Preacher defies orders to answer questions about controversial home

The Baton Rouge Advocate

FRED GRIMM

LUCEDALE, Miss. -- A stubborn country preacher ignored allegations of child abuse and defied orders to answer questions about his controversial youth home Wednesday. The Rev. Herman Fountain, nervously suggesting that he was ready to go to jail, said it was a matter of "the First Admendment and separation of church and state."

However, Chancery Judge Robert Oswald quietly brushed aside the spiritual-versus-secular debate that has engulfed Mississippi and the South. Judge Osward told the preacher that this was, first, a matter of children -- children and the protection of their basic rights.

He fined Fountain and two of his lieutenants $500 a day each until they answer court inquiries about the operation of the Bethel Home for Children.

Judge Oswald said that children at the Bethel Home, before state welfare officials bused most of the youths away two weeks ago, had been subjected to punishment that "can best be described as cruel, extreme, unreasonable, disgraceful."

"The children here and across the land, have certain basic rights which this court, parents, guardians and custodians, including preachers and religious groups, have a legal duty and the highest moral obligation to protect," the judge said.

Not that his action meant that Lucedale can return to the accustomed quiet of a little (population 2,570) southern Mississippi town. Fountain made that clear almost immediately. "I have no intentions of paying any fines. I didn't do anything wrong."

The 38-year-old Baptist preacher, a short unsophisticated man with a crew cut and a worn, gray suit, has been at the center of a religious and legal confrontation since June 10 when state welfare officials, prompted by complaints of abuse, tried to remove the children from the 28-acre complex outside Lucedale. After a tense confrontation in which Fountain was arrested for assaulting a state policeman and for inciting a riot, the state took custody of 77 youths.

"We think there were between 100 and 160 at the school, but they allowed and encouraged them to run," Mississippi Welfare Commissioner Thomas Brittain said angrily. "We don't know how many kids are still out there. I think telling those kids to run away was abuse in itself."

It was the second time welfare officials had intervened at Bethel. In 1980, 38 children were removed after a runaway from the school, found suffering from scabies, claimed he was beaten there.

The most recent raid comes amid a larger, contentious debate in the South over control of religious boarding homes. Just four days after Mississippi officials raided Fountain's complex in Lucedale, Louisiana authorities removed 29 girls from the locked gates of Rev. Mack Ford's New Bethany Baptist Academy in rural Bienville Parish.

In 1984, South Carolina had similarly closed down a boy's home run by Ford in Waterboro after complaints that children there were beaten with plastic pipes. Officers found a 14-year-old boy locked in a small cell on that raid.

Two years ago, Texas officials similarly shut down the Church of Fort Worth Children's Home. "They're trying to nationalize and globalize our children," said the Rev. W.N. Otwell, who is facing a contempt citation in Fort Worth for reopening his boarding home. Otwell has been in Lucedale for three weeks, advising Fountain.

Fountain, however, seemed worried and unsure of himself Wednesday. He and his assistants, David Owens, 36, and Thomas McDonald, 29, came to court with similar close-shorn haircuts, and, despite advice from their own attorney that there was no legal shield against testifying in the First Admendment, gave similar non-answers.

Fountain, 38, a native of Oklahoma City, refused to answer questions and instead offered a rambling testimony about his previous sordid life of crime and drugs, including a 100-pound marijuana deal in Miami in which he said he "ripped off" his supplier.

Then, he said, he was saved and 10 years ago was sent to Lucedale by God to begin a school for castaway children. He said that God "revealed to me the separation of church and state."

But his defiant silence left unrefuted the allegations by many of the children who had lived on the 28-acre dormitory, school and church complex that they had been subjected to harsh treatment. Children, in hearings since the removal June 10, have told the judge they were slapped, beaten, awakened at 4 a.m. to run laps around an outdoor track, strip-searched and forced to stay in a small windowless room, sometimes for days or weeks, listening constantly to taped sermons. The children talked of long hours on work crews and said their mail and telephone calls, even to parents, were censored.

Commissioner Brittain said it reeked of brainwashing. "Some prefer to call it programming," he said.

Outside of court, Fountain denied abusing the children, most of whom were troublesome types sent to his care by their parents. "This is just the state trying to control our children. The state is just using this to get a licensing law passed."

Christian fundamentalists like Fountain have beaten back licensing moves in the state Legislature, even after another explosive scandal in Hattiesburg, Miss., in 1986, when charges of abuse led to the removal of 117 girls and the closing of the Bethesda Home for Girls. Passage now seems more likely, however.

The Mississippi Religious Leadership Conference, which includes 14 of the state's dominant religious groups, issued a statement supporting licensing.

"There is no effort to infringe upon anyone's religious beliefs or ministry, no attack on whether a religious group can exercise its call to ministry," the conference said. "Rather, the issue is the welfare of young human beings."

Bethel is among 16 unlicensed children's homes in the state. Welfare officials say there are 28 licensed children's homes in Mississippi, most run by religious organizations including a 600-child home run by the Mississippi Baptist Convention.

Fountain, however, is a fiercely independent Baptist on the conservative fringe of fundamental Christianity. He dismissed the example of Southern Baptists: "They're the ones that crucified Jesus Christ."

Youth Court Prosecutor Mark Maples said Wednesday that he was pleased that the judge has levied fines rather than jailing Fountain.

"Fountain has been begging to go to jail," he said. "He wants to be a martyr."