Report Claims Southern Baptist Leadership Failed Abuse Victims

It was revealed recently that the Southern Baptist Convention has been covering up allegations of sexual abuse for decades. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

It was revealed recently that the Southern Baptist Convention has been covering up allegations of sexual abuse for decades and Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins joins me to talk about this and many other issues. Finally, this story's being told. You know, I, I look at this story it's, they're, they're doing a little bit better than the Catholics have done. Catholics have covered this since 1940s and 50s. But now they did an independent search, they did an independent study and the independent study was not good for them, but they're, they're willing to talk about it. What's your take.

Yeah. You know, at least they're admitting, okay, we've got some problems and yes, we, the way we're structured basically is what led to a lot of these problems and that's really something that I think most people don't quite understand here. The Southern Baptist Convention isn't necessarily like the Catholic church. The Catholic church has dominion over all Catholic churches. They're all interconnected. With Southern Baptist, each church is basically allowed to do their own thing. We're not gonna oversee you or dictate you. We don't even get involved in your problems for the most part. So that's what actually led to a lot of these problems because they're happening at these independent congregations. So starting in about 2007, I think it was, they started getting these reports in to the main body of the Southern Baptist Convention and that's when things start to go a little south for the whole thing. They, they knew that these complaints were coming in. They weren't exactly taking the action. They said, okay, well, we're gonna let you guys, you deal with this. This is your business. We're just here to, you know, sign the paperwork.

It's the same conduct.

Yeah.

Okay. Same conduct we, we see with the Catholic church, we see with the Mormon church, we see with all of these cults that are arising everywhere. Okay. So suppress the reports, do everything that you can to suppress the reports. Cover it up, make sure it doesn't ever see the light of day, whether it's sexual abuse, no matter how horrendous the sexual abuse is. And then resist reform. Okay. As long as we can, resist reform, we don't want to talk about it, because it's gonna hurt us. And then the other thing is vilify and attack the people who are making the accusations and hope they go away. Isn't that kind of what's happened here?

Oh, absolutely. And you know, that is also another big part of this too. It's not just, we're gonna ignore it. We're gonna pretend it's not happening. We don't want the bad publicity. It is, let's discredit the men and women that are coming forward with these allegations of abuse. These people that have been through these horrifically traumatizing experiences, let's make their life hell.

Yeah.

Let, let's make it so much worse for them rather than admitting and solving a problem. Listen, there's so many organizations out there that have had instances like this, you know, whether it's the Boy Scouts, the Catholic churches as we mentioned, we've talked about tons of 'em on this show. The difference is what do you do with this?

Mm-hmm.

If there is a bad actor in your organization, purge the bad actor.

Right.

Make sure you let people know that, yeah, we had a problem. We've fixed it. We're making sure there's no other problems. It always comes back to the cover up and it always ends up getting exposed, which makes.

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