The Reverend Jesse Jackson

Shakedown Artist extraordinaire.

The disgusting thing about Jesse was the fact that he dropped out of seminary in his first year (probably in his first semester), and instead of setting himself to his studies like any other ordained minister, he started his own denomination and ordained himself.

I didn't know this till I heard Jane Chastain, a very rightwing conservative talkshow host but a VERY good and reliable source of information, claim it on her radio show in the late Nineties. I went on the internet looking for any evidence that he'd been properly ordained and found zero. He did belong to his own denomination, and he did drop out of seminary without earning a single credit.

Today, however, if you look at his wikipedia entry, you'll discover what was heretofore an unknown fact: Jesse had been ordained in 1968 by the Baptist Church. I see this has been changed again. His followers are utterly determined to wipe out the fact that he ordained himself, or perhaps the denomination he started and headed himself ordained him, same thing. At any rate, they keep changing the assertion back to "the Baptist Church ordained him", and some smarter people keep trying to nudge it closer to the truth.

The Baptist Church cannot have ordained him. There is no central authority among the Baptists that ordains anyone. Individual churches can hire ("call") a would-be minister (I suspect that only a renegade church would have hired Jackson with no theological background), let him serve for a time while they decide whether to ordain him or not, and then make the decision to confer ordination upon him. No one is ordained unless he belongs to a church. Jackson was never called by any Baptist church. Remember, he had his own denomination he could shake down for donations, he never sought ordination by any Baptist church.