… and although UD knows that not everyone shares her attraction to any combination of flamboyant, relentless (and in the very best cases, litigious) religious self-righteousness plus equally relentless moral debauchery, she hopes that at least some of her readers will enjoy as much as she does the details of the Daniel Greer and the First Baptist Church of Hammond Indiana cases. Both stories have emerged not a moment too soon — just as America’s highest-profile sanctimonious person, Ted Cruz, has fled the scene. Both cases feature noisy revilers of nasty secular culture now in court for staggering sexual and/or financial degeneracy.
Yum. Let’s go there.
Until the current civil case against him, alleging that for years he raped a fifteen-year-old boy in his care (“Rabbi Greer was in his sixties when he forced the minor Eli to engage in acts of sex with him, including forced fellatio, anal sex, fondling and masturbation,” the lawsuit says. “Rabbi Greer frequently gave Eli alcohol at the time he raped and assaulted his child victim. Rabbi Greer showed Eli pornographic films. The lawsuit says Greer sexually abused [Eliyahu] Mirlis at multiple locations, including on school property, at the rabbi’s home, and at motels and rental properties.”), Rabbi Daniel Greer was famous for having spawned one of the Yale Five. His extremely orthodox daughter and four fellow indignants sued Yale University for making them live in debauched secular co-ed dormitories. The suit was of course immediately and irritatedly dismissed as soon as it got to a judge (they “could have opted to attend a different college or university if they were not satisfied with Yale’s housing policy.”), but because the story came out of Yale it got oodles of unwarranted attention.
Now Father Greer bids to make the family name even more famous than his daughter has made it by railing against homosexuality while, according to the complaint, raping a boy for years.
Lovers of out-there religious hypocrisy will also enjoy the mischievous megachurch of mid-America, where … er… let’s see …
Ex-pastor Jack Schaap is currently serving a federal prison sentence …
… Schaap pleaded guilty to transporting a girl to Illinois and Michigan for sexual encounters over a four-week period starting the week before the girl turned 17. He also had sex with her in his church office.
Schaap is named in [a recent] lawsuit, but not as a defendant, accused of helping facilitate a financial fraud that bilked two investors out of more than $200,000
A former deacon at the church, later hired as a financial planner, Thomas Kimmel, 70, is also in federal prison …
In 2014, Kimmel was convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions, according to court documents.
His role as a fundraiser in “Sure Line Investments,” a business buying and selling used cars which devolved into a Ponzi scheme, involved Schaap and snared a number of individuals around the country, according to court documents.
Kimmel was a financial adviser at First Baptist Hammond and traveled the country seeking investment in Sure Line, according to court documents.
And Schaap preached from the pulpit that Kimmel’s investment opportunities would give church members more money to use for God, according to court documents.
Both Schaap and Kimmel received commissions on the investments they secured for Sure Line, 1 percent and 10 percent respectively. That information was never disclosed to church members who invested, according to court documents.
It’s got everything but animal cruelty.