Rev. Jimmy Swaggart is back in the news because he thinks joking on TV about killing gays is funny. (It seems like whenever Swaggart makes the news, its for consorting with prostitutes or for spouting hateful rhetoric. I could have missed something, but barring extensive research, that’s what it seems like from where I sit.) The latest Swaggartism is, of course, from column B. According to the Associated Press, Swaggart told his television audience on September 12th that he would “kill” any man who looked at him romantically.

“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry,” he declared in his internationally viewed broadcast. “And I’m going to be blunt and plain. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m going to kill him and tell God he died,” Swaggart announced as his congregation laughed and applauded.

The last time Swaggart distinguished himself in this way, he was a leader of the bash Islam brigade of American evangelical Christian leaders, whose display of rhetorical pyrotechnics was almost certainly the largest outburst of religious bigotry in my lifetime. Among other things, Swaggart called Islam a “failed religion of hatred.”

Swaggart is now busy surfing waves of complaints and unflattering media attention, and has apologized for saying he would kill gay men and lie to God that he had done it. He says he threatens to kill various people in this same “joke” formula all the time. Funny guy, that Jimmy. Perhaps he is unaware that so many people are victims of violence for the mere fact of being gay, or being mistaken for being gay, that the FBI has collected statistics about it for a decade as part of a national effort to combat hate crimes. Swaggart told his hometown newspaper, the Baton Rouge Advocate that he is sorry he offended anyone, he does not condone violence, and he continues to oppose homosexuality.

Given Swaggart’s resolve in the face of controversy, perhaps he will be calling on fellow televangelist, Rev. Paul Crouch, who may be in need of some counseling.

According to an extraordinary series of articles in the Los Angeles Times, Rev. Paul Crouch, head of Trinity Broadcasting Network, (TBN) settled a lawsuit against a former employee for $425,000 to silence him from disclosing a homosexual affair in 1996. The agreement was confidential, but the former employee is now claiming, among other things that he felt he was forced to have sex with Crouch in order to keep his job. Enoch Lonnie Ford, 41, the alleged victim, says, “Paul Crouch needs to be exposed, and the truth needs to get out.” Crouch, now 70, is president of the Orange County-based TBN, the largest religious broadcaster in the world.

Crouch and TBN deny the allegations and say that they only settled the suit as the best way to protect the ministry against the scurrilous charges. They also say, and the LA Times account confirms, that Ford sought millions of dollars more from Crouch and TBN for not publishing a manuscript in which he details the charges he already agreed to keep confidential in the settlement agreement. TBN calls it “extortion,” and revealed that Ford is a convicted sex offender and a drug user.

Wow! Some sensational story, huh? Its eerie, though, that the vast media pack hasn’t jumped on this story of alleged sexual coercion, hypocrisy and criminal activity on the part of one of the most prominent religious leaders in the world. Coverage and commentary has been spotty at best. It’s unfair of course, for the media to function as a conveyor belt for unsubstantiated charges against public figures from disreputable or highly biased sources. Maybe the vast media pack has gotten gun shy after recent debacles like the duping of Dan Rather and the smear campaign waged by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth…

Nah. More likely, the LA Times is so far ahead in reporting on this, that the competition is caught short. Additionally, although Crouch’s empire is far larger than any of the other televangelists he is less well known beyond his audience than the more flamboyant Swaggart, or the politically prominent televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Still, the relative absence of follow-up reporting and commentary is striking at a time when sex abuse by Catholic priests and settlements from church funds to silence alleged abuse victims, and cover-up on the part of church authorities continues to be one of the largest, if not The largest corruption scandal in the history of modern religious institutions. Oh yeah, and until a series of excellent investigative reports by the Boston Globe broke the dimensions of the story wide open, press coverage of that one was spotty too.