Sour Notes from the Barbershop Harmony Society

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/18/21

            Cobb County resident Bob Snelling is a 77-year-old grandfather of six. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Snelling was a career pilot with Delta Airlines, a State Representative in the Georgia House of Representaives, and a long time Presbyterian elder. As though all of that would not keep a man totally occupied, Snelling is a former member of the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS) in which he was active for over 30 years.

            Snelling delights in sharing all of his hobbies with his grandsons, including his barbershop harmony singing. When Grandson #6 became 12, Snelling took him to a rehearsal of the local chapter of the BHS, the Big Chicken Chorus (BCC), where he was immediately welcomed. The grandson soon acquired a serious interest in BCC, noting that the rehearsal times were like “walking into a roomful of Grandfathers.”

            Sadly, however, it turned out that one of the BCC members was a sexual predator, a fact that came to light about two years after the grandson began participating in the group. Abused by this predator, the grandson possessed, in Snelling’s words, “the courage to face the abuser in court.” The abuser is currently serving a sentence in the Georgia State Prison System.

            Although the predator was brought to justice, Snelling is on mission telling how his local BHS chapter reacted to his grandson’s charges. On the morning of August 29, 2019 to the complete surprise of Snelling and his family, the perpetrator arrived in the court room accompanied by three members of the local BHS. The purpose of those members appearing was to serve as character witnesses in hopes of getting the perpetrator’s sentence reduced. All three testified. Knowing well the BHS Code of Ethics and its Youth Policy, Snelling concluded that the witnesses had violated both.

            To honor his family and to respond to the blindsiding of the witnesses, Snelling filed an ethics complaint with the BHS Ethics Committee. Of particular concern to Snelling and his family was the fact that one of the three witnesses was a local high school choral music teacher. According to Snelling, the music teacher called his grandson twice during the week of the hearing trying to get him to soften his testimony.

            The BHS Ethics Committee concluded that none of the three witnesses violated BHS policy or ethics. According to Snelling, they reasoned that because the witnesses’ testimony was legal it was therefore ethical. After receiving the Committee’s decision, Snelling filed an appeal with the full Board of Directors and was disregarded a second time.

            Snelling’s take on the series of events is that the BHS enables sexual offenders and that its Code of Ethics and Youth Policy are “eyewash and no more than a paper tiger.” Also, when the abuse occurred his family received no support from anybody inside the BHS either locally or nationally. Any support given by members was for the convicted perpetrator.

            In my conversations with Snelling, a former colleague in the Georgia House of Representatives, he drew my attention to American lawyer and gymnast Rachel Denhollander who was the first to accuse Dr. Larry Nassar of sexual assault when she was 15. Nassar, the former Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics doctor, was convicted and sentenced to 175 years for his cumulative crimes. Snelling recalled how Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias denied charges made about his sexual deviancy which his ministry acknowledged soon after his death. Snellings’ point was to indicate how rampant the problem of sexual assault is.

            Snelling asserts that not only was his grandson harmed by the sexual predator; his entire family was as well, given the emotional trauma that accompanies such crimes which can last a lifetime for victims. “The BHS ignored the injuries it caused and rationalized its own lack of responsible action in not enforcing its own policies,” Snelling claims. “They demonstrated to the world that, in disregarding their own Youth Policy and Code of Ethics, the moral fiber of the BHS is not only negligible; it is non-existent.”

            In a letter to churches and businesses that host BHS rehearsals at their facilities, Snelling urged them to reconsider their relationship with the organization and to have a full and open review with the leadership of the local chapters using their facilities.

            Readers desiring more details about Snellings’ story or his complaint against the BHS can find complete documentation at http://www.bobsnelling.com/BHSStory. All of the complaint documents and the full court hearing transcript are available for review.

 

Roger Hines

9/16/21

           

 

                       Stay West, Young Man, and Labor On

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/4/21

            Since 1894 Americans have dubbed the first Monday in September as Labor Day. Dubbed, but not necessarily celebrated. For many Americans, Labor Day is merely another day of labor, but at the very least the so-called holiday is an acknowledgement and reminder of the laborers and labor that built and still sustain the greatest nation on earth. Work is what makes things – all things – work.

            In many lands laborers have always been looked down on. When the 300-year reign of the Romanov family ended in Russia in 1917, 93% of the Russian people were peasants. As it turned out, the new communist Soviet system was of no help. As for China, her entire history has included the suppression of the working class.

            Meaningful, joyful work is chiefly a western value. When today’s teens hear the expression, “the West,” they probably think of California or Colorado, certainly not of “western” movies. Their minds probably don’t rush initially to Greece, Rome, modern Europe and America.

            But they should. The West, meaning western civilization and the locations that birthed and cradled it, isn’t just a vague historical term. It’s an idea and ideal that has been incubating and advancing for barely three centuries. That ideal has been cherished not by China, Russia, and Iran but by Western Europe and North America. It is the belief that we can govern ourselves, that political freedom releases creativity and inventiveness, that a man’s home is his castle, that his field or workshop is his domain, and that unelected monarchs, dukes, imams, (today we must add bureaucrats) are no more favored by God than the rest of us.

            One of the West’s chief intellects was neither too educated nor too literary to work. Samuel Johnson, author of England’s first dictionary and a precursor of the work of Noah Webster, worked as a shoemaker, a book stitcher, and a tutor even while he was writing his famous literary works. As Mark Twain put it, “The western world’s first dictionary maker was never too cute to work.”

            Two recent visits to Samuel Johnson’s beloved London confirmed two of my fears about western civilization. One is the fear that western values, including the work ethic, are imperiled by uncontrolled immigration. Not that immigrants are lazy. Most of them are probably seeking work. But according to many London locals in hotels and stores and at least two newspapers, immigration has increased crime more than it has improved the work force.

            The other fear is that both America and Europe, whose roots are Judeo-Christian, are chopping off their roots. Imbedded in those vast roots is the teaching, “He that will not work shall not eat.” Corporations, especially farming companies, are neither nourishing nor promoting the work ethic when they pay immigrants almost nothing, thereby creating and sustaining an underclass.    

            Western values, including the work ethic, came to America by way of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia, not Mecca, Tehran, Moscow, or Beijing. This assertion is no slight of the Middle East or Asian nations, but a factual observation of the path taken by such values as individual freedom, representative democracy, the elevation of women, freedom of religion, and meaningful, productive labor.

            One could write volumes on the sins of the West, but no one can reasonably argue that the people of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are as free as Americans or as well-fed. As for the economic and religious root-chopping going on in Europe and America, it is being done by progressives, primarily in academia, and irony of ironies, by the corporate world. Universities continue to advance multiculturalism, denying that the culture that built them is exceptional.

            Those who apologize for Western values should read more of Kipling, particularly his “Ballad of East and West.” A lover of India and his native Britain, Kipling believed as did Lincoln in “the mystic chords of memory,” that is, remembering who you are and what brought you to where you are.  “Forget your folks and you forget yourself,” lanky Abe proclaimed.

            When famous newspaper editor Horace Greeley editorialized, “Go west, young man, and grow up along with the country,” he was promoting territorial expansion in America’s geographical west.” God forbid that we allow America-haters, foreign or domestic, to destroy what “the West” means in its philosophical/governmental sense and what it has done for the human race.

            Much labor and new thinking about governance and the value of the individual are what birthed us. The same things will keep Western civilization alive, but only if we truly cherish and defend them. 

 

Roger Hines

September 2, 2021