Over the past few weeks, I have been hearing from several Covenant Life Church faithful. One common trait I have noticed is that critical thinking is not their strong point.
I do not mean to tarnish all members of Covenant Life Church, because I know a few bright individuals who, for valid reasons, have remained, even while approximately two-thousand members have fled for safer, saner churches.
But the Kool-Aid swilling loyalists who have of late been defending Covenant Life Church in front of Maryland Senators, radio talk shows and on blogs such as mine, make me wonder if perhaps George W. Bush may have some distant relatives in the D.C. area!
Sunday evening, April 3 Mark Mitchell reportedly held a damage control informational question and answer meeting for Covenant Life Church members. According to reports I heard, there were about seventy people in attendance. Again, I think most members who care about children being molested have already left the church, the rest are largely apathetic. The small segment of loyal foot-soldiers who believe CLC pastors are innocent of all charges, along with the 20 or so pastors and their wives still on staff probably comprised the majority of those in attendance.
It would be interesting to know what was said at the meeting. One might wonder if Covenant Life Church will be going through their files in an attempt to determine everyone who has had a child in a class taught by Larry Caffery so that they can be alerted to the possibility that their child may have been molested. That would be the right thing to do, but the action has the potential of exposing CLC to additional lawsuits, so I’m guessing they won’t be pursuing that course of action. Covenant Life pastors probably don’t have the time for that; as Mark Mitchell told us on the Kojo Nnamdi radio program, pastoral staff only had time to give Larry Caffery’s book a cursory reading, so they claim they never saw the part where Caffery was praying to God that he would not have any daughters because he was afraid he would sexually abuse them. I should add it took me two or three hours to read the entire book. Nothing “fell through the cracks” when I read it. I saw one danger flag after another. One would think a professionally trained pastor would have seen the same, even with a cursory reading. But no, Larry Caffery was allowed to work with children in the church that has one of the most robust child protection plans in place.
And Mark Mitchell was quick to claim that none of the crimes Caffery is charged with took place on church property. Undoubtedly this is true. The question Mitchell and the other pastors must hate to contemplate is did Caffery have other victims? I just came across a stat on child sexual abuse yesterday that said on average a pedophile abuses 150 boys prior to being caught, or 50 girls prior to being caught. So while no victims have yet come forward from amongst Covenant Life members, odds are there are others out there who have been victimized by Caffery.
So on with my story. I would guess part of what Mark Mitchell discussed with his 70 members last Sunday evening was those evil “watchdog blogs. I have noticed an increase of comments by CLC defenders the last two days. I want to highlight one individual in particular. Perhaps this person suffers from multiple personality disorder because he/she wrote seven comments. They were all under different names but came from the same IP address. Many of the email addresses were false, non-existent accounts. While I realize many CLC members would not resort to this type of behavior, and would probably even denounce it, I think it is indicative of the mindset of those who still strongly support CLC and profess their innocence.
I should say that I don’t suffer fools gladly. I have, up to this point in time, allowed all comments submitted to my blog to be published. My nature is to never silence discussion, positive or negative of me, Janna, or the subject matter. I was even going to let the first few comments from this fool stand, without me mentioning I knew they were from the same individual, but as the comments continued to roll in I entered a discussion with my blog moderator, Janna, and we decided together to change our policy. Janna is working on an official policy statement, but I will state that we reserve the right not to post lazy one-liner ad hominem attacks and insist that comments pertain to the subject of an article. I understand people may wish to remain anonymous and therefore not use their real name, but if you are using a false email address we may not publish your comment. Many of our readers have told us they appreciate the tenor of most comments on this blog and we hope to maintain the flavor of well thought-out responses devoid of incendiary arguments.
That said, below are the multiple comments I received from the same person. While I cannot state for certain this individual is a member of Covenant Life Church, it would appear he/she is.
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain yahoo.com by mta5.am0.yahoodns.net. [98.136.217.202].
The error that the other server returned was:
554 delivery error: dd Sorry your message to lovethecross@yahoo.com cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued [#102]. – mta1363.mail.gq1.yahoo.com
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain gmail.com by gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. [2a00:1450:400c:c0b::1b].
The error that the other server returned was:
550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try
550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or
550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at
550 5.1.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6596 z130si6365008wmb.37 – gsmtp
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain yahoo.com by mta7.am0.yahoodns.net. [98.138.112.33].
The error that the other server returned was:
554 delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com account (savedbyman@yahoo.com) [0] – mta1116.mail.ne1.yahoo.com
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