Most longtime Kossacks know that I have been of the mind that Donald Trump didn’t exploit a bug in the religious right, but a feature. When the nation’s so-called moral guardians made a Faustian deal with a man they knew full well was a boor, a bully, and a gangster, it was yet another example of the religious right supporting outright reprobates who give them what they want on policy.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen a particularly grotesque example of how this has happened—the unfolding scandal playing out around one of Trump’s former spiritual advisers, Robert Morris. In case you missed it, Morris was forced out of the Dallas-Fort Worth-based megachurch he founded almost a quarter-century ago, Gateway Church when it emerged that he’d groomed and molested an Oklahoma girl, Cindy Clemishire, for four-plus years in the 1980s starting when she was 12 years old. He’d spent the better part of four decades insisting that he’d merely had “moral failure” with a “young lady,” but resigned when it was apparent that lie wasn’t going to fly anymore.
On the weekend before Election Day, Gateway elders revealed that a lot of people at Gateway were well aware that what their boss was describing wasn’t merely an affair, but child sexual abuse—and did absolutely nothing. As I note at my Substack, I believe this is a textbook example of the mentality that resulted in the religious right bowing and praying to an orange god it helped make.
When Gateway elder Tra Willbanks delivered the results of an internal investigation into Morris’s crimes, he said a couple of things that made my blood run cold. He revealed that multiple Gateway elders and staffers knew before this summer that Cindy was 12 years old when Morris molested her. And yet, they didn’t make the decision they should have made, the decision that longstanding Texas law required them to make; since the 1980s, ministers have been mandated reporters in Texas. He also revealed that the press release Gateway churned out after Cindy came forward to Dee Parsons of Wartburg Watch had been crafted at Morris’s direction. To my mind, anyone responsible for drafting that press release damned well knew or damned well should have known that a 12-year-old girl is not a young lady—and that they were complicit in victim-shaming and victim-blaming.
R&I ~ MJM
Crazycat