Child Abuse as Family Value
I saw a post at DailyKos this morning that brought me wide awake quicker than a double espresso.
ABC to Run Focus on the Family Ads, Rejected Ads from United Church of Christ Last Year
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/2/24343/06904
Yes, that FoF, the hate in the name of Christ people. And the comments led me to do a bit of digging on the issue of child abuse in the name of religion. Not a nice way to spend the morning, I can tell you. But it may help to spread the information, and pain around.
So, some interesting ideas from the American Taliban.
My first stop was the No Greater Joy Ministry page and unfortunately,( or fortunately, I’m not sure which), there was enough there for a diary.
This site offers parental advice along with books and a magazine.
It also offers a charming little article called:
Training Roseanna’s Flesh
by Michael Pearl, the male half of the website.
Even the title gives me the creeps. But forging ahead I find a lot of tips to raising the obedient child-some excerpts follow.
Twelve-month-old Roseanna has one adoring mama, one adoring daddy, one adoring five-year-old sister, one adoring seven-year-old brother, and dozens of adoring friends.
But Roseanna has one enemy–her flesh.
Yes, that pesky flesh, she has it just to annoy you too. If she were a good child she’d be incorporeal.
…if you wait until actions become irritating before you discipline, you have allowed them to confirm selfish habits that are then hard to break. You must begin training before the need to discipline arises. There will be fifty occasions a day where you will want to train your one-year-old.
Never too early to break the spirit. And it’s a hobby that never grows stale.
If you are consistent, the assertion of your authority will be such a non-event that others looking straight at you will never know anything occurred.
Which will be handy at the trial later on. I think it’s called plausible deniability?
If your little fourteen-month-old makes an attempt to dismount your lap, and you indicate that you do not want him to, and he makes a protest by jerking away or whining, then by no means can you allow him to intimidate you into compliance. For, by so doing you have allowed the authority to pass to him. You would be encouraging rebellion. YOU MUST ALWAYS BE PERCEIVED TO WIN ANY CONTEST. It is all determined by what the child thinks. If there is a seed of resistance in the child, it must never be allowed to grow. Don’t allow that spirit of rebellion to become profitable.
Heaven forbid.
I keep comparing this with Pastor Dan’s diary from yesterday morning, and can I just say a hearty Bless you Pastor Dan!
Back into the darkness:
If, during the course of a day, no contest arises naturally, you should arrange one. Seek opportunity to thwart the child’s will, to cause him to submit to your command. If you cause him to surrender his will to you twenty times during the course of a day, he will not disappoint you with disobedience in public. Tell him to stop, sit, don’t speak for five minutes, etc. Play the half-hour “quiet time game,” the half-hour “don’t wiggle and squirm game.” Refuse him a treat when he is wanting it badly. Give it to him only when he is joyously submitted to your timetable.
And this is only the school of psychological torture, when this crowd gets into the physical torture they really go to town.
But my stomach can’t take much more and it’s almost time for work so, one hopeful note.
There seems to be an enemy of total domination child rearing lurking about. Or possibly, eight!
On the front page there is a link titled-
Our own set of possessed Damsels
It seems eight or so women have been making life a bit difficult for the NGJ folks! They’ve been warning ministers that allow this group to use their church for NGJ seminars that the authorities are watching this group and that the church may be risking their tax exempt status.
They apparently had a hand on getting the Dept. of Human Services in Tennessee to look into this group, but that seems to have come to nothing.
They have reportedly left nasty reviews of the group’s products on sites that sell them.
While if they have also, as reported, messed about with the web site, this is a step too far but the earlier reported actions give me hope. So I say, bless the damsels and I wish them success.
A good example of creative action, although it doesn’t seem to have made a dent, maybe if it grew to 80? Or 800? Food for thought, I hope.
This is stomach-churning stuff, Vida.
This: …if you wait until actions become irritating before you discipline
Dear god. I’ve known a few “control freaks” in my day, and this is their modus operandi. It’s horrible to advocate it on a Web site.
They really do think it’s a family value. Also, what they probably don’t mention (I didn’t go to the site, kudos to you for wading through it) is that some of these types of folks also think it is imperative that their children be little broken spirited automatons, and obey every command immediately… because in the “end times”, when the mark of the beast is here and all that, christians will have to flee and their kids will have to be quiet for hours at a time.
And other stuff… I had this explained to me by the pastor of an evangelical church once. I looked to make sure, too… he was serious.
On a lighter note… one of the best lines ever:
I have an inconvenient (sometimes) sense of humour, so I found myself swinging between outrage and snickering, while reading this diary ;).
Thanks for looking into this mess.
Thanks for posting this information.
The more people that realize how this fundamentalist philosophy really works the better we will be. Heaven forbid that a child gets to be just a child…
Aaaaarrrgh!
Someone mailed this link to me last night: http://www.abstinenceonly.com
Warning only open if you are not a prude. It’s is pretty comical in a juvenile sort of way.
I most particularly liked the ‘ask dr. frist’ letters. And can almost see him reading them…over and over and over again.
Yes, the Frist letters were good. I also enjoyed the creative use of hot dog buns.
Mini-Manacles?
TotTaser (TM)
Baby’s First Leg Irons?
These people need to be put in structured residential facilities with intensive therapy programs and their children sent to live with loving, chaotic and disorganized famiies with healthy rambunctious children with untrained flesh, and ideally at least one very large, furry matching dog.
ductapefatwa,
amen and halleluja, I have known many great kids who fear going home because mom and dad are stict constructionist/dominionist christians. They feared their parents and all they wanted was to be loved unconditionally, to be accepted as just a human being who was a teenager who needed to be a person. Instead they strived to mold these youngsters into the Stepford wives for kids, cajoling, needling, verbally abusing and sometimes physically abusing them to control every aspect of their lives. And then they wondered why is my kid doing drugs or drinking heavily. Of course it was the Public Schools problem and they are pulled our school and home schooled where there is no freedom of expression and the kid commits suicide and the parent says why did they do that, we loved them. Did you show it, did you express it. I talked to your kid everyday and he felt that he was not living up to your expectations, that you loved him less because he was not your perfect christian.
Sorry, just something that happened to me 12 yrs ago this month.
The kid called me up and hung himself as he talked to me on the phone, tore me up and the parents blamed me for the kids death because he left his note addressed to me and blamed them.
anyway I digress.
Don’t laugh. Tasers for children exist.
I saved a lot about that and other devices, but it’s all on my dead computer.
A baby can be trained into good habits with consistency and love not with beatings and discipline/ abuse.
We knew about a family who made a 6 year old sit at the table all afternoon from lunch until dinner because he refused to eat a portion of his lunch. His stale lunch became his dinner. The “Christian” parents actually bragged about their discipline/ abuse. They were proud that they had broken a six year old boy.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/06/MNGJ4B6UE11.DTL
If anyone wants to lessen a bit the stomach churning that these so called christians do in the name of love to their kids, read this article. It has links to sites of christian parents who do not allow violence or spanking for their kids and advocate love.
That will lead you to other links also such as the gasp revolutionary thought in one article that kids must be treated with ‘respect’. (think that was in an article on law for kids in Norway?)
Now if I had my way for Dobson and his freaks I’d put all the fuckers in jail forever so they could no longer damage our most precious resource-the children.
There was recently a family in the Kansas City, KS area who were indicted and convicted of child abuse and second degree murder in the death of one of their foster children. It seems they took some information from F On the F and really decided that it was in this childs best interest to become totally unable to move. Seems old man Dobson has some idea that immobilizing a child for lengths of time is a proper way to punish them. Anyway I digress, these christians and I use the word loosely, duct taped this child so tightly, binding his chest so much that he slowly suffocated to death. Then these christians had the audacity to claim that God had taken the child into his arms and took him home. Thank you God that these animals are doing a very long stretch in prison here in Kansas. I for one do not want James Dobson or his commentary anywhere near me or my family.
I remember that story but didn’t know that freak Dobson was behind that horrible idea..shoulda known.
The underbelly of all these evangelical churches with their violence towards kids is a national scandal that continues to go unreported in any real and comprehensive way.
It came out in the trial that these animals were faithful followers of the F on the F and its founder James Dobson. Who continues to promote violence against children as a means of controlling them and making them submit. My son is a very willful person, yet has learned respect and judgement and I have twice had to pat his butt with my hand. I hated it but knew in my heart that his running away would not stop if I did not let him know that it was unacceptable. We tried many ways before we resorted to a swat on the butt twice. Since that time he understands he is not to run away from us. We use timeouts and explanations to help him understand the consequences of his behavior. My child is a wonderfully energetic and open person and I am lucky to have him in my life.
Dobson on the other hand would have me spank for almost everything, berate and chide and make my son afraid of me, so I could control him. I don’t want to control him, all I want is teach him how to live and accept the consequences of his choices.
And once again this proves how much the media has sold out..by selecting who they will take money from and what ads to air. Arbitrarily censoring what we see before we even know it. Isn’t that called propaganda?
Chocolate ink,
that is what we called the propoganda machine of the Third Reich. Isn’t it amazing how much resemblance there is to our current media streams. Though the one difference is that instead of Reichmarks, the media is getting good ole green backs and lots of them, though I bet in the not to distant future they will be asking for Euro’s instead of greenbacks.
If I wasn’t lucky enough to have a computer to get my news from, I can’t even begin to imagine how braindead I’d be. Following blindly along with Faux and the rest of the media and not even know what I was missing. Scary thought indeed.
I continue to wonder about the media and the comparisons to Germany. It seems to me that many regular Americans don’t have a clue but people in the media do know that they are repressing and not reporting full stories on everything. Making them much more evil in my book for sure. Greenbacks or Euro’s-just as long as they get paid.
Well I guess I could imagine when I hear someone who parrots Faux or any news story blindly.
Perhaps Dobson needs a looking at, as far as his methods go, I mean that website NGJ is insane.
I’ve thought that for many, many years and he doesn’t limit himself to abusing kids but animals also. If you’ve read how he disciplined his dog…? He, Dobson is just one sick puppy-really sick.
I don’t get why normal people don’t get what a sick bastard this guy is. Why Larry King and others continue to have him on their shows as a ‘voice of reason’ is really beyond me.
This isn’t abuse folks…this is TORTURE! They are trying to “break” the children just as they try to “break” prisoners of war in Gitmo and Abu. No wonder they condone torture of these prisoners. They are doing it every day in their own homes and churches. I have to go take a showere and scrub myself clean now.
I just got back on line and wow, lots of interesting comments and a lot of food for thought. I wrote ABC for all the good it will do, pointing out that the lawsuits and charges relating to child abuse promoted by their sponsor FOF will undoubtedly make their way back to the network. Not sure if that’s the right tack to try but it can’t hurt any.
Also trying to gear up for reading Dobsin’s books, ugh…still, know the enemy.
If you’re going to be reading Dobson’s books I suggest you get lots of comfort food ready(I suggest chocolate) and any alcholic beverage of your choice to help make it through his books.
and check these quotes from the man himself..
spank that christian spirit of love right into the little bastards…
“some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked…?” why do i get cold chills when i read that…? oh, yeah, i remember… it was from a convicted rapist… “she was just asking for it…”
I alternate between cold chills myself when even hearing that bastards name and almost white hot anger at what he advocates for discipline.
When you start talking about pain as a purifer-for a child in particular-you’re heading into some real nasty problems with your own head/thinking.
Does anyone happen to know what his parents were like? or who they were?
I think someone already mentioned this somewhere but it’s no wonder that so many here in this country weren’t bothered by the ‘abuses’ from Iraq and all the photo’s we saw…if they can inflict purifying pain on their own children who they supposedly love why worry about some evil infidels over in Messopotamia, right?