Board Launches Investigation into Purity Minister’s Alleged Sexual Impropriety
Dr. Michael Brown, a notorious “ex-gay” industry promoter, pastor of The Line of Fire ministry and insufferable homophobic bigot is under intense scrutiny after credible allegations surfaced of past sexual misconduct. The married preacher-man stands accused of grooming a young woman in 2002 who was under his spiritual tutelage and performing multiple acts of sexual impropriety.
The Roys Report’s Rebecca Hopkins wrote last night that The Line of Fire Board of Directors hired the law firm, Mitchell, Stein, Carey, and Chapman to conduct a third-party investigation into Brown’s alleged misdeeds.
Brown’s catchphrase at Line of Fire is, “Your Voice for Moral Sanity and Moral Clarity.” It seems the good reverend’s alleged immoral behavior stains his fundamentalist reputation and raises serious questions of whether Brown engaged in moral turpitude.
The shocking report details a series of tawdry tactics, where Brown slowly and meticulously manipulated Erin (pseudonym) into increasingly sexual situations. It began with hand holding, instructing Erin to call him “daddy”, and escalated into French kissing, lap-sitting and ass grabbing. In the secular world we call this a lap dance.
Here are a few excerpts from the Roys Report.
- “It was no longer (Brown) was asking for a kiss,” she said. “It was (Brown) leaning down to get a kiss…I knew I couldn’t stop it or I felt I couldn’t stop it.”
- Erin said Brown also began smacking her rear end with his hand, which made her uncomfortable.
- Gregg Montella, who assisted Brown on ministry trips, once walked in on Erin and Brown in his office. Montella said Erin was sitting on Brown’s lap. “I couldn’t understand what I saw,” he said. “I spun around really fast and just walked right out…I thought, that’s odd. That’s gross.”
- One day while at Brown’s house, Erin found a letter he had written to another woman. “The letter basically stated that they were having a talking relationship and how they would dream about having sexual relations with each other and what they wanted to do with each other, how she wanted to wrap her legs around him, how he played into it.”
Brown, for his part, acknowledged that his tawdry actions might have been inappropriate. But somehow the holy man doesn’t seem to think that the alleged butt smacking, French kissing and hand holding was sexual:
“(A)spects of my interaction with her, although totally non-sexual in every way, reflected a lack of judgment on my part,” Brown wrote. “(I)f it’s true that for 23 years she has carried this pain and I am responsible for it, I am beyond mortified and would plead forgiveness and the opportunity to bring healing and restoration.”
Brown is a founder of the Coalition of Conscience and created the organization God Has a Better Way to harass LGBTQ people at Charlotte Pride. He is a prolific speaker and broadcaster, as well as the author of A Queer Thing Happened to America.
The minister’s “God Has A Better Way” campaign made headlines in the LGBT community when nearly 1,000 supporters arrived in red T-shirts at Gay Pride in Charlotte, N.C. The protestors’ stated goal was to “walk through or surround the [Charlotte Gay Pride] event to evangelize, sing, pray, hand out water and reach out with love to those in attendance while resisting the gay agenda.”
In a 2013 LGBTQ Nation op-ed I wrote of Brown’s activities at Pride:
Brown tried to ruin LGBT Pride in Charlotte. He rounded up a large group of “Red Shirts” (aka fundamentalist would-be thugs) and marched on the festival under the smug and self-righteous banner of “God Has a Better Way.” Presumably, his “better way” is converting happy and loving LGBT people into self-loathing bigots who pray at the altar of discrimination and hate.
In 2012, I debated Brown on The David Pakman Show and said:
“What [Brown] does is he incites people to violence in my view. Just look at his rhetoric… I think it’s this combination of militaristic language and the demonizing of a minority that sparked my view of Dr. Brown.”
During a 2015 sermon at Grace Church in St. Louis titled, “Can You Be Gay and Christian?”, Brown described his dramatic religious conversion: “I’m a Jewish believer in Jesus. God saved me in 1971. I was a heroin-shooting, LSD-using, hippie rock drummer.”
With the zeal of a convert, Brown declared that his mission in life was to, “continue to pursue the vision that has burned in my heart for many years: to raise up a holy army of uncompromising, spirit-filled radicals who will shake an entire generation with the gospel of Jesus-by life or by death”
While Brown became a religious zealot and supposedly cleaned up his drug habit, The Line of Fire’s third-party investigation might reveal that the life of this holier-than-thou “purity” minister is much filthier than his carefully crafted public image would have you believe.