Republicans support these laws, so the point about moral hypocrisy stands.

Brock, who has served as chairman of the board of supervisors three times, called on the public to pray for his family, of course. Apparently those prayers feel on deaf ears, if anything they made matters worse. A few days later Brock's daughter was also arrested for having several sexual encounters with the same boy. Arizona, being a conservative Republican state, has an absurdly high age of consent, well above the national average of 16. It is 18 in Arizona and the teen in question is now just 17.

It seems a bit kinky that both mother and daughter were fighting for the carnal pleasures of the same teenage boy. Admittedly, alleged photos of the "victim" indicate he is a piece of eye candy (see photo above, allegedly of the boy, photo by Rachel Brock). And I guess these Mormon Republicans couldn't resist but to lick the lollypop. Daughter Rachel, was charged with sexual conduct with a minor as well as furnishing him with obscene material. I can assure you it wasn't a photo of Mormons in their sexy (sic) magic underwear. Apparently she started first with the boy since the charges say he was 13 when she went after him. She also sent a video of herself masturbating to the boy's cell phone.

Of course, Mormons publicize themselves as advocate of family cohesion, and talk about the importance of family during times of trauma and difficulty. So how is this Mormon handling the situation. I'm sure that Fulton Brock will be there at his wife's side, condemning the sin but loving the sinner, forgiving her and working to heal their relationship. Oops! That doesn't seem to be the case. Almost as soon as the charges were filed, he was doing a little filing of his own, filing for divorce.

Supervisor Brock told the waiting press: "I have filed to divorce my wife. I cannot divorce my daughter." Wow! Please note that there has been no conviction for anything, not yet anyway. I would think that people who bashed gays so heavily on Proposition 8, in the name of family cohesion, would at least wait until there was a conviction before thrown the wife and daughter under the bus.

Apparently Susan Brock had access to the boy's on-line email account. To avoid them sending messages to each other she would go into his account and type a draft message to him. He would then type a draft message to her. They were never sent so the emails never showed up in an in-box or out-box, where they might easily be noticed. Mrs. Brock realized that these draft messages might be considered evidence.

So, she had some help from another conservative Republican activist, named Christian Weems. Mrs. Weems is also a member of the same Mormon church as Susan Brock. Weems came to Brock, in jail, and started hinting that if Brock gave her the password she could delete the messages.

Weems kept asking Brock for the "password" for a gate to a beach house. At first Brock was clueless (it comes with the territory). Brock said, "I don't remember a beach house, what are you talking about?" When Weems started suggesting passwords Brock figured it out and supplied her the password to the boy's account. Weems intended to go to the account and remove the evidence on behalf of her friend, but she was arrested before she could do that.

This implies that Weems was fully aware that Mrs. Brock was licking her eye-candy. Certainly she knew about the message system that Brock and the boy had set up. So it would appear she was aware of the relationship since Brock was then in prison and couldn't inform her after the fact. That Weems came to Brock to try to help her clearly indicates prior knowledge on her part. Newspapers report that numerous "high ranking" members of the Mormon Church will be called as witnesses.

Rahcel Brock published photos of the alleged boy on her website with comments that described him as "AWESOME!!!" wishing that "his awesomeness would rub off onto me," apparently something was rubbed off, just not the awesomeness. She said he knows how to "strut" his "studly stuff."

So, the coalition that passed Prop 8 were Catholics, Baptists and Mormons. And they were going to protect kids from married gays. Exactly who is protecting the kids from priests, Baptist preachers, and Mormon housewives? I'm waiting for Joe Arpaio to hold a press conference and tie the whole thing to undocumented Mexicans.

Bizarre testimony and Prop 8

Today the disgusting Proposition 8 had another day in court. As you may remember Prop 8 was thrown out of court as a violation of basic rights. The State of California has standing in the issue but Gov. Schwarzenegger made it clear he has no desire to defend Prop 8. The current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, has said he is not interested in defending this initiative either. Brown is now governor-elect and still has no interest in defending the law and in incoming Attorney General has also said she doesn't want to defend it.

So some of the hateful fundamentalists are petitioning the Court to grant them the right to defend the law on behalf of the State, which doesn't want to defend the law. There really is no limit to how far these Jesus-loves-you types will go to show they hate gay people.

Today's hearing was televised. I rudely neglected a friend from overseas who was visiting to take some time out today to watch the hearing. Some of the mental gymnastics were quite interesting.

The lawyer defending Prop 8 for these Christians argued that marriage is only meant to correspond with the procreative ability of men and women. They really do dismiss the idea that people can marry simply for love. The fundamental purpose of marriage is having babies—this is actually the claptrap the Popes have been pushing for years, only know fundamentalists have adopted it because their own theology didn't used to take this view. So they swapped theologies in because they really, really want to go after gay people.

The attorney acknowledged that there are plenty of couples who marry and can marry who will never be able to procreate. Infertile couples can marry. Elderly couples where the woman is past child-bearing age can marry. A woman without a uterus can marry. Men who can't produce sperm are allowed to marry. There are plenty of cases where heterosexual couples who have NO procreative ability are allowed to marry.

The attorney was asked about them by one the judges of the court. He acknowledged such couples existed but said that the ability to determine who they were was so cumbersome, intrusive and expensive, that it was intolerable for the State to prevent them from marrying.

Of course he could not defend their right in this case; he doesn't want to acknowledge marriage as a right. That would create problems for his case. So he basically seemed to concede that such couples should not technically be allowed to marry either but that the search costs, to determine who they were, would be too expensive and that government would have to intrude far too far into the lives of these people to determine that they can't procreate.

His implication seemed to be that same-sex couples are easy to identify. So it isn't expensive, it isn't cumbersome and it doesn't have to be intrusive. As I read this argument he seemed to be saying that it is alright to deny marriage to gay couples because same-sex couples don't reproduce. Similarly he seemed to concede that the same ought to apply to certain straight couples as well, and that they ought to be denied marriage except it is harder to figure them out. So, to avoid the cost of figuring which straight couples shouldn't marry it is easier to let them all marry, whether they will reproduce or not.

In other words, it's okay to deny marriage only to the gay couples because it is easy to do. Yes, they want to deny marriage to many straight couples but don't want to be bothered figuring out who they are. Gays are just easier to figure out. That is really mind-boggling.