*A few days ago, I posted on my Facebook profile “Some black women love R. Kelly more than they love their pastor.”
There is some truth to this. Black churches are known to have predominantly female congregations and the women often venerate the pastors. A former girlfriend, who was dating a pastor, remarked they were treated like rock stars in the black community. She also said that her boyfriend often had female parishioners slip him business cards when he was in church.
Black pastors are also known for taking liberties with female congregants. Some of them, like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, father children out of wedlock. One of the most famous incidents of this kind of behavior was the Rev. Henry Lyons, former president of the National Baptist Convention USA. In 1997, his wife burned down the house he bought for his mistress.
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In spite of this kind of bad behavior, black women are often some of the staunchest defenders of black clergy. I have heard stories of black women who are so devoted to their pastors, it causes their marriages to break up. They also often stand by prosperity-gospel preachers, such as Creflo Dollar, who leach money off their congregation. (In 2015, Dollar got his congregation to buy him a new $65 million Gulfstream jet.) A female associate once told me she didn’t want to hear anything bad about Dollar since he was her pastor.
And this is where the comparison to R&B star R. Kelly (real name Robert Kelly) comes in. Kelly has been accused of having sex with underage women for more than 20 years. This goes back to the days of his quickie marriage to R&B ingenue Aliyah, who he wed when she was 15. (The marriage was later annulled.)
However, his shenanigans with underage women didn’t stop there. In 2002, a videotape surfaced showing Kelly having sex and urinating on a girl who looked about 14. Somehow he managed to avoid imprisonment on that case.
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