When Elizabeth Vargas, the ABC anchor, tweeted that she had a trip scheduled to Little Rock and that news was rebroadcast by state Rep. Justin Harris, I figured the story was about Harris — likely his “rehoming” of two children with one of his former employees who’s now serving a 40-year sentence for raping one of them.
Harris seems to confirm that with the Facebook post shown above.
Has Harris sold ABC a bill of goods about his abandonment of children many say he believed were possessed by demons? This act of “rehoming” has now been made illegal by the legislature. Has he papered over the questions about his operation of Growing God’s Kingdom, a publicly funded but religion-laced pre-school that has poured hundreds of thousands into the Harris family pocket while producing criticism from people who’ve worked and had children there?
Harris seems to feel good about his time with 20/20. He has something of a god complex. It has served him well in bullying DHS and winning a surprising degree of influence in the Arkansas legislature. Despite the many revelations, I’m not aware of a single Republican, from the governor down, who’s uttered a negative word about Justin Harris, even as the General Assembly has criminalized rehoming and the governor has called for a wide-ranging examination of DHS thanks to what the Harris case revealed. Will he persuade ABC that HE is the victim of an out-of-control government bureaucracy?
Suffice it to say that our work continues on Justin Harris, his school, child welfare in Arkansas (yes, including oversights and ghastly deaths of children with whom the state had had contact). It will continue after Vargas has come and gone, whatever she might produce.
UPDATE: This post prompted the post below from Harris on Facebook.