OVO

Trevor Blake: Paul Crouch [LINK-ZUM]

Paul Crouch is a good Christian man. He is one of the multi-millionaires behind TBN. Let's look into the virtue and leadership Brother Crouch offers.

In 1991 Crouch went into a 'Christian drug treatment program' for cocaine use, where he met and had sex with a man named Enoch Ford. Ford was eventually paid US$425,000 to not speak of the encounter. In 1994 Crouch pleaded no context to having sex with a seventeen-year-old boy and spent six months in jail for it (age of conscent in California? Eighteen). Crouch tested positive for cocaine during his probation, but TBN successfully petitioned the judge to not put him back in prison. In 1995 Crouch spent thirty days in jail for possession of cocaine. A woman who knew of Ford's intimacy with Crouch was paid US$12,000 by TBN; since then she doesn't giving her name, fearing 'reprisals.' In 1988 Crouch's defense for an accusation that he had sex with a male chauffeur was that he was drunk at the time. More recently, Enoch Ford has reconsidered the value of his silence and asked for US$10 million - TBN's counter-offer was US$1 million. (LA Times article, bugmenot to avoid registration).

What of Crouch's company, TBN? TBN lost its license to broadcast in Miami in 1999 for violating FCC laws: they had created a fake minority-owned company to meet requirements for diversity in programming. In 2002 they settled a multi-million dollar plagiarism lawsuit for basing their movie The Omega Code on a book called The Omega Syndrome. Crouch campaigned in 2001 for his childhood friend John Ashcroft on Crouch's 501(c)3 non-profit television network, claiming that since the Attorney General is an appointed rather than elected official there is no conflict with the law. TBN even dropped all of its coverage of professional wrestling (read the depth and detail of this link before you laugh). Paul Crouch has said that if more people went to church then 9/11 wouldn't have happened - and that people who do not donate to TBN will go to hell (Crouch would know, having made the claim that hell was accidentally discovered by a drilling company in 1989). Crouch 'healed' someone by faith on his TV show; that someone nearly died because they stopped taking their medicine. Strangely, Crouch was outted on his own TV show once.

Having sex and taking drugs are a personal decisions with all sorts of consequences: some good, some bad. But using one's position in life to put down those who make those same decisions is contemptable. Paul Crouch is just another typical good Christian man in this regard.

[American Samizdat, September 13 2004. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: christianity, prohibition, sex, television

ovoyeur

rss

archives
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
September 2008