[Welcome, TPM readers. Welcome, Laodicea readers.] As we keep saying, authoritarian systems are extremely vulnerable to fraud, because authoritarian followers aren’t capable of providing checks and balances for their leaders, and the leaders are always tempted by the usual suspects: Money, power, and sex. Latest example: Oral Roberts [cough] “University,” which is about as much a university as Monica Goodling’s Regent “University,” or bad pizza billionaire and uber-Catholic loon Tom Monahan’s Ave Maria. I’ll skip right to the juiciest details:

An ORU student repairing [the laptop of Stephanie Cantese, Richard Roberts’ sister-in-law] discovered the document and later provided a copy to one of the professors.

It details dozens of alleged instances of misconduct. Among them:

• A longtime maintenance employee was fired so that an underage male friend of Mrs. Roberts could have his position.
• Mrs. Roberts — who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU’s “first lady” on the university’s [sic] Web site — frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to “underage males who had been provided phones at university expense.”

Sounds like she’s been taking lessons from Mark Foley (R-Neverland), although, granted, Foley (“Don’t forget to measure for me”) used IM, not text. Honestly, what is it about Christianist authority figures and child abuse? It’s like being a sex predator is part of the job description, or something; at this point, these guys have a track record, and there’s example after example after example.

More of the sadly familiar, yet still lurid, details:  Read more