How many creeps are employed at Liberty University?
News outlets report 63-year-old Liberty University professor Stephen Kilpatrick was arrested Wednesday. He faces multiple charges, including using communications systems to facilitate certain offenses involving children.
A task force against child internet crimes says Kilpatrick was arrested after travelling to meet someone who he believed was an underage girl. The school said in an email that Kilpatrick has been suspended from his position as an associate professor of mathematics “pending the outcome of this matter.”
You’ve got to wonder how many young girls’ lives he exploited before he got caught.
If he fell into a sting, that means he was using txt chat or some kind of internet chat. Give it a couple weeks and the FBI will have all those messages. Usually, guys like that leave a pretty big trail – they stalk several targets at once – so I bet his last 6 months’ comms will convince him to plea-bargain for a stay in some prison for a couple years. When he gets out he will learn the meaning of “fucked.”
If he was a billionaire, of course, he’d get off.
Oh, no! I’m sure instead he will learn the meaning of “Christ’s Love”.
– Ray Wylie Hubbard
My only qualm with your headline is that I’m not sure proper secular universities are any better at not employing creeps like Kilpatrick.
@chrislawson:
I think “Stung” is a reference to “sting operations” conducted by police.
And while every power structure that protects victimizers should be criticized (and while PZ does, in fact, criticize secular universities and other secular institutions for just that) those who hold themselves out as, to pick a random phrase, “the way, the truth, and the light” deserve extra scorn for selling themselves as the solution to moral problems while not, in fact, having any solutions to the problems of protecting victimizers.
They’re committing the fault of protecting victimizers and then also committing the fault of fraud. It’s only reasonable to drop a double dumbass on them.
What’s worse is that places like Liberty are under pressure to keep up appearances as “godly”, so they have more motivation to sweep this kind of thing under the rug. When you insist that the way your university is run prevents sexual assault, you’re not going to respond well to evidence that it doesn’t work.
“suspended”. What exactly do they expect will be the outcome? Innocent people don’t fall into stings like this.
It’s got to be tough being a professor of mathematics at Liberty U, since according to the Bible pi=3.
1 Kings 7:
23 He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. 24 Below the rim, gourds encircled it—ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea.
Marcus ranum @ 1
“… If he was a billionaire, of course, he’d get off”
Unintentionally unfortunate wording?
Crip Dyke–
I meant to refer to the first line of the post not the headline. And, yes, I know that PZ has called out secular academia in the past. And I certainly agree that any institution that arrogates the moral high ground deserves extra walloping (see also: the Catholic Church, the evangelical wing of the Republican Party). I wasn’t criticising so much as sighing at the sad acknowledgement that it’s not just the religious degree mills that have this particular problem.
I guess the question “how many creeps are employed at X University?” would have a terribly depressing answer for most, and possibly all, values of X.
@chrislawson:
Ah, got it. Sorry for misinterpreting & thanks for your clarification.
This is my biggest fear of the asylum seekers children that we do not know where they are or who their parents are! What are the creeps in Washington doing to these children? It makes my skin crawl.
Cervantes: ‘according to the Bible pi=3’
There is a lot of crap* in the Bible, but that seems to me to be perfectly justifiable rounding to the nearest cubit!
Not very precise, but still accurate.
______________________
* (not to mention vileness—so I won’t)
Yeah, I do wish people would stop with the π = 3 thing: The (probably-)much-later text, likely based on bronze(-ish) oral storytelling, is not a fecking blueprint any more that it is a science textbook or an accurate history. Indeed, claiming π = 3 is the implication is implying an accuracy to the heavily-edited badly-translated often-miscopied text which it is known not to have. There is no reason to think the description is accurately rendered, or that the incident even ever happened.
Or, for that matter, that the description is correctly understood / interpreted today, thousands of years later, in translation: E.g., most people interpret the “circular in shape” as meaning “sphere”, similar to interpreting a “round” Earth as being a “sphere”; but just as the latter isn’t precisely a sphere, the former also does not need to be — bringing us back to the it’s not a fecking blueprint point.
Liberty University is probably just relieved it’s little girls he was going after and not little boys. Don’t know how they would explain having a homo on their faculty to the donors.
Reminds me of the old joke about the letter to the newspaper advice columnist:
“Dear Newspaper Advice Columnist:
My father’s in jail for molesting children, my mother runs a brothel, and my two brothers sell drugs to middle school children, but none of that is what I’m writing about. I just do not know how I will stand the shame, the humiliation and the embarrassment if the neighbors find out that my husband voted for Trump.”
And that joke is so old that the first time I heard it, the husband had voted for Nixon.
I still don’t know where BuzzFeed is going with this story, but I have a feeling they do.