Meet Paul Irwin, the president of the American Bible Society.
How’s things, Paul? Had better days? Sorry to hear that…
The American Bible Society, the Christian charity based in Manhattan, announced on Tuesday that its president, Paul G. Irwin, and chief financial officer, Richard B. Stewart Jr., had been placed on paid temporary leave at the request of the organization’s board.
Why did your Board suspend you? Did you bend a Commandment or something?
An article in The New York Times on Sunday reported that the organization paid more than $5 million over the last two years to an Internet contractor with ties to online pornography.
Oof.
Meet Richard Gordon, the aforementioned porn-empire, er, emperor. Hate to say it, but he kinda looks the part, no?
Here’s that pesky New York Times again:
Mr. Gordon has yoked together disparate endeavors that support pornography, the Bible, and prevention of animal abuse — all by marrying the universal purchasing power of credit cards to the respectability conveyed by slick Web sites …
Paul Irwin, the head of the American Bible Society, from 1996 to 2004 was chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States. In his two decades preaching animal rights, Dr. Irwin, an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church, turned the Humane Society into the largest animal welfare charity in the world …
It was toward the end of his tenure, in April 2003, that Dr. Irwin first hired Mr. Gordon. Tax returns for the Humane Society show that the organization paid $881,000 to Mr. Gordon’s new venture, Exciting New Technologies …
[W]hen Dr. Irwin left the Humane Society and took the reins of the American Bible Society, he hired Mr. Gordon again … Between July 2005 and June 2007, tax documents indicate, the Christian charity paid Exciting New Technologies more than $5 million. A spokesman for the philanthropy said that the $5 million in payments involved projects other than Web design, including e-mail marketing and digitizing the Bible, that were performed by subcontractors.
I think the Reverend Irwin has been spending a little too much time in Song of Songs. Just a hunch.
Digg this
Nick Bollea, son of Terry Bollea AKA Hulk Hogan, is currently serving an 8-month term in a Florida jail for the reckless driving that put his friend John Graziano into a permanent coma. And as his phone calls to his mom prove, it’s clearly making him reflect on the behavior that put him there:
