I Have My Concerns...

I sat in on a behavior meeting for an incoming client at work this morning, which in and of itself is nothing particularly amazing. We're about to accept another gentleman with a mental disability to the workshop, and he occasionally has instances of verbal aggression when people aggravate him...which makes him virtually identical to not only every client we have but also every person in the freaking world. All in all it was a pretty by-the-numbers meeting, but towards the end one of his advocates said something that struck me as odd.

Apparently this client (who is now in his mid-60s) was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and, because of this, didn't celebrate Christmas. In fact, he kind of had Santa Claus mixed up with the Krampus - rather than a benevolent entity, he thought of Santa Claus a vindicator character who beat bad children rather than rewarding the good ones. All that is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned - what I do at work iswholly unaffected by the religious beliefs of the clients. However, the liason from the group home insisted that they'd "fixed his problems with Christmas" (apparently by going to great lengths to convince him of the literal reality of a benevolent Santa Claus) and now he's no longer a Jehovah's Witness but instead is rather in line with the rather generic Christianity practiced by most of the other residents at his facility.

That concerns me. Substituting one daft religious belief for another isn't trading up, but more importantly it's not within the purview of care providers to try and alter the religious beliefs of their clients, especially not clients who are dependent on the provider for care, shelter, and privileges. It's an abuse of the care provider's position of authority to alter the pre-existing and long-held beliefs of a client solely to conform to their own tastes. That's not what social workers are for. We're here to help people lead better and more independent lives, not coerce religious compliance from the people we're supposed to be empowering.

FLDS: Mass Child Rape in the Name of Religion...

It's usually easy and fun to make light of Mormonism, one of the more transparently manufactured Christian heresies. Made up by an illiterate huckster less than 200 years ago and pandering shamelessly to his most libidinous and base patriarchal fantasies, Mormonism, and the larger Latter Day Saints movement, is, overall, pretty deserving of mockery. The issue of polygamy is the one that most comes to mind when talking about the Mormons, though the majority of LDS groups have abandoned the practice (somewhat grudgingly). Today it is officially practiced only by scattered "Fundamentalist" LDS groups. (The FLDS, as they like to called themselves.) On closer examination, however, we can see very clearly that the fundie Latter Day Saints movement is far from a laughing matter.

Now, ordinarily I go by the theory that what two (or more) consenting adults to with each other in the privacy of their own bedrooms is neither the state's concern nor my own. Indeed, in terms of adult polygamy I feel the same way - as long as everyone knows what they're getting into beforehand and is free to bow out if they want to, I don't really care what adults do with each other. That goes for Mormons and everyone else. The problem with a lot of the fundie LDS folks, however, is the issue of child marriage. You see, many of the polygamist LDS communities like to "spiritually" wed young girls, some of them not even teenagers, to horny LDS elders that are old enough to be -my- father. Then they proceed to "spiritually" have sex with them, "spiritually" bang out more babies, "spiritually" abandon many of the male children, and then "spiritually" start the whole practice again with a whole new generation of girls. God be praised!

No, wait, that's fucked up.

I shouldn't need to explain why that's different from consenting adults, but I'm going to anyway - A 30 year-old woman who got married to a 40 year-old when she was 9 doesn't count as a consenting adult once she grows up and is still stuck in that marriage. To use a term I don't much care for, she's been brainwashed by her religion and her social situation. It is no different, and I mean no different at all from a kidnap victim exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome. She didn't opt into it at 9, there was no decision-making process on her part, she was thrust into a situation and has been taught that there's no other valid way of living, and now she's being used, literally, to manufacture a new generation of victims. It is child abuse writ large.

Likewise with child abandonment. It's an issue that isn't brought up as much, and the press does the issue a disservice by euphemistically referring to it as the phenomenon of "lost boys. Some LDS communities, nominally for spiritual reasons (of course), abandon or "excommunicate" teenage boys just to get them out of the community. Why would they do that? Come now, that doesn't take much imagination. Any population is going to give birth to more or less an equal amount of males and females, but fundie LDS elders want a large number of the female babies for themselves (spiritually, of course), leaving a surplus of boys. Boys that might, I should note, pose a threat to the harems of the elders. Hence, for any of a number of so-called sins, a large number of teenage boys are conveniently expelled from the community and left to fend for themselves in an outside world that they've been taught from birth to fear and revile. Once again, this is child abuse writ large.

I bring all this up because of a raid last week of fundie LDS leader Warren Jeffs' compound in Texas. Jeffs, as you'll recall, is in prison for arranging the "marriage" of a 14 year-old girl to an older cousin, an arrangement than culminated in her repeated rape. Well, a phone call to police by a 16 year-old girl (who is now missing), brought authorities to the Yearning for Zion Ranch, where they found hundreds of women and children, many of them showing clear signs of physical abuse, living in an insular LDS community. Hopefully this investigation will run to ground this particular group and their "spiritual" practice of organized mass child rape.

There are numerous interesting news articles on this matter, and I refer you to two of them in particular (here and here) because I haven't the stomach to recount the matter myself.

I also refer you to an excerpt on Mormonism from Christopher Hitchens' book God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything, from Slate.com. Hitchens is a firebrand and I don't always agree with him, but his account of the founding of the LDS movement is without any misty sentimentality for the group's religious nature and lays bare its laughable origins. Here's the excerpt.

Russian Democracy: In Name Only...?

Well, the Russian presidential election, such as it is, has been decided, and Dmitry Medvedev (whose name my spell-check just loves) won by what appears to be a better than 70-30 split. It just so happens that Medvedev is Vladimir Putin's hand-chosen successor, and that he has publicly stated that he would appoint Putin Prime Minister if elected. This was pretty much the way it was expected to go down - polls in Russia place Putin just below "sliced bread" on the list of things people like the most - but Russia has egregious problems with candidate registration and media access that call the whole thing into question.

Add into that the strange drawing down of Gorbachev/Yeltsin-era social reforms on Putin's part and it's hard not to be concerned here. Bluntly put, the autocratic, vaguely anti-democracy Putin has managed to extend his political tenure long past his presidential term limit by way of, for all intents and purposes, appointing a new president who had guaranteed him a high level place in the government. It's a concerning situation.

On issues from Chechnya to Kosovo, the Russians have been doing little to inspire confidence in the last few years, and the election today may just be another sign that the country is backsliding into Soviet-era pseudo-democracy once again.

Gillian Gibbons Convicted

The well-lubed mechanism of Sudanese justice has cranked out a guilty verdict for Gillian Gibbons. Presumably due to international outcry, they've elected not have her publicly flogged. Instead she'll serve 15 days in jail and then be deported. All things considered though, deportation from Sudan probably isn't that bad of a thing.

A religion of peace...?

Gillian Gibbons is a 54 year-old British national who has been working as a teacher in Sudan since August. She teaches a class of 7 year-old children. Part of a recent class project involved choosing a name for the class teddy bear. Gibbons allowed the children to decide, and they ultimately decided to name the cute lil' teddy "Mohammed". Sounds nice, huh? A bunch of little kids naming an adorable bear after a prominent mythological figure. Awesome.

Sadly, Sudan lives under Sharia law. Gibbons has been arrested for insulting and/or cultivating hatred for the state religion. The crime is punishable by up to 40 lashes and up to a year in jail. The Brits aren't getting as fired up about this as they probably ought to be, and frankly the Sudanese officials involved just keep spouting off platitudes about how sentencing is far off in the future and how anything could happen.

So just what's going on here? Why aren't the children who named the bear being brought to task rather than the teacher? Hell, why is anyone being being punished for something so silly? I think we see not only the evils of a fundamentalist religious constitution at work here, but also probably a heaping helping for misogyny and disdain for westerners as well. We must especially remember that the Koran itself doesn't even ban depicting images of the prophet Mohammed, nevermind naming cute, cuddly teddies after him.

Once again, we see that the strongest force in the world for cultivating disrespect and hatred for a religion is religion itself, its actions unrestrained and unquestioned, as it glories in its own intolerance and cruelty.