Oral Roberts is going down

Last updated on: October 8, 2007 at 7:55 pm by Fred Clark

Oral Roberts is going down 2007-10-08T19:55:52-04:00 Fred Clark

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“Scandal brewing at Oral Roberts U.” is the AP headline, but that seems like an understatement. “Scandals” — plural — is more like it.

You’ve got your basic nonprofit-violating-its-tax-free-status scandal:

Three former professors … sued ORU and [its president, Richard] Roberts, alleging they were wrongfully dismissed after reporting the school’s involvement in a local political race.

Richard Roberts, according to the suit, asked a professor in 2005 to use his students and university resources to aid a county commissioner’s bid for Tulsa mayor. Such involvement would violate state and federal law because of the university’s nonprofit status. Up to 50 students are alleged to have worked on the campaign.

That’s bad, but it’s hefty-fines-and-civil-settlement bad and not quite prison-and-disgrace bad. This kind of white-collar scandal would normally be survivable here in the U.S. If that were the full extent of the scandal, it probably wouldn’t even harm the school’s financial situation too much, since many of the university’s big donors don’t really believe in the separation of church and state anyway and IRS penalties could be spun into an example of “persecution” that could be used to leverage even more donations.

But the AP article also mentions Roberts’ “lavish spending at donors’ expense,” citing the kinds of memorable details that tend to give such scandals legs:

• The university jet was used to take one daughter and several friends on a senior trip to Orlando, Fla., and the Bahamas. The $29,411 trip was billed to the ministry as an “evangelistic function of the president.”

• Mrs. Roberts spent more than $39,000 at one Chico’s clothing store alone in less than a year, and had other accounts in Texas and California. She also repeatedly said, “As long as I wear it once on TV, we can charge it off.” The document cites inconsistencies in clothing purchases and actual usage on TV.

• Mrs. Roberts was given a white Lexus SUV and a red Mercedes convertible by ministry donors.

• University and ministry employees are regularly summoned to the Roberts’ home to do the daughters’ homework.

• The university and ministry maintain a stable of horses for exclusive use by the Roberts’ children.

• The Roberts’ home has been remodeled 11 times in the past 14 years.

That kind of list would give pause to even the most Mammon-worshipping disciples of the name-it-and-claim-it “prosperity gospel.”

But still, so far, we’re only talking about money. Lots of money — money fondled and self-indulgently spent by the extravagantly corrupt Roberts family who roll around in it like Scrooge McDuck while selling the needy for a pair of shoes. But still it’s just money. And here in America, scandals involving only money can still be survived.

The magic ingredient here in America, the element that makes a scandal fatal as opposed to merely damaging, is sex. This double standard may not make any sense, but that’s how things play out here.

And oh my does this scandal have more than enough sex to make it a fatal one:

[Mrs. Roberts] is accused of … sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.” …

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 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.”

The word “underage” appears three times in the above, so it doesn’t seem like we’re talking about consenting adults here.

Once those text messages become public that’s it, game over, checkmate. If the school survives, these will be the last people named “Roberts” to have anything to do with it. Good.

(Pam Spaulding and Wonkette have much more to say about all this.)

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