Lawyers for Donald Trump’s former faith advisor Robert Morris accused a 12-year-old girl of initiating “inappropriate” sexual conduct with the ex-Dallas megachurch pastor, new documents have revealed.
Morris resigned in June after admitting to the incident. His accuser Cindy Clemishire previously claimed that the pastor had begun abusing her on Christmas Day in 1982.
Clemishire, now 52, said that Morris and his wife had been staying at her family home at the time when he asked her to come into his room, whereafter he told her to lay on his bed and then began touching her inappropriately.
She said the abuse had continued until 1987 when she told her parents.
However, 25 years after the incident, a lawyer for Morris – J Shelby Sharpe – claimed that it was the child who was actually to blame.
And this neatly illustrates the grotesquely destructive delusion that lies at the heart of religious fundamentalism - it’s ultimately, and I’m tempted to say without exception, an attempt by overtly evil people to place the blame for their evil on others, or on society as a whole.
The underlying issue is not that other people feel lust, for instance, but that they themselves feel lust, and they consider that to be so shameful that their self-images cannot tolerate the idea that it’s a part of their own makeup. It must and can only be, to them, a thing that’s been imposed on them by “evil” people or an “evil” society, so the solution, to them, is to stamp out that “evil.” Solely in the belief, ultimately, that if that “evil” could somehow be made to not exist, it would no longer plague them.
Back to the witch trials we go.
“She used her evil magic to tempt me!” “Her devil powers controlled my groin!” “Oh woes me! Look at these weakened knees of mine! The succubus has drained the life out me!”