This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth: church scandals and a lot of them; election news; schools news; financial mismanagement details from Fair Park; mismanagement costs the city of Dallas a cricket tournament; a local newspaper pivots away from print; Indy Car racing coming to Arlington in 2026; a local museum opens a second campus; and more.
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Duran Duran, because the Guardian had an article about their 20 greatest songs ranked, which is wrong because it omits their best song.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the frankly bizarre string of pastoral malfeasance that’s been emerging in Metroplex churches this summer, but the New York Times beat me to it. These are not just tiny churches, but megachurches with national profiles like Gateway, which is one of the biggest churches in the Metroplex with more than 100,000 members. Most of the pastors on the WFAA list mentioned in the NYT article committed sexual improprieties and in a few cases, like Gateway, outright crimes, but as mentioned in the Dallas Observer’s follow-up on the NYT piece, one of the more recent cases involves domestic violence. The DMN’s article on the trend last month described the resignations and removals as the result of “moral failures”.
Gateway Church has been the center of these scandals: it came out that the founding pastor, Robert Morris, had improper relations with a “young lady” in the 1980s. Then it turned out that the so-called young lady was twelve when the improper relations started and he was already in the ministry. The latest from the DMN on the case is from the parents of Gateway founder Robert Morris’ victim, who deny that, as he claimed, they supported his return to the ministry.
Gateway’s Houston branch, which is run by Morris’ daughter and son-in-law, renamed itself Newlands Church; Morris’ son, who had been expected to follow his father as leader of Gateway next year when his father was supposed to retire, is starting his own church after he resigned from Gateway’s leadership team. Meanwhile, the mother church is dealing with not just Morris’ crime and the fallout, including a number of leadership resignations, but other suits like one alleging that the youth ministry ignored the grooming and assault of a teen member and another alleging the misuse of tithe money dedicated to missionary work. It’s not a new observation, but one you’ll find repeated several times in these links, but nondenominational megachurches have no safeguards at all, just the honesty or lack thereof in the leaders. It’s absolute power, and you know what they say about absolute power.
And in case you’ve forgotten another big problem about these megachurches and their unlimited power, here’s the pastor of Lake Pointe Church in Rowlett and Forney reminding us that they also dabble in politics, usually against Democrats. The article notes that the church has 20,000 members and the pastor has 340,000 Instagram followers, many of whom will have heard the pastor’s questionably-legal borderline-political commentary.
In other news:
- This Texas Tribune story about flippable districts in the Legislature features several local races: Angie Chen Button v Averie Bishop in Richardson; Morgan Meyer v Elizabeth Ginsberg (my district); Ben Bumgarner v Michelle Beckley in Flower Mound; Mihaela Plesa v Steve Kinard in Collin County. The Richardson race comes in for extra focus because it’s big and showy and Dems keep chipping away at long-timer Chen Button’s numbers.
- The Star-Telegram has a couple of items about the Senate election. First, former Republican Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, Tim O’Hare’s immediate predecessor, endorsed Colin Allred; he also endorsed Mike Collier. Second is a story about Allred and Cruz campaigning in Tarrant County. I had a hard time restraining my eyerolls at Cruz referring to Democrats as communists, but that’s par for the course and not surprising at any event including Tarrant GOP chair Bo French.
- Texas Monthly has a profile of Dallas’ viral congresswoman, Jasmine Crockett.
- You may remember a few weeks ago, Fox host Maria Bartiromo made claims that immigrants were lining up to register to vote in Tarrant County and Tarrant GOP Chair Bo French doubled down. The Star-Telegram also followed up on those accusations, and to nobody’s surprise, found there was nothing to them. Tarrant elections chief Clint Ludwig noted for this story that the double-voters presented by French were folks who had changed name or address, so I worry about his ability to stay in his job.
- There’s a lawsuit brewing in Rowlett about whether a church should serve as an early voting center. Personally I’m in favor of moving voting out of churches, but I’m not in favor of threatening the church’s occupancy certificate to make it happen, as alleged in this case.
- The Dallas Observer has its expected item on the mess that is the Dallas HERO charter amendments and why we should vote against them.
- Denton is considering significant campaign finance reform for city elections.
- A company that makes traffic cameras for the city of Fort Worth has been putting surveillance cameras for HOAs on city right of way without proper permits. Unsurprisingly, this is a big legal mess, both because of the privacy implications of who has access to the camera streams and because it may interfere with gas line access.
- An investigation into Fair Park’s finances shows that the management company misallocated $5.7 million in donor funds, mostly by putting restricted funds into the general funds. The management group thinks they’ve been vindicated of mismanagement charges and is pointing fingers at Fair Park First. The DMN has more and explains some of the details.
- The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction of a Dallas man on Death Row in a shaken baby syndrome case. Andrew Roark’s conviction in 2000 was based on science now considered discredited. This is the same kind of case as Robert Roberson, whose execution date is next week.
- Dallas City Council is all for fully funding DART, our local transit system, unlike many of our suburbs.
- Fort Worth ISD has named its interim superintendent following the forced resignation of Angelica Ramsey. Karen Molinar served as interim superintendent before Ramsey’s hiring. This time she’s going for the job herself, which makes sense given she’s been tapped twice now. The Star-Telegram also has the story.
- You may remember all the trouble Sherman ISD had around the musical Oklahoma! last fall: the trans student, the demand that all students play roles of their assigned gender, the investigation, the superintendent’s departure in May. The DMN got its hands on the third-party report and the whole thing was set off because the now-former superintendent was preventing “same sex kissing on stage”. If former superintendent Tyson Bennett’s job was a victim of the culture wars, it’s because he shot himself in the foot.
- The Star-Telegram is pivoting to the news future, which they think is online. Starting last Sunday, they’re printing physical papers only on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. They’ll prepare an electronic edition every day but the printed paper is no longer sustainable. As a digital subscriber myself, I’m part of this trend, but it worries me even so.
- I like some of the amenities of the Dallas suburbs (more on that in a bit) but stories like this make me realize I’d never want to live in most of them: a Flower Mound bakery featured Harris-Walz cookies and while they flew off the shelves, they also inspired harassment and even death threats. Apparently there’s a Facebook group for Flower Mound that’s all about making the lives of local businesses miserable if the Facebook folks don’t like their politics. Don’t these folks have something better to do?
- The Sixty Strikes cricket event that’s being held in Richardson, at UT Dallas, this month was originally planned for Oak Cliff. Turns out that dysfunctional city bureaucracy bungled the development of the cricket pitch and the cricket folks moved to the burbs to get their event together on time.
- Indy Car racing sponsored by the Rangers and the Cowboys zooming through the streets of Arlington in 2026. The 2 3/4 mile circuit will feature Globe Life Field and AT&T Stadium. More about the launch from the Dallas Observer and the Star-Telegram.
- And the surburban amenity in Richardson, at UT Dallas, I’ve been waiting for: the second campus for the Crow Museum of Asian Art opened last month. I’ve been a big fan of the tiny downtown museum near the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher for years now, and I’m hoping to visit the new, much larger, museum in Richardson later this month to see more of the collection. Note that the Crow in the museum’s name is Trammel, father of Harlan, whom you know in these pages from Six Degrees of Clarence Thomas.