The Watchtower has quietly notified Kingdom Halls throughout the United States to take special precautions and preventive steps to reduce their members’ exposure to the dreaded and fast-moving Coronavirus epidemic spreading throughout the United States. On March 7, 2020, Mike and Kim released a video that quotes the most recent Watchtower “elders letter” that instructs local Jehovah’s Witness elders on how to manage the threat to members and visitors to their congregations.
We stumbled across another of our “lost in the growing stack” of past news tips and came across this gem of a report from Lower Saucon Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. It’s not so much about the news and the fact that the Watchtower was selling another Kingdom Hall, but rather their reasoning and explanation for taking that rather drastic step. The organization’s statement indicated their move was to free up “additional funds for the church’s relief work in the U.S. and abroad.” We ask, “What “relief work”? And exactly where will that “relief work” be provided?
NBC NEWS in Yakima, Washington reported that “A man who pleaded guilty to raping two underage girls he met at the Jehovah’s Witness congregation they all belonged to has been sentenced to five years in prison. Elihu Rodriguez, 32, of Yakima, Washington, was given five years, the maximum sentence prosecutors had recommended after Rodriguez agreed to plead guilty to three felony counts of child rape in the third degree in September 2019.”
The limits of religious freedom: America must come to grips with when faith groups limit personal liberty — “When Pastor Robert Jeffress, a member of President Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board and the White House Faith Initiative, recently dismissed climate activist Greta Thunberg by saying that rainbows are evidence that polar ice caps aren’t melting, my heart sank…”
It’s a rare week when a new case of child abuse or rape among Jehovah’s Witnesses isn’t reported somewhere in North America. That’s in spite of new court cases and successful convictions every few months that are destroying Watchtower’s reputation. The following report comes from a small town in Illinois (USA) where there was limited coverage about just such a case. But it includes a surprising and horrific twist that proves Watchtower leaders at all levels still refuse to take decisive action to protect children.
On September 20, 2019, the Fresno Bee reported that a 45-year-old Fresno, California Jehovah’s Witness pleaded “no contest” on Friday to charges he sexually assaulted a young girl from his church who was only 17 years old. The man was identified as Martin Phillip Ramos. An additional surprise was reported in the article: The accused worked as a “police dispatcher in Madera.”
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Posted Sep 13, 2019 12:34 pm PDT /BILLINGS, Mont. — An attorney for the Jehovah’s Witnesses asked the Montana Supreme Court on Friday to reverse a $35 million verdict against the church for not reporting a girl’s sexual abuse to authorities. Last year, a jury awarded $4 million in compensatory damages and $31 million in punitive damages to a woman who said she was abused as a child in the mid-2000s by a member of the Thompson Falls Jehovah’s Witness congregation.