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1. Accusers lose in sexual misconduct cases against prominent pastors
Several sexual misconduct cases we've been watching ended this week—all in favor of the accused pastors. In a surprising turn, Mona Brewer and her husband dropped their sexual misconduct suit against Atlanta megachurch pastor Earl Paulk. "We were having difficulty even at this point getting witnesses to speak out against the acts of Bishop Paulk and the church," their lawyer told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Sometimes you just have to do this." The trial was to begin April 2.

In another prominent case, Lonnie Latham, who was pastor of South Tulsa Baptist Church and a former member of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee before his arrest on a misdemeanor charge of lewdness, was found not guilty. Latham had been accused of inviting an undercover male police officer to engage in oral sex. His lawyer appealed to Lawrence v. Texas, a Supreme Court decision throwing out Texas's anti-sodomy law, saying, "If it's not illegal to engage in that conduct, then it shouldn't be illegal to talk about it." The judge did not rule on the constitutionality of Oklahoma's anti-lewdness law.

And finally, Gerald Griffith is not a name that many evangelicals know, but the pastor and founder of Baltimore's Redemption Christian Fellowship Church apparently has an international following. He has also been charged with sexually abusing three different teenagers during counseling sessions. The first of his trials was declared a mistrial Tuesday when one of the witnesses referred to another of the cases. A deacon at the church was acquitted in November in a separate abuse case.

2. Time's David van Biema: What does Akinola really think about Nigeria's anti-gay bill?

Apparently as part of Time's retooling, David van Biema has been doing a bit more opinion writing lately. This week, he calls Church of Nigeria head Peter Akinola to take a stance on his country's anti-homosexuality bill. Homosexuality is already illegal in Nigeria, but this bill would put a five-year prison term on anyone who:

• "goes through the ceremony of marriage with a person of the same sex,"
  
  
• "performs, witnesses, aids, or abets the ceremony of same-sex marriage" (including clergy)
  
  
• or "is involved in the registration of gay clubs, societies, and organizations, sustenance, procession or meetings, publicity and public show of same-sex amorous relationship directly or indirectly in public and in private."
  
  

"Akinola either needs to publicly renounce, in strong terms, his early support of the bill's punitive clauses and to amplify the rather tepid concern he later expressed about them, or else he needs to explain why he's not doing so to the dozen or so churches in Virginia whose congregants were largely ignorant of the legislation when they voted to join Akinola's archdiocese in December," van Biema writes.

Many commenters on the conservative Anglican blogs accuse van Biema of a kind of neo-colonialism. One writes, "Too bad that these folks who call for this don't really care about Nigeria or they would understand the context of this law, instead of imposing American cultural thinking onto this country. And we wonder why internationals despise Americans so much. We think the entire world revolves around us—and so it does."

3. William and Mary puts the cross back in Wren Chapel
It's under a glass case away from the altar, so it won't hurt anybody. A disclaimer plaque explaining the college's historical Anglican roots (it's now a public university) will help reassure anyone who thinks it might actually mean something to the institution in this day and age.

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March (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51