"Sex Addicted" Asian Spa Shooter Attended Evangelical Rehab Clinic

Repression may have made everything worse.

• If you’re gay, trans, or a woman in Arkansas, it would be good for your health to leave the state immediately if you can. The Republican-run Arkansas Senate just passed a bill that would allow healthcare workers to deny service to people if doing so violates their “conscience.” This bill is more than just emboldening slut-shaming pharmacists to deny filling birth control; it could mean blood on Governor Asa Hutchinson’s hands if he chooses to sign it.

• For the sake of being difficult, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took Nancy Pelosi’s reference of the Capitol as “a temple” to be literal as her excuse for why she voted against giving Congressional Gold Medals to a number of law enforcement officials who protected the Capitol during the insurrectionist attack on January 6th.

• A Belgian judge ruled “religious rules are not above the law in our society” and fined the Jehovah’s Witnesses €96,000 for violating Belgium’s anti-discrimination laws by shunning former members to a cruel extent.

• Christian bigot Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sent out an e-mail to his supports urging them to oppose the Equality Act, which is a civil rights bill that would prevent anti-LGBTQ discrimination in areas like employment, housing, education, and more. In his e-mail Perkins quoted a biblical passage that implies he believes gay and trans people are deserving of mistreatment for living a “sinful” lifestyle.

• The more we learn about the Georgia spa shooter, the more confirmation we receive that conservative Christian culture is toxic. As it turns out, Robert Aaron Long struggled with “sex addiction,” which is a term thrown around in conservative religious communities to describe natural human compulsions that have been suppressed and shamed to a dangerous degree. The Washington Post is reporting that, according to a former roommate of his, Long was a patient at evangelical “sex addiction” clinic HopeClinic.

  The evangelical facility HopeQuest advertises its services for treating “sex addiction” and “pornography addiction,” alongside several descriptions for what it believes these addictions could include. Bayless said Long blamed his descent into addiction on pornography and used a flip phone instead of a smartphone to avoid temptation online.

  …

  “He was militant about it,” Bayless said. “This was the kind of guy who would hate himself for masturbating, would consider that a relapse.”

  As new explanations pour in for why Long murdered eight people, nothing will deflect from the basis of his actions being rooted in racism— creating casualties of the Asian women who he viewed as both servants to his sexual needs and expendable in his struggles with his demons.

• COVID-denying Canadian Pastor James Coates may be released from jail within days despite refusing to comply with public health precautions. He held unmasked, crowded church services, yet all charges against him — all but one — have been dropped. Coates and his lawyers want the final charge heard out in court in order to challenge the constitutionality of the public health order that churches only hold worship services at 15% capacity. In other words, Coates needs a stage to act out his persecution drama.

• Finally, here’s Christian “prophet” Jeff Jansen ranting at Steve Shultz’s mostly empty chair about how Donald Trump is still the president.