The same men telling women in the SBC to get out of the pulpit are the same men telling the victims of sexual offenses in SBC churches to shut up and get over it.

While women may have held a quieter role in supporting the pedo/rapey shit that goes down in the SBC and maybe still do, the VAST list of SCB sexual offenders and their protectors is made of men, the internal hierarchy of power is rigid and unyielding, and for as much concerned pearl-clutching as SBC leaders engage in every time it hits the news, which it does frequently, they still haven’t really done anything to slow it down. A couple of these articles are older, but nothing substantial has changed:

20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms – Houston Chronicle

How an Alleged Predator Remade the Southern Baptist Convention – Texas Monthly

New Lawsuit: Paige Patterson, former Southern Baptist leader, humiliated woman who reported rape – Houston Chronicle

Read these at your own risk: they are thoroughly sickening. But there is a pattern: for every individual who is harmed, there appears to be a machine ready to shut them down, one that was operative as far back as the 1970s.

So knowing what I know about what goes down in the SBC and has for decades, when I see a headline like the above, “Southern Baptists vote to advance a formal ban on churches with women pastors,” I don’t see it as having anything primarily to do with doctrine, especially since if the doctrine were that important there would be any number of things they’d already be doing differently.

Rather, I see a group of predators seeking to ensure that their hunting grounds remain fresh, open, and uncluttered with victims they have already used and/or anyone who would speak for them or act on their behalf.

I’m not a Christian and I have no dog in this hunt, but if there was ever a religious organization that desperately needs to be stopped on its institutional slide back to the 1950s (or 1750s), the SBC would absolutely be it.