Wednesday July 8 Reads

But insurance companies will still cover Viagra, right?

This USSC decision is appalling.
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Jim Bakker made a return to his television show on the episode broadcast today.  He was supposed to be on for just five minutes, but he wound up being on the entire telecast.  His big news of the day, besides his improving health--he still has to rest for several more months so this was just a guest appearance today--was his announcement of the beginning his new Voice of the Prophets network.  He has been talking about this for the past few years.

Bakker went on his usual rant against legal abortion and how the coronavirus and other problems are the result of God's wrath against it rather than the fact those other problems stem from an idiot in the White House.

You can watch the video here of Bakker's "guest" appearance on his own show.
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You bet it was a child rape.  Letourneau did untold damage to Vili and to her family.

Yet this was not how people viewed the case in 1998. The media covered Letourneau not as a sexual predator, but either as a subject of prurient tabloid interest, on par with the domestic disputes of the stars of Die Hard and G.I. Jane; or as a tragic lover, ensnared in an ill-fated romance that society was simply unable to understand. (Often, as the People cover demonstrates, it was a combination of the two.) Perhaps more than any other figure in recent history, the media coverage of Mary Kay Letourneau is responsible for perpetuating the gendered double standard associated with child rape, or the idea that, while a male teacher having sex with an underage female pupil is reprehensible, a female teacher sleeping with an underage male pupil is not only forgivable, but worthy of a high five.

To scholars of mid-Nineties tabloid ephemera, the details of the case are well-known: Letourneau, a teacher in Seattle, Washington, met Fualaau when he was in her sixth-grade classroom (a little-regarded yet unspeakably icky footnote to the story is that she taught him when he was in second grade as well). They began what her obituary in the New York Times refers to as a “sexual relationship” in 1996, when she was 34 and he was 13, resulting in the birth of two daughters. Letourneau initially pleaded guilty to charges of second-degree rape, serving a reduced sentence of three months, only to return to prison for a seven-year sentence after violating a court order to keep away from Fualaau. When she was released in 2004, she was once again court-ordered to keep away from Fualaau; once again, she fought this order, and the two wed in 2005.