If there is anything that can take down a political campaign, it is a sexual misconduct allegation.
The Trump campaign is now dealing with one, although it is not directly against Trump, but instead against a former spiritual adviser of Trump's.
Talking Points…
- Allegations made
- Morris confesses
- Analysis
When the allegations were first made against Pastor Robert Morris of the Gateway Church in Southlake, it shook the area. This church regularly sees a congregation of about 100,000 on a typical weekend, so you can imagine how the community was rocked when longtime family friend Cindy Clemishire accused Morris of sexual abuse that she claimed took place more than four decades ago.
Clemishire dropped the bomb on Friday, claiming that when she was between the ages of 12 and 16, her family had met Morris at a church in Oklahoma (Morris was a traveling preacher at the time). The families grew a friendship and invited the Morris family to stay at their home in Tulsa during the Christmas holiday in 1982. She described the incident, saying that Morris had asked her to his room to "talk," but he then started to touch her stomach, breast, and under her pants. She added:
"I remember vividly everything I was wearing and how the pajamas felt. They were light pink, and it was a little top with bloomers, and I had on underwear and bloomers and the little top and a robe that snapped up over the top."
Eventually, Clemishire told her family about it, with Morris eventually being removed from the ministry for two years for "restoration." However, he returned to preaching in 1989. Morris came clean about the abuse during a recent interview in The Christian Post, although he was careful not to mention the girl's age, stating:
"When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years."
Morris claimed that when he returned to preaching, he did so with the Clemishire family's blessing, but the victim says that was not the case. She stated:
"Of course we want to forgive, we're called to forgive. But he's never had anyone's blessing in my family to be back in the ministry. We don't believe anyone that's done anything like this should be an overseer to anyone in any industry, but especially in the church.
"I don't think that it's repentant when someone calls a 12-year-old a 'young lady' and tries to just dismiss what happened as just some heavy petting."
The Gateway Church then responded to the story coming to light again, adding:
"Pastor Robert has been open and forthright about a moral failure he had over 35 years ago when he was in his twenties and prior to him starting Gateway Church. He has shared publicly from the pulpit the proper biblical steps he took in his lengthy restoration process."
This all ties in with Donald Trump because Morris has served as Trump's spiritual adviser in the past and has helped Trump raise big money in Texas, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Trump even visited Gateway Church in 2020 to participate in a panel discussion there. The timing of this story was surely to piggyback off Trump's hush-money case and try to tie Trump to deviants, so we will have to wait and see how this plays out over the next few polling cycles.
Morris was never charged, but that means nothing when he has openly confessed to the abusive relationship. Even so, as long as Trump avoids him moving forward, I doubt it will impact the campaign in any big way. Time will tell.
