Rapping About Teh Gay

Terry Firma

Mar

24

2013

Wow. It doesn’t get much whiter than this.

It’s not really worthy of a serious response, so we didn’t write one. Instead, we took it down to her level for a minute. Beatbox optional.

We humans sometimes can be great
when we learn to differentiate
between things we ought to denigrate
and love that we can celebrate.
Why don’t we simply highly rate
things that unite, not separate?

And when it comes to gay or straight
I have to ask, when you orate
please leave behind that thick steel plate
that just serves to debilitate
and leads you to extrapolate
things Holy Books don’t advocate.

Know also that no rap is great
when done by a mental featherweight
who use muzak to berate
and fails to fully ‘preciate
this is the West and not Kuwait.

Stabby Pastor: ‘Her License is Semen-Stained’

Terry Firma

Mar

23

2013

Via Phillyburbs.com:

A pastor who repeatedly stabbed his longtime mistress just days before she was to marry another man has been sentenced to 21 years in prison. The Rev. Edward Fairley of Paterson, NJ, must serve nearly 85 percent of the term imposed Friday. Fairley had admitted stabbing the victim 28 times in March 2011, but said he did not intend to kill her. He said the stabbing occurred during a fit of rage provoked by her toying with his emotions and using him for his money.

But a Passaic County jury convicted him last month on charges of attempted murder, stalking, and making terroristic threats. The victim, who is also a minister [emphasis added] survived the attack.

Fairley started the affair with Simone Shields shortly after marrying his fourth wife. He and Shields worked at the Koinonia and Christian Ministries that Fairley started 17 years ago.

Fairley

The good reverend represented himself in court, which resulted in the unusual situation of the accused cross-examining the victim. He told the jury that Shields had slept her way up the ladder, and accused her of having had an affair with a clergyman from another congregation to help get her credentials — adding,

Her minister’s license is stained with semen.

It wasn’t the first time the man of God found himself in court — or in prison. Fairley’s gotten a bit stabby before.

Though the jury didn’t know about it, Fairley, 61, was convicted in 1983 of kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault and other crimes, and sentenced to 22 years in prison after stabbing his then-wife and mother of two of his children. He served seven years before being paroled in 1990.

[photo by Mitsu Yasukawa, via northjersey.com]

AA Still Asks, ‘Your Liver or Your Brain?’

Bert van Manen

Mar

23

2013

If you have a serious drinking problem, you turn to AA, right? But what if you’re an agnostic or an atheist? Can you still climb those famous Twelve Steps if you don’t believe in God?

Six of the steps have strong religious connotations, to say the least:

2) (We) came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Quite the litany. Turn our will and lives over; admit the nature of our wrongs; remove our shortcomings and defects of character; pray for God’s will for us.

Sounds like a sect to me. A pretty brainwashy sect, at that.

vomit

So would you rather ruin your liver or your brain? Some choice.

[image via Roger Fields]

Pastor Starved His Daughter (9) Over Homework

Terry Firma

Mar

22

2013

The nine-year-old daughter of Mark Hooper (42), the pastor of Cob Street Baptist Church in Johnsonburg, PA, should weigh approximately what other girls her age do: around 65 pounds. But the pastor and his wife, Susan, allegedly didn’t let the girl eat

…until she correctly finished her math homework while being homeschooled.

So instead of being anywhere close to the 65-pound mark,

Police say the girl weighed only 31 pounds … and has the bone structure of a 5-year-old.

Mark and Susan Hooper have been charged with child endangerment and will have to appear in court next month.

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At least their daughter is still alive. Javon Thompson isn’t so lucky. In a case that made headlines three years ago, his mother, Ria Ramkissoon, refused to let the 16-month-old boy eat or drink because he didn’t say “Amen” — which, egged on by other believers in the house, she took as evidence that he was “possessed by an evil spirit.”

The boy died.

Could it possibly get any worse? Why, yes, actually:

For weeks afterward, Ramkissoon spent much of her time in a room with her son’s emaciated body — talking to him, dancing, even giving him water. She thought she could bring him back. … His body was hidden in a suitcase for more than a year and has since been buried. But even now, she maintains her faith in his resurrection.

Unbelievably, when the case went to trial, Ramkissoon got off with time served (20 months) plus probation, and was made to attend a residential-treatment facility for young women, where

…the treatment program includes Bible study.

Staying Classy in Lincoln County, West Virginia

Terry Firma

Mar

21

2013

Dateline West Virginia:

The text of the ‘letter’:

We were really glad to hear that School Board is getting rid of them queers. The next thing is we need to get rid of all the niggers, the spics, the kikes and the wops. You know even them Catholics, they are wrong as baby eaters.

We need to clear them people out and have good, white, God-fearing Christians and everybody else needs to be put to death for their abominations. We’ll keep Lincoln County white and right. Thank you.

It’s possible that someone was trolling the newspaper. It’s more likely that there are still plenty of people, including “good, white, God-fearing Christians,” who are just being frank (as long as they can remain anonymous, of course) about their outsized hatred for anyone who’s even the slightest bit different.

Not So Pro-Life After All

Terry Firma

Mar

21

2013

Lindsey Lowe, 26, has always been an exemplary Christian. For three generations, her family attended City Road Chapel United Methodist Church in Madison, TN. Lowe was baptized and confirmed there. She was also a member of the youth group and, indeed, grew up in the church. She is a 2004 graduate of Goodpasture Christian School in Madison. On her Facebook page, Lowe listed the Bible as one of her favorite books. She performed her job at a local pediatric dentist office with pleasant cheer.

She was often seen toting the Good Book, and just the other day she faced her friends and family, pointed up, and said, “I’m OK. I love you all. He’s with me.”

What made her offer them such reassurance? This:

A jury found a 26-year-old Tennessee woman guilty of murder Tuesday in the 2011 smothering deaths of newborn twins found in her laundry basket. The jury of seven men and five women convicted Lindsey Lowe, of suburban Nashville, of felony murder, premeditated murder and aggravated child abuse. …

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At trial, jurors saw a video of Lowe telling police she had given birth alone on Sept. 12, 2011, in the bathroom of her parents’ home on a quiet cul-de-sac in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The bodies weren’t found until two days later. A family member discovered one baby dead in a laundry basket at the home in Hendersonville, 20 miles northeast of Nashville. When police arrived to investigate, officers found the second body under a bloody sheet in the same basket.

Lovely detail:

Lowe was engaged at the time but became pregnant during an affair with another man, jurors were told. She hid the pregnancy from her family and friends.

Oh, and also from her fiancé, natch, so as not to “disappoint” him.

When she gave birth to twins, in September 2011, she promptly suffocated them and discarded the little bodies in the hamper.

After the jury verdict on Tuesday, the presiding judge sentenced Lowe to life in prison.

[image via WKRN]

How a Methodical Methodist Got Rid of His Wives

Terry Firma

Mar

20

2013

They’ll probably make a movie about pastor Arthur Schirmer (of Reeders United Methodist Church in Pocono Township, PA) some day. But rather than being a celebration of divinity, the flick will feature treachery, lies, adultery, and double murder.

A former pastor was sentenced Monday to life in prison without parole in the fatal bludgeoning of his second wife in 2008. Arthur “A.B.” Schirmer, 64, was sentenced nearly two months after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the death of Betty Schirmer. The conviction brought an automatic life sentence.

Schirmer is charged separately with killing his first wife, Jewel Schirmer, in 1999. He awaits trial in that case.

bilde

Prosecutors said he clubbed Betty Schirmer on the head with a crowbar, then loaded her into their car and staged a low-speed accident in an effort to conceal the crime. …

Local police initially believed Betty Schirmer’s July 2008 death was the result of a car crash. State police began a more thorough investigation months later, when a man committed suicide in Schirmer’s office after learning the pastor was in a relationship with his wife, the church secretary.

Authorities ultimately concluded the fender-bender could not have caused Betty Schirmer’s extensive head and brain injuries. Police also found her blood on the garage floor, along with evidence that someone had tried to clean it up.

[image via Lebanon Daily News]

Pastoral Care — In a Teenager’s Panties

Terry Firma

Mar

19

2013

The youth pastor of a suburban Chicago church had his bond set at $300,000 today. Darin Evans is accused of sexually grooming a teenage girl under his pastoral care, ultimately committing sex acts with her in

…his vehicle, in parks, cemeteries and men’s restrooms, and during a religious retreat in Wisconsin.

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Evans is charged with 11 counts of criminal sexual assault and two counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault. He is married and the father of three children.

[Image via Huffington Post]

The World’s Tallest JPEG?

Terry Firma

Mar

19

2013

And to think, it could easily have been a thousand times taller. Still, pretty impressive (enlarge the picture by clicking on it after it loads).

Seduced By Not-So-Holy Men

Terry Firma

Mar

18

2013

The author and history professor Garry Willis is both a practicing Catholic and one of Catholicism’s most ardent critics. To his great credit, Willis has been at the forefront of the movement to finally shine a spotlight on child abuse by clergy.

After I read about the exploits of Baptist preacher Jack Schaap, who had sex with a troubled teenager entrusted to his pastoral care and then told her that their extramarital affair was blessed by Jesus, I went looking for something Willis wrote eleven years ago. This is the passage. Emphasis mine.

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Priestly pedophilia is … set apart from other varieties by the fact that the seduction technique employs religion. Almost always some form of prayer has been used as foreplay. The very places where the molestation occurs are redolent of religion — the sacristy, the confessional, the rectory, Catholic schools and clubs with sacred pictures on the walls. One of the victims of Father Paul Shanley, of the Boston archdiocese, says that his ordeal began in the confessional, when he confessed the “sin” of masturbation. The priest told him that masturbation could be a “lesser evil” and that he would help him work out his problem. He did this by taking him to a cabin he kept in the woods, where the priest taught the boy how they could masturbate each other.

This pattern occurs over and over — a conjunction of the overstrict sexual instruction of the Church (e.g., on the mortal sinfulness of masturbation, even one occurrence of which can, if not confessed, send one to hell) and a guide who can free one of inexplicably dark teaching by inexplicably sacred exceptions. The victim is disarmed by sophistication and the predator has a special arsenal of stun devices. He uses religion to sanction what he is up to, even calling sex part of his priestly ministry.

Schaap is a Baptist, not a Catholic — but we see the exact same scenario play out, full of faux-holy lecherousness and the kind of betrayal that makes Judas look like a saint. These are kids, for fuck’s sake: many times more vulnerable — and infinitely more susceptible to claims of authority — than those of us who have safely crossed into adulthood.

Willis lays out the ink-black perfidy of this behavior just about as well as anyone could. And for that, regardless of our own God-belief or non-belief, we all ought to thank him.

[image via Catholic Crime]

Obey the Lord and Beat Your Kid to Death

Terry Firma

Mar

16

2013

The little girl was beaten for seven hours until she died. Her parents stopped only for short prayer breaks.

 

Drop Cloth Jesus

Terry Firma

Mar

16

2013

When Jesus was done with toast and shower mold and bird poop as a medium, he moved on to something more conventionally artistic: Paint.

You could call it a divine sign: a Saugus man said he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw Jesus Christ on a drop cloth at his home. “My heart went a million miles an hour. I was hyperventilating,” said Brian Krantz.

Facepalm-worthy stuff, but at least we get a new exclamation out of it; here at Moral Compass HQ, our future expression of frustration or astonishment will be “Sweet Jesus Christ on a drop cloth!” Thank you, Mr. Krantz.

For fun findings on the human brain’s face-detection proclivities, see here. Cliff Notes version: the more gullible people are, the more they’ll “recognize” random patterns as meaningful images.