By NICHOLAS NGOLYO of Daily Nation

During the day, he was a man of God, preaching the good news to his flock. But at night, he turned into somebody else, engaging in sex orgies and recording them for commercial distribution.

This is the picture that police painted of a 50-year-old American evangelist who was on Wednesday charged with possessing pornographic material.

   Pastor Thomas Kevin Manton of Dominion International church, in a Kibera court in Nairobi, where he was charged with
   producing an obscene compact disc.

A compact disc

Mr. Thomas Kevin Manton of Dominion International, a church that operates from a Nairobi hotel, was denied bail and remanded in custody until Friday for the police to complete their investigations.

The evangelist was arraigned before Kibera senior resident magistrate Cosmas Maundu and denied the charge. The prosecutor, Mr Joseph Musyoka, told the court that on February 25, this year at Runda Estate in Nairobi, he made or produced an obscene publication — a compact disc — tending to corrupt morals.

He did this for the purpose of trade or for the purpose of distribution or public exhibition, the police alleged. Mr Musyoka told the court that the evangelist, who came into the country in 2007, might face more serious charges after completion of investigations.

Immediately the charges were read to the accused, his lawyer, Mr Charles Agwara, asked the court to release him on bail. The lawyer told the court that they would prove that there was a scheme to extort money from the accused. But Mr Musyoka protested against the allegations.

“These are serious allegations. We don’t know whether the allegations are true,” the prosecutor said. He objected to the accused being released on bail saying the police had not completed investigations.

“The accused was arrested on June 23, 2009 and the police have not completed their investigations. We pray that the accused be remanded in police custody to enable the investigating officer to finalise his inquiries,” Mr Musyoka said.

The prosecutor added that the defence lawyer had made serious allegations that certain people were out to extort money from the preacher, but the claims had not been proved. Mr Agwara opposed the application by the prosecution saying it was not the first time for the evangelist to be arrested by the police.

Earlier, he said, his client was arrested and held at Jamhuri police post. “I have been attending Kilimani Police Station for the last one month. The police said they were waiting for witnesses to record statements,” Mr Agwara said.

Added the lawyer: “One month is a fair time to complete investigations. When he was arrested and locked up at Jamhuri police post, he was released after paying some money. We had even complained to the Commissioner of Police about the case.”

He said that the application to have the accused remanded for three days so that police could complete their investigations lacked merit. “The prosecution has not tendered any evidence for the accused to be remanded for three days,” the defence lawyer told the court.

But Mr Musyoka said that they had several documents they intended to investigate because they had pornographic content. He urged the court to remand the accused saying the police did not arrest the preacher out of malice. The magistrate agreed with him and remanded the evangelist.

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War-Mongerer Bolton — Invade Somalia!

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Writes: BOB HERBERT

Race is like pornography in the United States — the dirty stories and dirty pictures that everyone professes to hate but no one can resist. But I suspect that even porn addicts get their fill sometimes.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

Most of the electorate understands that the U.S. is in sorry shape, which is why more than 80 percent of poll respondents say we’re on the wrong track. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has nothing to do with any of that. The idea that his nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd…[more]

REFERENCES:

Editorial Reviews: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

From Publishers Weekly: In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug.

The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a “package deal,” the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans’ ingrained “stupidity” and willful blindness, unsalvageable.

Berman’s attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the “freedom fries” phenomenon, which he bemoans as “symbolic of an emptiness at the core.” Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality.

From Booklist: A despairing analyst of contemporary America, Berman continues criticism begun in The Twilight of American Culture (2000). One character crystallizing Berman’s thoughts is President George W. Bush, under whom, according to Berman, the U.S. is incipiently, if not actually, suffering a “presidential dictatorship,” a “de facto Christian theocratic plutocracy.” In that vein, Berman undertakes a wide-ranging condemnation of American economic and foreign policy of the past 50 years, which he believes has propelled America into disastrous decline.

That Berman inveighs against free markets and thinks the cold war was partly a dynamic of the Soviet Union acting defensively infuses this work with a solidly leftist viewpoint. In Berman’s vigorous arrangement of evidence, current events are propelling us upon an irreversibly downward trajectory toward a societal situation resembling the Dark Ages. However, Berman offers no positive ideas to reverse this perceived free fall, making his tome more of an alarm than a solution.– Gilbert Taylor

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