If anyone starts babbling about equality of any kind at your church, excommunicate them without hesitation. Because this is where it always – always – leads:
The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, the first woman to lead Manhattan’s famed Riverside Church, lost her lofty post amid complaints that she brought ministers and a congregant on a sex toy shopping spree and then gave one of them an unwanted vibrator as a birthday gift, The Post has learned.
On May 15, Butler allegedly took two Riverside assistant ministers and a female congregant to a sex shop in Minneapolis called the Smitten Kitten, during a religious conference, according to sources familiar with the out-of-town shopping excursion.
At the store, the pastor bought a $200 bunny-shaped blue vibrator called a Beaded Rabbit for one minister — a single mom of two who was celebrating her 40th birthday — as well as more pleasure gadgets for the congregant and herself, sources said.
The female minister didn’t want the sex toy, but accepted it because she was scared not to, sources said. Butler also offered to buy a toy for the second minister — a gay man in a committed relationship — but he declined, sources said.
In a New York Times article published online Thursday — after The Post began making calls for this story — her supporters claimed she was let go because she spoke up against harassment and sexism. But a source familiar with the investigation said Butler and the church mutually parted ways when her position became untenable amid accusations of misconduct — adding that the sex-toy incident was one of “several concerns that the Riverside Church Council had about Amy’s judgement.”
This is what comes of inclusivity. One silver lining in the coming collapse of the USA is that it will no longer be illegal to burn witches at the stake.