October 9, 2007

Everything You Need to Know About the Oral Roberts Scandal… So Far

Future home of Oral Roberts Ministries

First, some background: Oral Roberts is the ex-Pentecostal (we suspect the terminally - slain - in - the - spirit Pentecostals weren’t radical enough for him) who started his own ministry in the late 1940s, and opened Oral Roberts University ^(PDF) in Tulsa, in 1963 — on a direct order from God.

God, it seems, spent a lot of time giving Oral direct orders; in 1977, a 900-foot-tall Jesus told Roberts to build the City of Faith Medical and Research Center. Of course, building a hospital takes some serious money — so, in 1987, God tried to extort $8 million dollars out of Roberts, or He’d kill him.

Well, OK — Roberts said that God would “call him home.” In any case, through a televised plea so anguished it rivaled Jimmy Swaggart’s award-worthy perfomance as he begged forgiveness for his “moral failure,” Roberts managed to raise more than $9 million — in part because a few of his followers were afraid God wasn’t going to “call him home,” but that Roberts was planning on committing suicide if his fundraising bid failed.

But Roberts’ God was a greedy god. A few years earlier earlier, Jesus had reappeared to commission Roberts personally to find a cure for cancer. Ol’ Oral let Jesus down, the medical school went bankrupt, and Oral had to sell off the hospital to cover its crushing debts, in 1989.

As a consolation prize, God began using Roberts’ ministry to raise the dead. In fact, Roberts himself brought a dead child back to life (his son Richard swears so — but more about Richard in a moment). Too bad Roberts’ God was also a cruel God; had he gifted Roberts with this ability earlier, Roberts could have resurrected his daughter and son-in-law, who died in a car wreck in 1977, and his eldest son Ronald, who committed suicide in 1982.

With that, we turn to today’s MO’Kelly Report, “Mrs. Dick Roberts Gettin’ Her Freak On” (which is really just a re-cap of the AP story, “Scandal brewing at Oral Roberts,” but far more entertaining):

Fast forwarding twenty years, it’s nice to see that Oral’s family is making good use of that money. This week, Oral’s son and president of Oral Roberts University Richard Roberts began answering to numerous allegations of financial misconduct and questionable behavior by himself and family members.

No…the word “questionable” doesn’t even begin to adequately describe the allegations. Mo’Kelly will just run them down for you quickly.

• According to a lawsuit, he 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 non-profit status. Up to 50 students are alleged to have worked on the campaign.

• A longtime maintenance employee was fired so that an ahem…”underage” male “friend” of Mrs. Roberts could have his position. (Stone-cold freak alert! Flash the yellow light)

• Lindsay Roberts (Bob’s wife) — who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU’s “first lady” on the university’s website — 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, ahem… “underage” males who had been provided phones at university expense. (Sound the alarm! Stone-cold freak alert!)

• The university jet was used to take one daughter and several friends on a senior trip to Orlando, and the Bahamas. The $29,411 trip was billed to the ministry as an “evangelistic function of the president.” (Mo’Kelly got a “senior trip” to Disneyland which cost all of $40).

• Lindsay “Freakmama” 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. (With all the underage…ahem, “friends” it’s a wonder she had time to put/keep any of the clothes on.) …

Plus, notes the Christian Broadcasting Network (which is probably no great fan of Roberts’; we need a scorecard to keep track of which televangelist ministries are in bed together, and which hate one another, from moment to moment), that a lawsuit filed by three former ORU professors claims that “the Roberts’ home was remodeled 11 times in the last 14 years and had university employees doing his daughter’s homework.”

CBN also notes (with glee?) that using ORU “students and university resources in a local mayor’s race… could jeopardize the school’s tax exempt status.”

We can only hope.

Of course, Richard Roberts is denying everything, and whining like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar: “I am not intimidated by blackmail and extortion. Make no mistake about it, this suit is about money.”

Oh? We can’t wait to hear who’s been blackmailing you, Richie. Was it a 900-foot-tall archangel acting as goomba for God’s hit squad?

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Posted by: Sapphocrat

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