Welcome everyone once again to another edition of the conversations that matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris with two other

guests today. We have Aaron Wren who is the co-founder of American reformer. You can go to his website

Aaron Wren.com and find his writing there, which, and he didn't mention this, but I'll mention also his popular email publication is called

the Masculanist and it's really good stuff and then you have Alan actionson he's joining us as well. And he is the editor at

Capstone report. And Alan and Aaron have both been covering and

the SBC's or the guideposts investigation into SBC's sexual abuse allegations.

And so I want to welcome both you guys. Thank you so much for being willing to just help interpret this for everyone listening.

Happy to be here. So I want to start with you. Happy beer.

So I want to start with you, Aaron.

You wrote a piece and you can find it if you go, in fact I'll put the link in the info section if you go to

Aaron Wren.com but it's your sub stack the title is the SBC's title nine

recommendations on handling abuse and I thought this was really perceptive and it fits in with a number of other things I'm sure we'll discuss here. But I just want to give you the floor here to kind of explain what your happen is about the recommendations or at

least one of them in this guidestone investigation and what you think could

potentially happen that would be bad for the Southern Baptist Convention?

Well, this report has around 30 pages of recommendations in them and it's a lot of details in there. So I read through it and the one thing that really jumped out of me immediately is we are talking about some of the most severe criminal acts that exist in America. Sexual abuse, sexual assault, and yet, you know, the first thing I would think of when I think of that stuff is if you find out about it,

called cops. And yet the legal system, that is to say the criminal or the civil legal systems,

really don't play much into their recommendations of how to address this at all.

There are some references to mandated reporting, which is a situation where people, say a school teacher or a doctor or people of that nature, are required to report suspected sexual abuse of a child or things like this legal obligations to report that to police but

other than mandated reporting is really not a lot about the legal system which I thought was really curious

and instead what they basically proposed to do is to create a an administrative entity, I believe they call it, that would be functionally similar to these title nine entities that exist on college campuses to adjudicate

different allegations there. So in the legal system you have the right to kind of confront your accuser to compel testimony to compel evidence production. There's due process. There's a standard of proof that has to be made.

There's rights of appeal. You have the right to a council, it's all public, on down on everything that we know about the legal system designed to protect the rights of the accused.

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