I've taken many jabs at the ACLU for defending perverted freaks now here's the HRC following their lead.
By Reduxx Team February 16, 2024
A registered child sex offender was welcomed at the Human Rights Campaign’s North Carolina Dinner gala last week, just months after a controversy involving him being awarded a top LGBT advocacy prize. Chad Severance-Turner, a former youth minister, is currently the Chief Executive Officer at the Carolina LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce.
On February 10, the Human Rights Campaign in North Carolina held its annual dinner gala, with a number of top LGBT activists in attendance. Among the speakers at the Bank of America-sponsored “Without Exception” event was HRC Press Secretary Brandon Wolf and Democrat State Senator Lisa Grafstein.
But among those featured in attendance was Chad Severance-Turner, a registered child sex offender who has managed to rise to prominence as an LGBT advocate in North Carolina.
As previously reported by Reduxx, Turner was first accused by three boys of sexual abuse in 1998.
According to a GoUpstate report on the case from 2000, all of the victims who had come forward had met Turner through his position as the music director at the New Harvest Church of God in Gaffney, South Carolina. The cases were tried separately due to the nature of the charges, and Turner was ultimately only convicted on one offense.
Of the incidents Turner was convicted on, a 14-year-old boy had testified that Turner had invited him to spend the night at his house in the nearby community of Bessemer City, North Carolina. The victim stated that during the visit, Turner had questioned him on how he’d feel about a man performing oral sex on him.
Turner, wearing a silver vest, at the February 10 HRC Dinner.
“I thought he was joking,” the boy told the court. He explained that Turner frequently questioned him about sexual acts between men and women, which upset him because of the man’s position in the church. The victim continued that, following a revival meeting, he and Turner stayed overnight at the home of one of the other alleged victims.
The teen says he awoke to find Turner fondling his genitals, but didn’t immediately report it due to shame.
The second minor, who said he was 15 when the incident occurred, stated he was invited to Turner’s home where the older man showed him a pornographic video of a man and a woman having sex. He then said that later that night, after he and Turner went to sleep in the same bed, he woke up to find Turner fondling him.
The third alleged victim, who was also 15 at the time, said Turner had made the same advances to him over a three-week period when he stayed in the boy’s home. The minor said Turner had fondled him several times.
“He told me if I ever told the pastor, he’d make me look like a fool and a liar,” the boy said.
Turner’s registration with the North Carolina Sex Offender and Public Protection Agency.
During the trial, Turner’s defense attorney, Thomas Shealy, accused the boys of perpetrating a “witch hunt,” and asserted that it was suspicious that there was a few month delay between them being sexually abused and them going to their parents.
Turner was ultimately convicted on the charges related to the first victim, and sentenced to 10 years in prison for committing lewd acts on a minor under the age of 16. He served 2 years behind bars before being released on parole and being ordered to the sex offender registry.
Since being released from prison, Turner has become an active and notable member of the Charlotte LGBTQ advocacy community.
In 2012, Turner was elected the president of the LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce, immediately heading efforts to push for an expanded “nondiscrimination” ordinance which many complained would have prevented businesses from maintaining spaces such as washrooms as single-sex.
He was named “Person of the Year” by LGBT news outlet QNotes in March of 2015, but would resign from his Chamber of Commerce post in 2016 after his history as a child sex offender came to light. He would once again join the LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce as its inaugural CEO in 2021, a position he has held since. Under his leadership, the Chamber has secured partnerships with prominent organizations like Fifth Third Bank, NASCAR, Duke Energy, Wells Fargo, Sonoco, and Novant Health. He was also recently appointed by Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles to serve on the city’s Business Advisory Committee.
Turner has previously been awarded an honor by the Human Rights Campaign at their annual gala, though at the time, HRC officials refused to state whether they were aware of his child sex offender status prior to giving him the award.
Most recently, Turner was honored with the Harvey Milk Award by Charlotte Pride in a controversial move that was quickly reversed after Reduxx reported on his pedophile past.
8 notes
·
View notes
because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
50K notes
·
View notes