Retired Southern Baptist minister Wade Burleson – now a candidate for Congress in Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District – has been trying to do the right thing for a long time.

Fifteen years ago, he tried to do the right thing when he tried to focus leaders on troubling revelations of sexual abuse scandals involving members of the clergy and others within Oklahoma.

As my former colleague in the news profession, Carla Hinton, wrote in a magisterial story for the state’s largest newspaper recently, Burleson (of Enid) “began calling for Southern Baptists’ to create a database of preacher predators in 2007 to alert unsuspecting congregations of sexual abusers hopping from church to church and victim to victim.”

Along with the rest of us, he learned on a Sunday morning (May 23), “along with the rest of the world, … that, while the leaders of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination decided against a database, there was an internal list of predators that the denomination didn’t share publicly.” [Read the rest of the article on the Oklahoma City Sentinel]

Original source can be found here.