In the Herald-News of Joliet, Illinois there’s a most disturbing headline: Shorewood teacher arrested on child grooming charge; placed on leave. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis:
An area teacher was arrested Friday on a felony charge of grooming.
What’s “grooming”? It’s described later in the article:
Grooming occurs when a person knowingly uses a device or online service “capable of electronic data storage or transmission to seduce, solicit, lure or entice” a child, according to state law.
Egad! Who was arrested? The newspaper says:
According to Shorewood police, Lemuel V. Elechicon, 51, of Crest Hill, sent inappropriate text messages to a 13-year-old girl. Authorities would not confirm if the girl was one of Elechicon’s students at Trinity Christian School in Shorewood.
A 13-year-old girl? What kind of school is it? Are they — gasp! — Darwinists? This is the school’s website: Trinity Christian School, which says:
At Trinity Christian School our desire is to assist you, as parents, with the tremendous responsibility you have to rear your children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” We see our part in the task as providing an atmosphere and context where sound, challenging academics can be presented from a perspective that honors God and views biblical Christianity as the truth of life.
Their Mission and Vision page has a Statement of Faith, which proudly declares:
WE BELIEVE in the scripture of the Old and New Testaments as the only infallible and authoritative Word of God, inerrant in the original writings, and that they are of supreme and final authority in faith and practice.
It sounds like a fine creationist school. But who is Lemuel V. Elechicon, the teacher accused of grooming? The school’s Faculty and Staff page says:
Mr. Elechicon holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Elementary Education and Biblical Studies from Faith Baptist Bible College in Ankeny, Iowa. With diverse experience, he has taught all subjects from 4th grade to 8th grade, and has specialized in science and biblical creationism since coming to TCS in 2004.
This is very confusing. We have a fine creationist school, and Elechicon has all the credentials to be a fine creationist teacher. How could this “grooming” event possibly occur? What’s going on here? Back to the newspaper. They say:
“We are working with police to investigate the situation,” Trinity Christian School Board Chairman Frederick S. Alexander said in a written statement issued Saturday. “Mr. Elechicon has been placed on administrative leave and will remain on leave until the investigation is complete. Please understand, we cannot comment further at this point.”
The only other news is this:
Elechicon’s court date was set for Saturday.
Shocking. Very shocking. We’d expect that sort of thing if the school were a wicked secular institution, with teachers indoctrinated in Darwin’s godless theory — but that’s not what we have here. The news story makes no sense! Therefore, your Curmudgeon will speculate — from a creationist point of view.
First of all — assuming the girl was a student at Trinity Christian School, our first question is: Why was she being educated? Creationist females don’t require education. They should be kept at home under the supervision of their parents. All girls need to know is that they must obey their parents until they are married, and then they must obey their husbands.
As for Elechicon, it’s possible that he was being seduced by the girl. Think about it, dear reader. He’s a creationist teacher, presumably innocent in the ways of the secular world, who found himself in the proximity of a pubescent female. Perhaps she was a temptress, who led the teacher astray. Women can have that effect — think of Adam & Eve.
Okay, that’s enough speculation. The matter will go to court, and in due course the truth will be known. The sympathy of all creationists must be with the school and the teacher.
Copyright © 2017. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Curriculum and teacher approved and accredited by Betsy DeVos.
The Trinity Christian School proclaims:
We must all, at this stage, maintain a presumption that Lemuel V. Elechicon is innocent unless proven otherwise, of course. But should he be found guilty, I trust the Trinity Christian School will apply the Biblically-sanctioned punishment as set forth in Leviticus–that is, they will only use stones of the specified dimensions.
pretty much blows to hell (pun intended) their argument that if we just become a more religious society bad things like that won’t happen.
Doctrinal Statement on Creation from Faith Bible:
We accept the Genesis account of the six days of the creation week as a historical record and believe that the universe with all that is in it was created by God; and we affirm that living creatures were made according to their kinds and were not produced by some process of evolution.
We believe that marriage was divinely ordained to be the lifelong and exclusive union of one man and one woman, and we affirm that the Scriptures command that sexual intimacy be reserved for this Biblical marital relationship alone, condemning all other forms as sexual immorality. We believe that God created both male and female, and that He designed gender distinctions between men and women, including the Biblically-defined and distinctive roles of husband and wife. Since gender distinctions are rooted in divine order, changing or disguising one’s inherited sex (and correlated gender) reflective of this order transgresses God’s design. We believe in the sanctity of life of all human persons, including the unborn, ailing, and aging.
They also believe in the “Lake of Fire”. Their science department, such as it is, is run by a retired engineering dean from Iowas State…
I can guarantee you this was not the dude’s first rodeo.
This is the kind of thing that happens to those who have names like a character from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.
Friends – have you lost your senses?
How can you possibly make light of this? In what possible context is this the stuff for making jokes or poking fun at expenses of creationists (or anyone else for that matter)? Where is your sense of perspective? Where is your shame?
The alleged crime is child sexual abuse. Since when was this a laughing matter?
I’ll stand first in-line to call out the lies and chicanery of creationists, but this newspaper article deals with a very serious crime. It simply irrelevant whether the teacher might have been was a creationist, or whether the school might have been creationist, or whether the child attended the school, or even whether the child might have been a creationist.
In Australia, we have a “Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse”. It has been running since January 2013 – 4 years – and it’s work is still unfinished! I hesitate to say why it’s work is unfinished – it is certainly not for want of effort. But please don’t think that this is a problem only in Australia, I venture to say that your own countries would fare no better if they were to undertake a similar investigation.
SC, I urge you to edit this post. You should not/cannot remove it – what’s done is done. But please reconsider whether it is appropriate that this post should be written as a source of fun with which to attack creationists or any other group or institution.
Who is saying it isn’t a crime, Ted? Who mentioned that the crime was okay because of who the victim is?
The background is not irrelevant.
The point is that sending your child to church or to a church school – even a fundamentalist church school that believes in hell – won’t protect them from predators. Private schools often have much lower standards for teachers and other employees than public schools. Too many people believe that if people claim they are Christians that they can be trusted, they can’t.
Michael, I do agree with this – there is enough evidence (worldwide) to support it. But please, if that’s the point of the post then there’s no reason to even remark on the event, let alone create a post. No, IMHO, the post is written with strong tongue-in-cheque style. The intent is “stick it up” creationists and it is a low point in an otherwise fine blog.
tedinoz asks
I first read your post as a very cunning meta-satire on a satire—but now, I’m not so sure. If you’re pulling my leg here, you’ve done so brilliantly!
But, in case you are in earnest here, then permit to offer a brief introductory course: Satire 101. Our textbook for the lecture is Swift’s celebrated A Modest Proposal, which is at once hilariously funny and deadly serious, which is the hallmark of effective satire arising from what Swift characterised as sæva indignation (‘savage indignation’) about human foibles and failings. Does anyone suppose that Swift trivialised the horrors of widespread starvation and poverty? Of course not! His satiric ‘proposal’ far better exposed a social evil than any of the earnest pamphlets by contemporary ‘projectors’ who singularly lacked understanding of—or compassion for—the grotesque ills of the age.
No one here doubts for a moment that child abuse is an extremely serious problem (just as mass infant mortality from starvation in Ireland was in Swift’s day) and, as in Australia, in the UK there is fresh awareness that the problem is far more widespread than had been thought. And one of the conditions that historically permitted this evil on such a scale was precisely the cloak of sanctity and righteousness afforded to abusers by a range of religious institutions—the same institutions, in fact, which claimed a monopoly on virtue and actively denounced secular humanism as the source of all ills. Such hypocrisy needs to be exposed and rendered unacceptable, and that is what satiric ridicule does.
Consider: Every time Creationists trots out their pathetic ‘No Darwin, no Hitler’ lie, they utterly trivialise the real horrors of the Holocaust and outrageously abuse the victims thereof. But merely piling on and proclaiming that abuse has no effect. Far better, IMHO, to expose both the vacuity and the offensiveness of their claim is to play it back to them with the equivalent (and equally offensive and fallacious) claim of ‘No Wright Brothers, no 9/11’, or ‘No Jesus, No Jonestown.’
And I think one should have some concerns, as an Age of Endarkment encroaches upon us, about the fashion for mass ‘piling on’ of public outrage and rush to judgement. I will not be at all surprised should it turn out, at trial, that the Creationist teacher named in the article above is indeed found to be guilty (it seems likely, given the evidence made public so far by the police)—but as I said in my previous post, until that trial a presumption of innocence is required by any reasonable system of jurisprudence. It is alarming to me to witness how rapidly allegations become facts (or alternative facts) via social media and widespread moral panic whipped up, sometimes in error, and sometimes inflicting genuine damage (cf. the recent ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory).
But the real point of the satire here—the ‘savage indignation’—is that reasonable grounds have been found for an arrest on felony charges of an individual whose employing institution does not admit of the possibility. That, surely, is a supremely worthy target !
…But as I said, if you were pulling our legs—man, did I fall for it!
Well, the Forbidden Mickey did mow the lawn for me there.
Just aside then, from the news bulletin it doesn’t occur that any sexual abuse actually had taken place (yet), or the charge wouldn’t have been ‘grooming’ but, well, abuse.
tedinoz says:
I thought about that while I was writing the thing. It may have bothered me more than it did you, because I spent more time writing it than you did reading it. In my defense I’ll make a couple of points: (1) No sane person will misunderstand the point of my post; and (2) I demonstrated how creationists routinely react to news of rape, school shootings, or any other outrageous activity.
As with every kind of humour the big question of this satirical blogpost is: who is at the butt end of the joke? The victim or the powers that be in the social environment of the victim?
Obviously the latter.
SC has done nothing to harm the victim. On the contrary, this school can fatally weaken this satire in a very easy way: full cooperation with criminal investigation (in stark contrast with for instance the RCC) and unconditionally taking sides with the victim.
Then suddenly our dear SC is at the butt end of his own joke and then I’ll immediately admit that he deserves it. Then. Not before.
“if that’s the point of the post then there’s no reason to even remark on the event, let alone create a post.”
Oh? Not making clear that a social environment that claims to be holier than Jesus himself does not protect from child abusers is no reason to create a post? This suggests that Ted is the one whose ethical and empathical priorities are wrong, not those of our dear SC.
Well, in any case the timing of Elechicon’s arrest on Holy Friday with court date set for Saturday portends doom for the unfortunate tutor. Where does one find competent legal counsel on a Saturday?
And after all, Elechicon should be granted at least some grace for his actions: The Easter observance practiced by Christians is, we know, named for the Anglo-Saxon Pagan celebration of ‘Eostre,’ – the name of the goddess of spring.
I would also add that creationists and their anti-science anti-reality worldview harms children as for one it simplifies things into a Nancy Reaganesque “just say no” campaign leading to teen pregnancy, STDs, drug use, gun violence, etc. because they believe education will cause a behavior rather than prevent it – or permit people to engage in it responsibly.
“It simply irrelevant whether the teacher might have been was a creationist…”
Except that proponents of creationism in school make explicit claims regarding moral outcomes.