Another Right-Wing Christian Cleric Caught
CSI: Sex Crimes Among Christian Conservatives, has caught themselves another perpetrator. This one is from a megachurch in Florida. His victims are underage boys.
This one is Marshal Seymour, formerly of the Lakeland, FL megachurch First Baptist Church at the Mall. (Hey, if you look at their web site you’ll see why the “Mall” in the name is so, so appropriate. These folks are marketing themselves like mad, to mothers of preschoolers, bikers. . . I’m sure they’ll have a ministry for child molesters soon.) Marshal is charged with paying young people for sex (or maybe just paying them to keep quiet about it). According to Tampa Bay Online:
After two weeks of investigation, Lakeland police arrested a trusted church member and accused him of sex offenses involving three boys he mentored at the church.
“This is a pastor’s worst nightmare,” Dennis said.
Marshal Seymour, a 40-year-old student ministry volunteer at Lakeland’s prominent First Baptist Church at the Mall, turned himself in Friday night after Lakeland police issued a warrant.
Seymour met his victims through the church and paid them to perform sex acts or to keep quiet about sexual encounters, Lakeland police said. The boys were 15, 16 and 17 at the time of the incidents, which occurred during the past two years, according to arrest documents.
Seymour is charged with three counts of using a child in sexual performance and one count each of unlawful sexual activity and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence.
And I love this part of the article. Man, it reads a bit like the Roman Catholic priest sex scandals, doesn’t it, with clergy and volunteers getting caught and then just going on to another church?
The Lakeland police investigation revealed that Seymour had been arrested on felony sex charges in Mobile County, Ala., in 1998. The circumstances were similar, with Seymour accused of victimizing a boy he met at church, Lakeland police said.
However, the charges were reduced to misdemeanor assault, and Seymour was sentenced to a suspended one-year sentence in 1999, police said. That’s the same year he came to Lakeland and First Baptist Church at the Mall.
Now, the First Baptist Church at the Mall bemoans the straying of their staff member, but they’ve evidently made sure he’s no longer on their web site. Nope, his name shows up nowhere. And there is no official notice there about Marshal Seymour’s transgressions while he was working for the First Baptist Church at the Mall’s Youth ministry. Jay Dennis and Marshal Seymour’s fellow parishioners had a few things to say, praying for the families of the victims and Seymour’s wife and child, but they have not explained why they placed Marshal Seymour in a position where he could victimize young people.
“straying of their staff member,” sounds so much cleaner that THAT FRIGGIN’ PERVERT!
Reconrims the old joke - The only trouble with Baptists is that they weren’t held under long enough.
And still they clain the moral upper hand….makes me want to vomit….and just wait untill God gets a hold of them..or maybe (more than likely) it will be Satan
Yes I know the Baptists are coming under great criticism, but are they alone in deserving it? There is a startling video on this very issue:
“Is American Christianity, really Christian?”Pastor Paul Washer
See the Google Videohttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2977907213395711239
So many Republican child molesters; so little time. (I suggest about 20 years.)
You seem almost happy about all of this. It’s like you don’t even care about the victims you’re so excited that these guys did this and are being nailed.
Hey hey hey… before you start condemning these people you remember just one thing: “It’s ok if a Republican does it.”
You seem to forget that with the current administration, Republican conservatives receive a get out of jail free card with every voter registration or church id.
So you see it’s really not immoral, unethical or illegal at all. It’s just It’s obviously just a big misunderstanding. That kid must have slipped off a ladder into the pastor’s lap or something.
Oo oo! I know.. It’s Bill Clinton’s fault!
Yeah, nobody ever had sex before Bill Clinton so it has to be all his doing.
Why this is shocking is a no brainer as a teenager of 15 I had the same thing happen to me at one of tampas big churches and i went to the pastor at the time and basicly got told he would take care of it he sure took care of it alright when it was brought out that a deacon who was in the airforce at Macdill had raped 4 girls from the age of 8 to 13 the 13 year old was mentaly challenged and this was done on church grounds and the church excomunnicated him and allowed him to go free with out contacting law enforcement and told the parents not go to police we would take care of it internaly and this was in 73 and the church the New Testament Baptist chuch in grant park and its still going .
JUST LIKE THOSE GOP-CHEAPLABOR-CONSERVATIVE-ORGANIZEDRELIGON BASTARDS TO KEEP TRYING TO GET NEW MEMBERS ON THEIR STAFF. BY NOW YOU WOULD THINK THEIR STAFF WAS RED AND SORE AND JUST IN NEED OF A REST.
You seem almost happy about all of this. It’s like you don’t even care about the victims you’re so excited that these guys did this and are being nailed.
Comment by Larry O — November 5, 2007 @ 11:17
—-IT ISN’T THAT WE ARE HAPPY THAT THERE WERE SUCH CRIMES… we are oddly amused by the fact that the perps by large account seem to be the various ministers and politicians who spend their public career chastizing everyone else for a lack of morals. The comments aren’t about the victims much at all, because that is not the topic of the rant— which is dealing with the hypocracy of the perps.
AS A SIDE NOTE….. YES it really is terrible that these things happen at all, especially because very often this is the cause of the affliction of the next generation of people with similar issues. I hope the victims get enough help that they avoid falling into similar problems. I hope the perp gets equal help with his problem, a bear-hug from his new cellmate bubba, and something more from the church or political party than a slap on the wrist and a transfer to a new district.
When will people realize that the basic tenet of republicanism is that some people are here to use people and some people are here to be used. They use little children, anyone of color, and anyone who does not have money in every way possible. In other words their philosophy is ‘dog eat dog’ and they all want to be the top dog.
If someone talks about morality.”family value”,sin,and traditional family/values start reaching for your taser or pepper spray….and run like hell
If the courts and law officials would use the proper punishment for these low-down individuals, we would not have this problem. For instance; if you molest a child, you lose your organ. If we use lethal injection as the death penalty, why not castration for molestation?
Digit, if we do as you suggest there would be a whole lot fewer little radical Christians and Republicans running around. That said, I am not in favor of such blood-thirsty punishments. I truly believe a world where people can live a legitimate life as gay (or whatever legal, but named “sinful” behavior by the Christians), will solve the gross deformations of character many of Christians and Republicans develop when forced to repress.
You are only half right, we Do care about the victims, because of that we are really happy that one more of these moral cripples is outed and stopped. I am further gratified that that outing is one more chink in the dam that is the whole sick antifreedom, antidemocratic, theocratic nightmare of perverted sex and reasoning that is subverting institutions across America, far worse than any Communist, or fellow traveling Conservative Islamist could dream or imagine doing.
As bad as other threats may or may not have been, they were never even accused of this at least not in this country and research shows that it it is often just this sort of child abuse that is the cause.
You know… yeah, he was a pervert. I used to go to that church - he was never actually on the website - he was just a volunteer. They didn’t pay him, he didn’t have any official position.
Doesn’t make what he did any better, but at the same time, he wasn’t a church “leader” or a “cleric” - he was just another scumbag.
He could have been molested at home, this would make for a little understanding by the courts and others still no excuse for what happened. His attorney might like to know this.