Matt Gaetz: It Looks Like Another Southern Baptist Impunity Story

Lo and behold, Matt Gaetz is a Southern Baptist.

So too is Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who is trying to deep-six the House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz — a report that is said to include evidence about Gaetz’s sexual abuse of a 17-year-old girl and his illicit drug use.

“She was a high school student and there were witnesses,” said the lawyer representing the girl.

We’ve seen this story again and again in Baptistland.

I feel overwhelmed by the grief of it, and yet it’s a familiar grief.

For decades, Southern Baptists have been turning a blind eye to sexual abuse allegations against their pastors.

Now they’re turning a blind to sexual abuse allegations against Matt Gaetz, the man nominated to be U.S. Attorney General, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Matt Gaetz (Francis Chung / POLITICO)

The patterns repeat. Southern Baptists are effectively carrying the impunity of their faith group into the federal government.

Johnson says it would be a “terrible breach of protocol” to release the House Ethics Committee’s bipartisan investigative report on Gaetz.

“Protocol.”

I’m reminded of how SBC leaders have incessantly used “autonomy” as an excuse for doing nothing about reported clergy sex abusers.

Whether “protocol” or “autonomy,” it’s a word that’s being used to try to lend legitimacy to the coverup of evidence about alleged child sexual abuse.

Next up, Johnson casts Gaetz as a mere “private citizen” and, in an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN, suggests how horrible it would be if the government investigated Tapper or “any other private citizen.”

This conjuring of the pall of government intrusion strains credulity.

Gaetz was not a private citizen during the course of the ethics committee’s year-and-a-half-long investigation; he was a public official – a member of the House of Representatives. Because of that, the investigation was paid for with public taxpayer dollars.

Furthermore, Gaetz resigned just two days before the committee was scheduled to vote on the report’s release. The report has already been written.

So, casting Gaetz as a “private citizen” seems designed as nothing more than a disingenuous diversion.

Not only was he a public official during the course of the investigation but there is prior precedent for release of an ethics report after a member’s resignation. And the fact that Gaetz has now been nominated for an even higher public office — Attorney General — makes the argument for release all the more compelling; the public deserves to know what kind of man this is.

But of course, we’ve seen this story before: Southern Baptist leaders finding excuse after excuse, however disingenuous they may be, to protect their crony colleagues, no matter how corroborated or voluminous the allegations and no matter how egregious the alleged conduct.

Meanwhile, pastors accused of sexual abuse operate with impunity. They move on to new churches — and often to new prey — just as Gaetz is about to move on to a new higher office in government.

Gaetz denies the allegations against him. But of course that doesn’t mean the evidence should be ignored. The Senate has a constitutional duty to assess Gaetz’s fitness for office, and any responsible vetting would include consideration of the evidence that was before the House Ethics Committee.

And let’s not forget that, wholly apart from the sexual misconduct allegations investigated by the ethics committee and wholly apart from the sex trafficking allegations investigated by the Department of Justice, Gaetz’s known public actions are also disturbing.

In 2022, as a member of the House of Representatives, he voted against legislation to combat human trafficking. The bill — known as the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention & Protection Reauthorization Act — had wide bipartisan support and ultimately passed in a 401-20 vote.

But Matt Gaetz, who at that time was under investigation for sex trafficking allegations involving a minor, voted against it.

In 2017, on another bill designed to fight sex trafficking — this one called the Combatting Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act — Gaetz cast the only “no” vote. The bill passed in the Senate with unanimous support, and in the House it passed by a vote of 418 to 1.

Obviously, Gaetz is way out of step with how the vast majority of Americans view sexual abuse and sex trafficking. And this too is highly relevant information to consider for the vetting of the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

But of course, Southern Baptists are institutionally out of step as well. When the Abuse of Faith exposé was released in 2019, documenting hundreds of child sex abuse cases involving Southern Baptist pastors, the SBC barely blinked. Then when an independent investigation of the SBC’s Executive Committee revealed that, for decades, top leaders had covered up abuses and stonewalled survivors, Southern Baptists talked the talk of caring, waited for the media storm to die down, and did near-nothing.

This is a hypermasculine culture that offers impunity for men at the top, that turns a blind eye to sexual abuses, and that sometimes even *wink-wink* makes light of it all. And Gaetz carried that culture with him into the halls of Congress.

He allegedly bragged about his sexual escapades to other lawmakers and showed them nude images and videos of women he claimed to have had sex with. And Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, shared publicly that Gaetz had “boasted on the floor to multiple colleagues in the House of Representatives of his methods of crushing Viagra and high test Red Bull to maintain his erection through his orgiastic evenings.”

Then there’s the simple fact that Gaetz is wholly unqualified to be Attorney General. As former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb pointed out, Gaetz is unqualified “academically, professionally, ethically, morally, and experientially.”

All of this, including the House Ethics Committee report, is evidence that should be marshalled to assess the character and qualifications of Matt Gaetz, the man nominated to lead the United States Department of Justice.

The House Ethics Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow, November 20. It should vote for release of its report to the public.

Update: On December 23, 2024, the House Ethics Committee finally released its report on Matt Gaetz. Here it is.

My book, Baptistland, is now available. And thanks to Baptist News Global for picking up this column to republish - here!