The face of evil

I just finished a book that I'm going to be thinking about for a very long time; Alice Oseman's wonderful, devastating, beautiful, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant novel Radio Silence.

What has kept my mind coming back to the story over and over since closing the last page is not the pair of main characters, Frances Janvier and Aled Last, as well-drawn and engaging as they are; it's a minor character -- at least judging by the number of scenes in which she actually appears -- Aled's mother, Carol Last, whose influence pervades the entire story like some kind of awful miasma.

She's not what I would call "big evil."  Mrs. Last is no Sauron, no Darth Vader, no Jadis the White Witch.  She has no desire to rule the world and mow down thousands.  Her evil is so small as to be almost banal.  She "redecorates" Aled's room while he's away at school, destroying all of his posters and adornments, even painting over the mural of a galaxy he'd created on his ceiling, replacing it with a blank white surface.  She has his old dog put down without his knowledge, without even a chance to say goodbye.  She sends him a saccharine text every single time he makes a new episode of his beloved podcast, about spending his time in more productive pursuits instead of his "silly little show."  She takes her daughter's "inappropriate" clothing and burns it in the back yard, right in front of her.

And each and every time, she has an unshakable justification for why she does what she does.  There's always a reason, and any objections have about as much effect on her as an ocean wave striking a cliff face.  In the most chilling scene in the whole book, Mrs. Last proudly shows Frances what she's done to Aled's room while he's away, saying with a tight little smile, "It's just a few little rearrangements here and there.  I'm sure he'll appreciate a change...  Feels very fresh, don't you think?  A cleaner, emptier space makes a cleaner, sharper mind."

She doesn't even listen for Frances's response; of course the answer is yes.

For the Mrs. Lasts of the world, the answer is always yes.

It's a tribute to Alice Oseman's skill as a novelist that my response to Mrs. Last was as strong as it was.  But why we all feel revulsion at such a character is telling.  It's like an analysis I read a while back of why the most hated character in the Harry Potter universe isn't Lord Voldemort -- far and away, it's Dolores Umbridge.  

Very few of us, fortunately, ever meet a Lord Voldemort.

But all of us know a Dolores Umbridge.  A teacher, a boss, a family member, a significant other, an acquaintance who, given a little power, uses it to tear down the souls of the vulnerable or dependent, and remodel them to suit.  A person who couches it all with a sweet smile that never reaches the eyes and a declaration of, "You know it's all for your own good, dear."

This, for most of us who have read the Potter series, is the real face of evil, not the grotesque, distorted visage of Lord Voldemort.

I know a lot of the reason that both Dolores Umbridge and Mrs. Last made me as sick at heart as they did is that my own childhood was laced through with this sort of thing.  Nothing as overt as what Dolores did to Harry or what Mrs. Last did to her children, perhaps; but the message I got was nothing if not consistent.  "You can't possibly like that music/television show/book/movie, can you?"  "Why are you wasting your time with that?"  "Mrs. So-and-So's son has accomplished so much, she must be so proud of him.  Maybe you should try following his example."  "Why bother with that?  You'll just give up in three weeks when you find out how hard it is."  And, most pervasively, over and over again, "No one wants to hear about that," whenever I talked about what I cared most deeply about, what I was passionate about.

My response was much like Aled's in Radio Silence; hide.  Protect what I loved so it wouldn't be destroyed.  It came out in uglier ways, sometimes; I did my own share of mistreating those who were vulnerable, to my everlasting shame, living up to my grandma's wise if tragic words that "hurt people hurt people."  I became secretive, angry, and deeply despondent.

And it took me years to admit that this subversive attempt to demolish who I actually was and rebuild some new, improved version was nothing short of emotional abuse.

That the Mrs. Lasts in my own life didn't win was more due to luck than anything I did to stop them.  For the past twenty years especially I have been fortunate enough to have people in my life who are determined to nurture rather than destroy, and I can say truly that they saved my life, both figuratively and literally.  

I'll end this post with an exhortation to be that for the people around you; do not ever underestimate the power of simply appreciating and loving those you meet for who they are, embracing their weird, unique wonderful selves without feeling any need to change them.  Drop the desperate need to hem people in, to make them conform to some arbitrary standards of how they dress, what they eat, what music and books and shows they love.  Thank heavens we don't all feel passionate about the same stuff, right?  How boring would it be if every last person had exactly identical tastes, loves, opinions, and obsessions?

I'll end with a quote from someone I've quoted here many times before: journalist Kathryn Schulz, whose astonishing TED Talk "On Being Wrong" should be required listening for everyone.  Toward the end, she has an observation about why different perspectives don't imply that one person is right and the other is wrong -- and how sterile the world would be if that were true:

But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human.  It's like we want to imagine that our minds are these perfectly transparent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds.  And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing.  That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring.  The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is.  It's that you can see the world as it isn't.  We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place.  And the most beautiful part is that we all do this a little differently.

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The God-given right to abuse

In today's post, I'm going to allude to two news stories I ran across in the last couple of days that are so upsetting, so completely nausea-inducing, that I am going to omit most of the details and simply direct you to the links if you want to read more.  (If that disclaimer wasn't enough, let me be blunt: serious trigger warning regarding violence and abuse directed at children and teenagers.)

In the first, a man named Isauro Aguirre was just handed the death penalty in California because he had killed his girlfriend's eight-year-old son.  The reason?  He "thought the boy was gay."

The second was written by the young man who was the target of the abuse.  Rex Ogle, now 38 years old, was given forty-eight hours to leave his home with only what he could carry when he was eighteen.  For three months he lived on the street, eating out of trash cans, sleeping outside in all weather, until he broke down and called his grandmother for help.  The reason?

His stepmother had outed him to his father as gay, and his father told him, "If you choose to be gay, then you’re no longer part of this family.  You want to live that lifestyle?  Then do it somewhere else."

"In my father's defense," Ogle writes, "he had offered me a choice."  The choice was that he could leave, or remain part of the family -- as long as he attended church three times a week, asked a girl out and stayed with her (or another girl who was approved by his father), and he promised to "never seek to associate with a person of the homosexual persuasion."

In other words, lie to the world about who he is.  He realized he couldn't do that.  The result: forty-eight hours later, a man stood stern and dry-eyed while watching his own son walking down the driveway, weeping, carrying nothing but what he could fit in a backpack.

In both cases, the defense by the abuser was that "being gay is wrong."  God disapproves.  Therefore, a true believer has the license to abuse, and still claim that he's on the moral high ground.

Readers will no doubt be fast to point out two objections.

First, many Christians don't do this sort of thing.  Which I grant you.  I know many devout Christians who are, I'm sure, as disgusted by the abuse outlined above as I am.  However, one thing I don't hear often is those same Christians publicly denouncing the origin of such behavior -- and the church and political leaders who sanction it.

A second legitimate objection is that Christianity is hardly the only religion that has condoned violence against LGBTQ individuals.  Hell, in areas controlled by strict Muslims, gay men have been pitched off rooftops; if they survive the fall, they're stoned to death.  Which is certainly true.  But since when is "they're doing it too" any kind of justification?

So the general response is to defend evangelical Christianity against any responsibility for this sort of thing.  The interesting thing, however, is that the perpetrators of the abuse themselves are completely unequivocal as to where the reason comes from.  God told them it was the right thing to do, and their defense is "my holy book tells me what is right and wrong."

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sure, the Bible and the Qur'an both prohibit homosexuality.  The problem is, there are a whole lot of other things the Bible and the Qur'an prohibit that no one seems to take especially seriously, even the ones who call themselves fundamentalists.  I'll look at the biblical ones, because I'm not well-versed in the Qur'an, but I have no doubt the same is true there.  (Here's a list of some of the actions prohibited by the Qur'an, but be aware I haven't checked them for accuracy.)

Here are a few prohibitions from the Bible, along with the relevant verse:

• Eating shellfish.  (Leviticus 11:12)
• Tattoos.  (Leviticus 19:28)
• Marrying after getting a divorce.  (Mark 10:11-12)
• Women speaking in church.  (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)
• A man being uncircumcised. (Genesis 17:14)
• Lending money at interest. (about a dozen different verses address this, starting with Leviticus 25:37)
• Women braiding their hair, or wearing gold or pearls. (Timothy 2:9)
• Coming into church if you're handicapped or "have a blemish." (Leviticus 21:17-23)
• Praying in public. (Matthew 6:6)

The fact of the matter is, nobody's following the Bible to the letter.  All of the inconvenient stuff is simply ignored.  So is the stuff that could get you thrown in jail (such as owning slaves and/or killing them [Leviticus 25:44-46] and stoning disobedient children to death [Deuteronomy 21:18-21]).

So why all the focus on LGBTQ individuals?

Because the idea of two guys or two women having sex makes some people feel squinky.  It has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the Bible.  If it did, you'd find the Westboro Baptist Church loonies waving signs around in front of Red Lobster, and way less of this kind of thing:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons A guy saved by Jesus, Romans cross tattoo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Not to mention way fewer female televangelists like Leigh Valentine, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Joni Lamb.

I am sick unto death of people using their religion to justify being horrible to others.  I don't give a flying fuck what you think about what I should be doing with my naughty bits.  It is, frankly, none of your damn business.  There's also the issue that homosexuality has unequivocally been shown to be connected to brain wiring -- i.e., it isn't a choice and never has been.

So disowning or torturing and killing your own child because they're LGBTQ is about as moral as doing so because they have freckles or brown eyes, whatever the Bible says about it.

It is appalling that we are even still having to fight this battle.  A lot of my LGBTQ friends are petrified about the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy -- as conservative as he could be, he was at least a swing vote on social issues.  Now, with Donald Trump and his evangelical cronies to pick the next Supreme Court Justice?  No one really doubts that once they've established an ultraright majority, the first thing they'll topple is Roe v. Wade.

And the second thing they'll come after is LGBTQ rights.  In other words, unless we're very lucky, there'll be legal coverage for discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

I hope reading this has pissed you off enough to make your voice heard.  We are at a crossroads, I think, when we will either continue down the road of letting an amoral bunch of wannabe theocrats drive policy in this country, and move us further toward oppression and bigotry, or else enough people will stand up and say, "Stop.  Stop right here."

But that will only happen if we're willing to say that.  Loudly.  Over and over, and regardless of the personal consequences.  Otherwise, I fear that we're headed for a very dark period in history.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Prison camps for children

When I considered topics for today's post, the one I was thinking about was so upsetting that I nearly decided to find some cheerful, science-newsy subject to write about instead.  But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I couldn't leave what was first and foremost in my mind unaddressed.

So here goes.  If you're easily upset, you might want to opt out now.

It all started with Melania Trump's jacket.

Most of you probably know by now that the First Lady went to visit an immigrant shelter in Texas on Thursday while wearing an olive-green jacket that bore the words, "I Really Don't Care.  Do U?" on the back.

On first glance, this is tone-deafness on a level that makes Marie Antoinette's infamous "Let them eat cake" seem minor league.  Melania has given a lot of lip service to the Poor Immigrant Children, so to wear a jacket saying "I Really Don't Care" to a migrant camp is either epic cluelessness, or else...

... deliberate.

For all of the ridicule that Melania's gotten, she is not stupid.  There is no way that jacket choice was an accident.  She was dog-whistling her husband's rabid base -- people like Ted Nugent, who said that immigrants are "rabid coyotes" who "should be shot on sight."  You don't just pick up an item of clothing with a slogan in huge lettering without giving any thought to what it says or how it might be perceived.

And that goes double if you're the First Lady of the United States.

And triple if you're then wearing it on a tour of a migrant shelter.

So the jacket was a big ol' middle finger and "fuck you" to the immigrants and the people who support their humane treatment.  But what makes this even worse is that there are multiple (and credible) allegations of horrific abuse at these shelters, so Melania's tour, and subsequent conclusion that everything is hunky-dory, is a lot of whitewash over a situation that is about as nausea-inducing as anything I've read recently.

Let's start with one fact; these children are not criminals.  They were brought across the border by their parents.  Whether the parents deserve jail and/or deportation is a discussion we can have.  But these children are guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I won't go into all the allegations, but if you check out the link you can read about the charges that are being levied against not just one, but dozens, of shelters.  Here are a few, all of which are from children under the age of 16:

• forcible administration of psychotropic and/or addictive drugs, without the consent either of the child or the parent
• forcible restraint -- including one allegation of a child being strapped hand and foot to a chair and left there for two days
• manhandling that left kids with multiple severe bruises
• ridicule of children for being Hispanic or for speaking poor English
• children being gagged or having a cloth bag put over their heads to silence them (there is already a court case regarding a child who died of asphyxiation during restraint; it's been ruled a homicide)
• children being pepper sprayed in the eyes -- one child says it has happened to him seven times

Workers at these detention facilities say all this happens because the kids are "acting out."  Let me ask you a question that I'd like you to give an honest answer to; if you were fourteen years old, were separated from your parents, kept in unsanitary conditions (many of which have no air conditioning), were ridiculed and abused and drugged, wouldn't you act out?  Wouldn't you fight back?  Wouldn't you try to escape?

I sure as hell would.

One fifteen-year-old, who fled Guatemala to escape an abusive father and child labor, said, "The detention center makes me feel like an animal.  The conditions at the detention center are terrible."  A boy from Honduras said, "I want us to be treated like human beings."  An eleven-year-old named Maricela said, "I do not feel safe here.  I would rather go back to Honduras and live on the streets than be at Shiloh [Treatment Center in Virginia]."

Shortly after giving her sworn statement about the abuse she and others have received, Maricela was transferred from Shiloh to another facility.  Her current whereabouts are unknown.

Elissa Steglich, a clinical professor of psychology at the University of Texas Immigration Clinic in Austin, is unequivocal.  She said, "We've ensured there will be lifelong damage to these children."

Remember what I started with?  The children are not criminals.  But we're treating them like they are.  Worse, actually.  At least there are standards in prison to make sure the guards aren't abusing the prisoners, and the prisoners have at least some recourse if abuse occurs.

Here?  What recourse do these nameless, faceless children have?

What we've heard from the powers-that-be is nothing more than lip service.  The Republican leadership -- which has been shouting "all lives matter" for the last two years, and based their anti-abortion stance on "compassion for the poor children" for a hell of a lot longer than that -- has shown that in their view human rights begin at conception and end at birth.

And if you have brown skin, you probably don't even get that grace period.

It seems to me that we've reached a critical point, where we are establishing who we have become as a nation, whether we will be true to the idealistic "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free" that appears on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, or if we've decided that our identity is something darker, more insular, more selfish.  If we choose the latter, there may be no turning back.

So, to go all the way back to what started this post: yeah, Melania, it's pretty obvious you, and your husband, and your husband's hand-picked leadership, "don't really care."  You may as well stop pretending you do.

As for me, I care a lot.  And I can only hope that the fact we are currently being led by a family of lying, cruel, narcissistic grifters is not going to mark the end of America the Compassionate in the history books of the coming centuries.

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This week's recommended read is Wait, What? And Life's Other Essential Questions by James E. Ryan.  Ryan frames the whole of critical thinking in a fascinating way.  He says we can avoid most of the pitfalls in logic by asking five questions: "What?"  "I wonder..." "Couldn't we at least...?" "How can I help?" and "What truly matters?"  Along the way, he considers examples from history, politics, and science, and encourages you to think about the deep issues -- and not to take anything for granted.

State-supported abuse

In the past few years, the religious right has cultivated an attitude of persecution amongst its followers.  It's worked; we hear over and over about the War on Christmas, how anti-discrimination laws are restricting the rights of the religious, even how the Evil Federal Government and Their Activist Judges are plotting to round up Christians and put them in jail for their beliefs.

And instead of being laughed into well-deserved obscurity, these ranting loons have actually convinced large numbers of apparently sensible people that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States, despite the fact that 83% of Americans self-identify as Christian.  Also despite the fact that churches and church property are tax-exempt.

And also despite the fact that in many states, Christian private schools receive little to no oversight from state education departments.

I didn't realize the extent to which this can go awry until I read the exposé published last week in the online news source Alabama.  Written by Anna Claire Vollers, this article is entitled "Former Students Share Harrowing Stories of Life Inside Alabama's Worst Religious Private School," and was as gruesome and hard to read as the title would lead you to believe -- but I strongly urge all of you to read it, because it's brilliantly written and there is more to the story than the few details I have room for in this post.

Under the guise of providing religious guidance and education to troubled teens, the Restoration Youth Academy of Prichard (outside of Mobile, Alabama) was allowed for years to engage in practices that as an educator I can only describe as "destroying children."  Teenagers were shackled, beaten, put in solitary confinement for speaking up for themselves or others, deprived of food and clothing.  One 14-year-old was confined naked in an "isolation room;" a girl made to stand in front of the others while the leaders called her derogatory names.   The only curriculum provided was ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) which is an ultra-fundamentalist school curriculum that teaches young-earth creationism and that anything other than traditional gender roles is sinful.

Lucas Greenfield, who when 14 was locked into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot room with blank walls and a single bare light bulb, said, "When you're inside a tiny room where all you can see is four walls, you start – I won't say hallucinating, but you start going crazy.  All you think about is, what's the best way to kill myself?  Is there any way out of this?  This is ridiculous.  I hope I die...  This kind of program should not be allowed to exist.  All because you put a cross on top of a building and call it a Christian program, we're supposed to overlook all that happens in those places?"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are stories of mandatory boxing matches, often deliberately pitting younger and weaker children against stronger and more aggressive ones.

"They'd have the bigger kid beat the shit out of the other kid," said Greenfield.  "They'd make us form a big circle. You can't get out and you can't get back in.  They would always have somebody, normally me, pray before we'd have the boxing match. Will [head instructor William Knott] told me to pray nobody got killed.  I was like, really?  You're the one making them fight."

Greenfield is one of the lucky ones.  He was freed in 2015, and has completed his high school diploma, and has plans for his future.  Others still suffer from PTSD and anger issues.  Many have dropped out of the public schools to which they were transferred after being released.  Several have retreated into drug abuse.

And all of this went on for years, with the state turning a blind eye.  Vollers writes:

Alabama law (Code of Alabama 16-1-11.1) says state regulation of any religiously affiliated school would be an unconstitutional burden on religious activities and directly violate the Alabama Religious Freedom Amendment.  State law also says the state has no compelling interest to burden nonpublic schools with licensing or regulation. 

While Alabama does have a few basic reporting requirements for private schools, it exempts those that are church schools in every instance.  Teachers do not have to undergo background checks and schools do not have to be inspected.  While many church-affiliated schools do choose to pursue licensing or accreditation by outside agencies, it's not a mandate in Alabama.

The good news -- if we can call anything connected to this nightmare "good news" -- is that Restoration Youth Academy has been closed, and its owner, Pastor John David Young, head instructor William Knott, and guidance counselor Aleshia Moffett, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse.  They are scheduled to stand trial this fall, and astonishingly, deny all wrongdoing.

What sickens me most about all of this is that these three monsters spent years overseeing the ruin of children's lives, and because they are a "religious institution" the state made no effort to check on what they were doing.  There are children who were imprisoned in RYA (yes, I use the word "imprison" deliberately, although people in prison are treated more humanely than this) who will never recover.

It's time that state and federal officials recognize that religious institutions, like any human-created and human-run endeavor, can be wonderful and life-enriching or sadistic and destructive.  There is no justification (and never has been) for the government giving carte blanche to places like RYA simply because they're afraid of being accused of a campaign of persecution by the religious.  

Giving proper oversight to churches and church schools and treating them as equivalent to any other organization aren't encroaching on "religious freedom;" it's doing what government should do, which is to protect the rights and safety of the citizens from the unethical, unscrupulous, and as is the case here -- the downright evil.

The least among us

In Ava Norwood's gripping novel If I Make My Bed in Hell, we read about the ordeal of Annabeth Showers, who has spent her seventeen years on Earth under the control of parents who belong to a cult called the Tabernacle of the Living Word.  She is forbidden to cut her hair, read any outside literature, listen to music.  Transgressions are punished by beatings and public humiliation.  Annabeth's journey from repression and fear to peace, freedom, and the right to self-determination is impossible to put down -- and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of religion in the oppression of women and children.

It is also a true story.

I don't mean in the details; there is no such person as Annabeth Showers.  The other characters in the story are equally fictional.  But for those who get to the last page of Norwood's book and heave a sigh, and say, "Well, at least none of this is real," I have news for you.

There are people now, in our modern society, who use the threats of god and hell and sin, and sometimes physical punishment as well, to control children through fear.

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell (ca. 1301) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with the Fort Wayne, Indiana elementary school teacher who shamed a seven-year-old boy and gave him three days' worth of detention for telling another child he didn't believe in god.

Second-grade teacher Michelle Meyer found out that the boy -- who is referred to only as "A.B." -- was asked by another child if he went to church.  He said no, and allegedly, the other child "started to cry."  This brought the situation to Meyer's attention, who instead of using it as a teachable moment about tolerance of differences, proceeded to tell A.B.  that she was "very concerned" about his disbelief in god and about "what he'd done," and that she was going to call his mom.

She never did.  Probably realized that if A.B. doesn't go to church, neither does mom, and so a call home would be a losing proposition.  So Meyer came up with her own way of dealing with the situation.  According to the news story:

Ms. Meyer required that A.B. sit by himself during lunch and told him he should not talk to the other students and stated that this was because he had offended them.  This served to reinforce A.B.’s feeling that he had committed some transgression that justified his exclusion.

And to make matters worse, Meyer had A.B. and the girl whose religious sensibilities he'd offended talk to another adult, who also apparently believes in the Bring Children To God Through Humiliation approach:

Upon hearing [the story], the adult employee looked at A.B.’s classmate and stated that she should not be worried and should be happy she has faith and that she should not listen to A.B.’s bad ideas. She then patted the little girl’s hand.

A.B., who used to love school, is now afraid to go there because "everyone hates him," and frequently comes home crying.

Praise Jesus and hallelujah.

Of course, this is mild.  There's only so much you can get away with in a public school.  But take away the protection conferred upon children by the eyes of outsiders, and you end up with the Twelve Tribes -- a group that sounds so much like Norwood's Tabernacle of the Living Word that the phrase "art imitates life" barely suffices.

In an exposé of this repressive cult by The Pacific Standard, I read with an increasing sense of horror about what these people do to their children out of a false belief based in fear -- the beatings, the terror talk about hell and the fiery furnace, the prohibition against play, the compulsory work starting as early as age five.  Like the Tabernacle, the Twelve Tribes is good at putting on a pleasant public face, running places such as the Blue Blinds Bakery in Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Maté Factor Restaurant in Ithaca, New York.  Their shops have a cool, back-to-the-earth vibe, and their food is high quality.

But you don't see what's behind the scenes.  Children being whipped with bamboo canes on their naked posteriors for minor offenses.  The oppression of women, who are forbidden to use painkillers during childbirth to "atone for Eve's sin."  The message that any doubt, any questioning, any hesitation is of Satan, and will result in eternal damnation.

The article I linked -- which is as hard to read, but as necessary, as Norwood's If I Make My Bed in Hell -- tells about a few children who successfully escaped from the cult's grip.  One girl was so perpetually terrified of punishment that her jaw would lock shut, preventing her from talking or eating, for hours or days at a time.

"If one is overly concerned about his son receiving blue marks," wrote cult founder Gene Spriggs in 1973, "you know that he hates his son and hates the word of God."

"Blue marks," by the way, are bruises.

Freedom of religion, like any freedom, has its limits; when you use your freedom of belief to oppress others, there is something seriously wrong.  As my mother put it, "My rights end where your nose begins."  And the situation stands out in even starker relief when the exercise of freedom of religion involves putting the powerless in a situation that amounts to physical and psychological torture.

It makes you wonder why the ultra-religious are so focused on the reality of hell in the afterlife, doesn't it?  They've already created something very like hell, here on Earth, for their own children.