The Southern Baptists elected Steve Gaines, pastor of Bellevue Baptist, to serve as its president. Gaines is the cartoon for every southern stereotype — heavyset, manipulative, heavy-handed, a shameless money-grubber.
He engineered a huge cover-up of child sex abuse in his church and barely managed to avoid prosecution himself. He has pre-emptively blocked advocates for victims of clergy sex abuse from following him on Twitter.
I've never even heard of Pastor Steve Gaines, but he's already blocked me. #SBC16 president. What is he hiding? pic.twitter.com/NeI1O0gKtY
— Janey The Small (@JaneyTheSmall) June 15, 2016
And his appeals for money would be comical if they weren’t so successful; Tom Rich has a clip of him telling his congregation that God might kill them if they failed to fork-over 10%.
Steve Gaines Scares His Sheep, Tells Them God May Kill Them If They Don't Tithe from FBCJax Watchdog on Vimeo.
And to think that I briefly felt good about the SBC when it managed to pass a resolution condemning the confederate flag.
How did somebody so garish get elected? I’m only thinking out loud but, between the dual affronts of Donald Trump and Orlando, I think something fundamental has changed in the zeitgeist over the past few months, that the collective ‘We, the People’ has finally had enough of the loony right. So maybe the selection of Gaines is a huge reactionary F-You from the retreating crazies?