After the Reverend Henry J. Lyons was accused of stealing massive amounts of cash from the National Baptist Convention, a large black religious organization of which he is president, to finance a life of luxury and mistresses, his lawyer argued in his opening statement that this habit represented a "cultural difference" that the all-white jury needed to recognize. "The customs, the practices, the traditions of the National Baptist Convention allowed him to do what he did." said the lawyer.

[Ed.: Lyons's misdeeds included selling a fraudulent mailing list that supposedly contained members of the National Baptist Convention, but that turned out to be picked out from the telephone book based on whether the names sounded black. One of the names on the list was that of an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. A good deal of the money in question flooded into the organization following the media hoax alleging widespread arson of black churches.]

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