Insurance to cover sexual abuse by clergy is geeting more difficult to obtain. Many insurers refuse to even offer it, and those that do often place all sorts of stipulations on coverage as well as caps on the amount they will pay out for any incident.

Even before the scandal about child sexual abuse broke opem in the Roman Catholic Church, there had been a retrenchment by insurers offering any coverage for sexual malfeasance by clergy, including heterosexual affairs begun because clergypersons crossed the line during counseling.

Our denomination (the United Church of Christ) has re-written its policy book regarding how fitness for ministry will be determined and how cases involving accusations against clergy shall be handled. Many of these changes, quite frankly, were driven by the demands of insurers.

They wanted assurance that the church ordaining bodies did everything in their power to weed out unsuitable candidates and had in place mechanisms to deal with incidents of abuse, harrassment ormalfeasance. Church bodies that failed to follow procedures could find themselves hanging in the wind. Insurers are quite leery about offering coverage since they have little way to calculate the risk.

ar,ar,

which risk is going to increase, since warbots make kids like crazy and put them in the choirs for th sole purpose of charging th filthy rich churches a zillion bucks fer sumthin th preacher didnt even do.

;p