00:08:05.640Now, I only point that out so that you understand.
00:08:07.980And as I said, if you've been following me for a while, you already know this, that I am not someone who's looking to deflect from the Catholic scandal, who's looking to ignore it.
00:08:51.640So when I point to what's happening now in the Baptist church, that's not my point.
00:08:56.840My point is, I don't want those in the Southern Baptist church to make the same mistake that Catholics made for so long, which was to be in denial, to insist that it's not so bad, to claim that anyone pointing to the problem must just be anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, they must just have a grudge, whatever.
00:09:17.040However, I don't want to see those same mistakes made, and it looks like they are being made.
00:09:25.320And not just in the Baptist church, by the way.
00:09:28.020As I've mentioned in the past, this is not just a Catholic problem.
00:09:38.820The three largest insurance companies who insure many of the Protestant churches in the U.S. have reported that there are about 260 sex abuse claims made against Protestant church leaders every year in this country.
00:09:52.400And it's been going on at that rate for years.
00:09:59.120So, not Catholic, not Baptist, not Protestant.
00:10:03.380This is a problem in the church, in Christianity.
00:10:07.260Now, it's obviously not just a Christian problem either.
00:10:29.420But the churches should be an exception to that.
00:10:34.560Now, I'm not saying that churches should be a place where only perfect people go, because if they were only for perfect people, then nobody would ever go to church, right?
00:10:42.760But there's a pretty wide gap between perfect person and sex predator.
00:10:47.800Okay, there's a pretty wide chasm, and there's a lot of room in between.
00:10:53.940Churches should be a place where you can go and be safe and be away from all of that.
00:11:01.740Yeah, we can look around and see, oh, every single institution where there are adults and children, it looks like there's a sex abuse epidemic.
00:12:46.160And so what I'm hoping is that that same kind of visceral reaction, the same level of anger and outrage and calls for change will arise also over this issue in the SBC.
00:13:05.960Christians all across the spectrum were outraged.
00:13:08.060They were, you know, if you wanted to, you know, if you want to find a way to really split hairs and actually look at what was being reported and you wanted to find ways to diminish the severity or, you know, deflect, you could have because you could have said, well, most of these are, you know, they've already put things up.
00:13:25.440But most of this stuff is from, you know, we're talking about a lot of these cases happened 40 years ago and blah, blah, blah.
00:13:51.380And so the same thing should happen here.
00:13:53.300The problem is, you know, the tweet that I sent out, it did engender a lot of outrage, but at me.
00:14:01.200Lots of people took the time to lecture me on my inappropriate comparison and to scold me for my wording and to insist that, no, the Catholic thing is so much worse and let's still talk about that.
00:14:12.980How dare I compare them, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:16.480You know, a lot of people were getting mad at me about a tweet I sent out.
00:14:19.240And so just out of curiosity, some of them, I went to their pages to check to see if they had tweeted anything about the SPC scandal at all, aside from just lecturing me about the way in which I called attention to it.
00:14:30.420And what I found, of course, is that a lot of people who were taking time out of their day to lecture one guy for the manner in which he called attention to this crisis had not themselves taken any time to call attention to it themselves.
00:14:42.960And this is something I've found, you know, not just yesterday, but any time I've tried to call attention to the sex abuse problem in other churches, I have found that a lot of people are very resistant to it.
00:15:09.060Today, I posted a link to the Houston Chronicle article with a, you know, this time just a link with a simple caption saying this is the tip of the iceberg.
00:15:17.540You know, there's, there's, so just keep that in mind.
00:15:21.140Here are some of the responses I received.
00:15:24.180Did you make a similar comment after the Catholic scandals emerged?
00:15:28.120I know you're embarrassed about the Catholic Church's decades of abuse, including thousands of innocent children, but to point to another denomination and saying, hey, look, guys, we're not the only ones that like raping little boys is pretty sad.
00:15:42.660This humbling moment for American Protestants could bring Catholics and Protestants closer together and possibly even help end anti-Catholic bigotry unless Catholics like you continue doing whataboutism.
00:15:53.460I'm neither Baptist nor Catholic, but seriously, what's your point, Matt?
00:15:56.920Whether it's one or one billion doesn't matter.