It’s not just the Catholics . . .
A Plano megachurch minister was taken into custody Thursday after authorities say he drove to Bryan, Texas, to have sex with a person he thought to be a 13-year-old.
Joe Barron, a minister at Prestonwood Baptist Church, is accused of online solicitation of a minor.
According to Bryan police, Mr. Barron had chatting for about two weeks with the person that he thought to be a juvenile. “The online conversations were sexually explicit in nature,” the release said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Barron asked if the girl could meet him in person, police said. Two days later, he made the three-hour drive to Bryan to meet the girl.
And as my blogging buddy Barry stated on his blog, Prestonwood has already removed him from their website but the Google cache tells you his job title was Minister of Married Adult III.
For those of you unfamiliar with the church, it is HUGE. Check out the Wikipedia entry on it. Speaking of which, I’m a little surprised Wikipedia isn’t updated with this latest news.
People just don’t seem to get it. We all publicly go tsk-tsk over things like this but in private, inside our heads, we’re more like these people than we ever will admit to.
I recall reading many different results of late 60s and early 70s sexuality surveys and while there were wide variances, there was one thing that struck me with respect to this particular subject and that was the estimated ratio of unrequited/unwanted sexual contact between adults and minors and requited/wanted sexual contact between adults and minors. (Not touching on legality, just the results of people putting in their answers to these surveys.)
The ratio in most studies had the requited/wanted by the minor side running 2 to 5 times the unrequited/unwanted by the minor side. Most every one of these studies carefully pointed out that these statistics were taken by recollection of current adults regarding their own childhood experiences and their supposedly honest look back at their development and desires and so on.
A strong sexual attraction between human male adults and human female sub-adults seems to be prevalent in the species and a surprising number of girls do want it, even if they have no more clue what they’re doing than their mothers. Especially if, but then that’s true at any age. People are more likely to jump head first into the shallows if the water is murky.
This for me illustrates the ongoing gap between human intellectual grasp and human biological imperatives and the need for humans to engage in mutual and self deception regarding them. When you get down to it, it is utterly fascinating, this gulf between how humans act and what humans say.
Like not killing. For a people who think they know what being nice and good is, they tend to do the opposite of their stated intentions more often than not. They say you shall not kill according to their creator, and then go wage holy wars that blow all of that right out the window.
Not touching on the wrong or right, just remarking on the way people are versus what they say.
Oh yeah, I guess what you could learn from that is that saying something and then lying to yourself and denying the impulse doesn’t make it go away. Perhaps admitting it exists in everyone, but then agreeing as a rational species that the ramifications of it are somewhat dicey and risky, too much for society to remain stable and people to develop well with too many opportunities for problems, then they could start to face themselves and control their impulses.
Of course, this means being honest about other things like drugs, overeating, etc.