In Oregon, a priest has been sentenced to six years in prison for child molestation.
The Rev. Angel Armando Perez, 47, pleaded guilty in Marion County Circuit Court to charges of first-degree sexual abuse, driving intoxicated and furnishing alcohol to a minor. Accusations of using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct and tampering with evidence were dismissed. He will serve six years and three months in prison for the sexual abuse charge, the mandatory minimum for that Measure 11 crime. He will serve the penalty for the other charges concurrently. Marion County Circuit Judge Courtland Geyer also ordered Perez to register as a sex offender. The boy told investigators that he was awakened by an apparent flash from a camera. He found his shorts and underwear at his knees and Perez next to him on an air mattress. The priest had the boy’s genitals in one hand and a cell phone in the other, court documents said.
And here in Florida, another upstanding member of the community is in trouble for his peccadilloes.
Lane Rees is a current Republican state committeeman, a former Walton County commissioner, the 2011 Walton County man of the year, a Jeb Bush appointee and a former board chair for the Foundation for Evangelism. He’s also now a suspected child pornographer.
Rees, who is 61, was arrested yesterday on charges of possession and transmission of child pornography.
Authorities were tipped of in February by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that images of child porn were being traded from Rees’s IP address. After a monthlong investigation, Walton County Sheriff’s Deputies arrived yesterday afternoon at Rees’s Santa Rosa Beach house to arrest him. According to North West Florida Daily News, authorities also seized Rees’s computer.
They said that “pretty significant images” of child pornography were found in the home, but the exact number hasn’t yet been determined.
Rees had been active in numerous political and Evangelical christian group. In 2002 he was appointed by then-Gov. Jeb Bush to serve on the Florida Medical Examiner Commission.
And yet if we let two people of the same sex get married, we’re destroying America and making God send hurricanes to Orlando.
I’m not going to get all heavy into the pop-psychology of why a priest would chase a kid down the street in his underwear snapping photos of him or why a right-wing evangelical Christian would have child pornography on his computer. But if you grow up believing that anything to do with sex or your natural human programming regarding attraction to another is wrong, sinful and must be repressed at all costs, it’s going to result in something bad happening, and it usually involves innocent parties.
On the other hand, if you’re allowed to grow up in an environment where human nature is allowed to take its course and you’re not taught to be ashamed or humiliated for being who you are, you’ll probably turn out okay.
HT to JMG and Riptide.
