How do you get up on Sunday and preach the word of God, and then turn around and stomp your wife out in a hotel parking lot? Bishop Thomas Weeks has some reconstructing to do...
Juanita Bynum, the fiery national evangelist whose sermons empower women to walk away from dead-end relationships, is suffering some man trouble of her own.
Her estranged husband, Thomas W. Weeks has been charged with felony aggravated assault and making terrorist threats after he allegedly struck her in a hotel parking lot.
wife, is expected to turn himself in to Atlanta police Friday, his lawyer said.
Police said Bynum, 48, has been whisked away by family as they decide what to do next.
Bynum and Weeks are co-founders of Global Destiny Church in Duluth. They were married in 2002 in a lavish televised wedding that featured a 7.76-carat diamond ring. They separated three months ago, said Bynum's sister, Tina Culpepper.
According to an Atlanta police incident report, Bynum said her husband "choked her, pushed her down, kicked and stomped her."
She told police Weeks "continued stomping" her into the ground until a hotel bell man pulled him away. Police also said Weeks threatened Bynum's life.
Culpepper said the couple was meeting for dinner at Concorde Grill in the Renaissance Concourse Hotel near Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport Tuesday night.
Police said the couple had met to work out their differences. Things soured, and Weeks walked out to the parking lot about 10:30 p.m., police said. He then turned back around and attacked her, said Officer Ron Campbell.
Weeks also threatened Bynum's life during the attack, police said. "Anytime you tell a person, 'I'm going to kill you,' that moves it up to a felony," Campbell said.
The bruises found on Bynum also were serious enough to bring felony aggravated assault charges against Weeks.
In a comment posted on her MySpace page, the Pentecostal evangelist said, "I am currently recovering from all of my injuries and resting well ... this too shall pass."
Her publicist, Amy Malone, said Bynum wants to keep the matter private.
"People are interpreting it to mean the two of them were fighting," Malone said. "They were not fighting. She was assaulted."
And now for the really good part:
Bynum's husband has retained two lawyers: famed defense attorney Ed Garland to represent him in the criminal case; and Louis Tesser, to take care of the domestic matter.
Garland has in the past represented NFL star Ray Lewis in his murder trial and millionaire James Sullivan, who ordered the murder of his socialite wife.
"He very much regrets what happened and said he's sorry for what it's worth," Tesser said Thursday night.
Weeks loves his wife, Tesser said, and "he hopes he doesn't wind up getting a divorce."
What??? Wow. Dude, divorce is the least of your worries...
James Dobson, head of the sprawling evangelical group Focus on the Family, has joined fellow evanglical leader Richard Land in saying there's no way he'd vote for Rudy Giuliani for president. Rather, he said if faced with the Hobsons/Dobson's choice of Rudy v. Hillary or Barack Obama, he would "vote for an also ran" or for no one at all, failing to cast a ballot for president for the first time in his adult life. Dobson's key complaints about Rudy?
Abortion:
How could Giuliani say with a straight face that he "hates" abortion," while also seeking public funding for it? How can he hate abortion and contribute to Planned Parenthood in 1993, 1994, 1998 and 1999? And how was he able for many years to defend the horrible procedure by which the brains are sucked from the heads of viable, late-term, un-anesthetized babies? Those beliefs are philosophically and morally incompatible. What kind of man would even try to reconcile them?
Gay marriage:
This self-styled defender of marriage says he is "proud" of having submitted, as New York's mayor, a bill creating "domestic partnerships" for homosexual couples. Admittedly, many liberal Americans will agree with the social positions espoused by Giuliani. However, I don't believe conservative voters whose support he seeks will be impressed. Presidential elections are won or lost by slim margins. Rudy has an uphill slog ahead of him, even though he is the darling of the media.
Character:
There are other moral concerns about Giuliani's candidacy that conservatives should find troubling. He has been married three times, and his second wife was forced to go to court to keep his mistress out of the mayoral mansion while the Giuliani family still lived there. Talk about tap dancing. Also during that time, the mayor used public funds to provide security services for his girlfriend. The second Mrs. Giuliani finally had enough of his philandering and, as the story goes, forced him to move out. He lived with friends for a while and then married his mistress. Unlike some other Republican presidential candidates, Giuliani appears not to have remorse for cheating on his wife.
Harry Truman asked, "How can I trust a man if his wife can't?" It is a very good question. Here's another one: Is Rudy Giuliani presidential timber? I think not. Can we really trust a chief executive who waffles and feigns support for policies that run contrary to his alleged beliefs? Of greater concern is how he would function in office. Will we learn after it is too late just what the former mayor really thinks? What we know about him already is troubling enough.
Cross-dressing (the real kind, not the political kind, like what he initially did on the subject of abortion):
One more question: Shouldn't the American people be able to expect a certain decorum and dignity from the man who occupies the White House? On this measure, as well, Giuliani fails miserably. Much has been written in the blogosphere about his three public appearances in drag. In each instance, he tried to be funny by dressing like a woman. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan, who loved a good joke, doing something so ignoble in pursuit of a cheap guffaw? Not on your life.
That about sums it up for Dobson. (Read Dobson's full column here.) According to John King of CNN, evangelical leaders like Dobson and Land are "working behind the scenes, not in an organized fashion ... yet ... but definitely working ... to derail Giuliani as a presidential nominee. King also reported that many of these leaders are quietly coalescing around a Fred Thompson candidacy. (I can't see them going for cheatin' Newt.) Pat Buchanan on MSNBC this afternoon said that if Giuliani were to be elected president, he would "move to that country Alec Baldwin said he would move to" if George W. Bush got elected in 2004.
With Jerry Falwell gone, and Pat Robertson certifiably insane, Dobson now moves to the front of the queue as the pied piper of evangelical voters seeking direction on what Jesus would do come election time. That is, unless his theological and economic rival, the relatively tolerant Rick Warren (whose philosphy is more about giving back than handing out chastity belts and damning people to hell) gets political first, on the side of "moderate" Republicanism. (I can't see that happening, though. Warren is an expert marketer. Like an NBA player, he'll probably keep his politics to himself so as not to turn off any potential fans.)
Oh, and that Ohio poll showing Rudy leading John McCain 23% to 17%, that's less than a quarter of the total vote take, and a far cry from the high thirties and low forties Giuliani was commanding just months ago. I'd guess that 20 points of Rudy's total is based on name recognition and 9/11 nostalgia among the Islamophobic right wing wackjob, "24" obsessed set.
The biggest problem for the evangelicals is, who else have they got? Thompson is pretty good for the GOPers, though apparently he's not much of a speech giver.
For Giulini's part, his camp isn't commenting on Dobson. But they're likely doing some quick math on whether, given Rudy's pro-amnesty stance on immigration, they might be able to gain in Hispanic votes what they could lose in evangelicals (angry white males aren't exactly at a premium, I think the GOP has maxed out on them.) So who's party is it, anyway?
It stays interesting...
Update: Witness what happens when this Red Stater attempts to stump for Rudy (scroll down to the comments section. Kapow!)
Update 2: You might want to add welfare reform and illegal immigration to Rudy's list of conservative wrongs. A couple of things I grabbed from the aforementined RedState comments section: On September 11, 1996 (ironic, no?) Giuliani delivered a speech giving rather tepid support to the vaunted welfare reform bill signed by then President Bill Clinton. Besides not really being strongly for it, despite his current claims to welfare cutting fame, Giuliani also delivered this interesting aside:
... there is one aspect of the bill that has immediate application, and one that I believe raises serious constitutional and legal questions. And it is part of the Bill people pay very little attention to, and I'm not certain many knew it was in the bill when they passed it. It's a provision that attempts to reverse an executive order that New York City has had in existence since 1988 which basically says that New York City will create a zone of protection for illegal and undocumented immigrants who are seeking the protection of the police or seeking medical services because they are sick or attempting to or actually putting their children in public schools so they can be educated.
New York City's Executive Order 124, signed by Mayor Koch in 1988 protected people in that endeavor by instructing employees of New York City that they are not to turn in those names into the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That has been the source of great debate from the time Mayor Koch signed it until now. There has been at least three or four attempts by Congress to reverse that executive order.
I'm sure many of you may not remember this, but because I was intimately involved with it I remember it very well. In one of the late versions of the crime bill there was an amendment and the purpose of this amendment was to say that if any city wanted to benefit from the proceeds of the crime bill or money coming from the crime bill, they could not have an executive order like Executive Order 124; they would have to reverse it.
In fact, that same year, as part of an education bill in which education funds were being distributed to the various states throughout the country there was a provision included in it that said if you did anything like Executive Order 124 and give this kind of protection you would be deprived of funds for education and, due to very strong lobbying efforts, I'm delighted to say these provisions were defeated in the past. ...
Hm... so the crime bill that Bill Clinton signed prohibited giving special 'zones of protection' to illegal immigrants, but Giuliani opposed it? And he was advocating such zones of protection, giving illegal migrants access to police, medical and educational services, five years to the day, before 9/11, yet now, he says the Fort Dix Three are a reason to secure the borders... are you GOPers sure this guy is a conservative?
By the way, Giuliani's camp has issued a statement on today's "path to citizenship" compromise that's as ambiguous as Rudy's MSNBC debate answers about abortion.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
