WINSTON SALEM (NC)
Baptist News Global
December 28, 2018
By Christa Brown
As you pack away the ornaments and the special Christmas dinnerware, imagine a story about a company called Southern Babtoys Corporation, which markets a toy with a pervasive problem.
According to conservative estimates, at least 3 out of every 100 babtoys, and probably more, will blow up in a kid’s hands, hurling tiny fragments far and wide. Typically, the exploding babtoy causes serious injuries, but the pieces are so minuscule that the child often doesn’t realize his injury at the time. He may see only a scratch on his forehead and doesn’t know that some of the pieces have actually penetrated his skull.
To make matters worse, the tiny pieces contain a radioactive compound that releases slowly in continuing ripples of destruction. Over time, the damage in the brain grows worse, but though the damage is real, it manifests so slowly that most people don’t immediately trace it back to the babtoy.
Kids play with babtoys in groups. So a single babtoy will often harm a whole bunch of kids.
Officials at Southern Babtoys Corporation know this is happening, but they don’t do anything about it. They don’t institute quality control measures to prevent the problem, and they don’t even keep records on babtoys that exploded. In fact, when these babtoys are returned, they are often restored and remarketed, but without fixing the problem and without putting even so much as printing a warning on the label. So the same babtoys can explode again and injure still more kids.
You might have one of these warning-never-included, defective babtoys without even knowing it. They look just like all the other babtoys.
“The ‘babtoys’ are Baptist pastors, and the ‘explosions’ are the predatory sexual abuses committed by a percentage of those pastors.”
When someone complains about risky babtoys, SBC officials make minimizing statements, chalk the problem up to other things and blame the complainers. They might say that the kid wore the wrong kind of clothes while playing with the babtoy, or that the parents didn’t properly supervise or that the complainers are just “opportunists.”
The SBC almost never acknowledges the seriousness of its quality control issue, how widespread the problem really is or how devastating the damage is for children. And it certainly doesn’t take any responsibility. In fact, the SBC has been successfully ducking responsibility for so long that it can scarcely imagine any other way to do business. Institutionally, it has simply accommodated to accepting wounded kids as the collateral damage of its business model.
Occasionally, when media reports about exploding babtoys crop up, SBC officials will make such nice-sounding public statements that few can believe such a caring company would ever be remiss for safety. Their official statements reference “precious children” and how terrible the “isolated cases” are.
SBC officials have obviously been well-coached by a whole slew of well-paid public relations professionals and attorneys. They’ve got the talk-thing down. Talk is what they’re good at. But preventive action? Not so much.
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