UNITED STATES
Roll to Disbelieve
by Captain Cassidy
We’re still reeling from the Duggar sex abuse scandal, but on the heels of it comes another involving Christian leaders totally misreading a child-abuse situation and handling it in the poorest, most tone-deaf way possible. Another day, another fundagelical scandal involving sex abuse. I know–weird, isn’t it? The group claiming a monopoly on morality and so busy trying to paint gay people as pedophiles eager to prey upon children seems to have a real problem with sheltering the sex abusers and attackers in their very own midst who are preying upon children. It’s just sooooo baffling!
A few days ago, a Christian woman attending a Dallas megachurch called The Village Church (TVC, which is a Southern Baptist group though they seem to be downplaying that like a lot of SBC churches are nowadays) discovered that her very very Christian husband was way into child pornography. And shockingly, that discovery was only the start of an unimaginable ordeal for her.
When she realized what her husband was doing, Karen Hinkley immediately applied for an annulment of the marriage–not a divorce, mind you; an annulment means that the marriage wasn’t actually valid in the first place. Even Catholic leaders are okay with annulments. The result of an annulment is that it’s as if the marriage never happened at all, and both parties are left as if they’d never married in the first place. That means any children born during the fraudulent union might suddenly find themselves illegitimate–which was the big problem for Catherine of Aragon when Henry VIII wanted an annulment from her; she didn’t want her daughter Mary to become a bastard–but otherwise it’s a pretty definitive statement about the original validity of a particular marriage contract.
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