Vyckie Garrison's Open Salon Blog

Adventures in Recovery ~ What About the Kids?

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 07:09:56 -0400

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by Calulu

Don’t know about anyone else but one of the biggest regrets I have is that I raised my kids in the madness that was my old cult church. They didn’t ask to be part of that. We, Jim and I, drug them into it with all the best intentions. My two kids ended up being hostages to fortune during our years at Possum Creek Christian Fellowship. We started attending when Laura was 4 years old and Andy was 7 and left when they were 15 and 18 years old. A long stretch of young impressionable years.

Since it’s been about five years since we left Andy and Laura have finally felt safe enough, distant enough from the dysfunction to share with me what happened to them, how they feel about religion and our old church and how it impacts them today. All of which leaves me tearful and guilty, because, you know, as their mom I’m supposed to protect them from the bad stuff out there. Who knew a great deal of the bad stuff was going to be wrapped up in religion and the Bible?

I’ve apologized profusely to each of them, more than once and I’ve done my fair share of worrying about what the future holds for them. I worry for Andy, now 23 and doing his film project to finish up his degree in film making. His subject is an evil zombie minister. You cannot tell me this is not due to the years at PCCF and the hurt. He’s working out his issues in his art.

Laura makes me worry but she’s a much stronger individual than her brother in terms of emotion life. She has had to be because of her illnesses. But this morning she dropped a bomb on me. As I was busy brewing up a pot of coffee so we could start our day she opened up about her years with the missions organization Teen Mania. It was bad, it was ugly. She’d stayed awake most of the night looking at a website named My Teen Mania Experience, chronicling the experiences that Teen Mania doesn’t want you know to know about including the Honor Academy’s ESOAL Training.

It was all she could talk about this morning. She’d been on two Teen Mania mission trips and we’d known tons of kids from PCCF that had spent a couple of years as an Intern with Teen Mania living and studying at the Spring Valley, Texas campus. But I’d not known what they put these kids through. She showed me the news reports of the kids slogging through the mud, rolling through mounds of their classmates vomit and other questionable activities all the while Teen Mania defended it as ‘Boot Camp’ We’re a military family and I can guarentee you that Boot Camp does not make you eat a can of cat food, roll through vomit or suffer unnecessary sleep deprivation in a soaking wet sleeping bag.

My big question about this all was this. How does suffering a 90 hour torture session bring you closer to the Lord and deepen your faith? It can’t.

It can emotionally beat you into submission, take away your desire to do anything beyond survive the ordeal. You will say and do anything to get past that type of abuse, to feel like part of the group, to feel like a winner. That’s the other thing they do, heap verbal abuse on the interns during ESOAL, including calling the ones struggling ‘losers’ and ‘failures’ Some Christian love huh.

After we looked at the website and the video of ESOAL Laura and I sat down and she opened up about her Teen Mania mission experiences, good and a lot of bad.

Our church got involved with Teen Mania the usual route, by taking a group of teens over to a nearby “Acquire The Fire” event. It’s a concert with popular Christian rock bands run by the interns of Teen Mania. The emphasis is on buying their products and making a commitment to go on a Teen Mania trip as well as the usual “Rah Rah 4 Jesus” I read recently that Teen Mania clears about a cool million from each one of these events, something I was unaware at the time.

After attending an ATF event Laura felt called to go on a mission trip to Romania. We checked into it, talked to the Teen Mania people and she signed up. We had to raise what seemed like an astronomical sum of six thousand dollars for the trip. But we did it.

We put Laura on a flight to Dallas Texas to start her 6 week Romanian adventure and that’s where everything started to go haywire. She called me in tears from the Teen Mania campus a few days later. At the time her complaints seemed petty to me, complaints about housing, the heat of the place with no air conditioning, no privacy, you name it, she complained about it. I wasn’t surprised, this was the first time she’d left the cushy nest of our solidly middle class existence and I thought it would do her a world of good to spend a large chunk of her summer in a very poor country.

That summer she called every few days in tears, once she wanted to come home, complaining it was ‘too hard’ Each time I tried to sooth over her complaints and tell her to hang in there, it wasn’t for forever.

Now she’s telling me in detail things I was unaware of. While I knew they weren’t living in the Hilton I did expect safety and basic comforts. Silly me.

The campus description Laura gave me this morning sounds more like something you’d put people in to punish them. Dirty and decrepit campus. They were housed in a huge un air conditioned Quonset hut under the blazing sun of a Texas summer. There were only 6 shower stalls and toilets for hundreds of girls. One night they were woken up by a thunderstorm and told to pile all their luggage up onto of makeshift benches before going back to sleep because the hut was flooding. Flooding and they sent the kids back to sleep? But they only had a stay at the campus a few days so it could have been worse.

But this is how the interns live while they are at Teen Mania, paying to intern at this place that isn’t accredited by any school system in the US. What you can tolerate for a day or so seems abusive to put someone in for a year or more.

Once they got to Romania they were housed in an old school that had bullet holes in the walls. Again, not surprising it wasn’t the Hilton. That doesn’t bother me, what does is Laura’s descriptions of the ineptitude of the leaders, things said and done in those weeks. She said they accomplished exactly nothing on that trip. Most of the trip they sang or did a dramatic skit in a nearby park. What was so horrible for Laura on this trip she says was the unrelenting pressure to conform, that they were constantly hectored, lectured, pushed and pressured by the leadership. It was non stop and there was no down time. She said it was like cult indoctrination.

But the two biggest incidents that stand out to her and frightened me were how sickness was handled. Laura has the same inherited immune system disorders as I do and we made sure to let Teen Mania know that if Laura had a flare up she had medication with her and she would need to take the medicine and rest until the flareup passed, a day or two perhaps. Laura had a flare up, went to her intern team leader to say she needed to stay back and rest. Her team leader refused, telling her to ‘adjust your attitude’, accusing her of trying to shirk her responsibilities with a lame excuse. Laura took her meds and soldiered on and told me nothing about this until now.

The second scary incident took place when the rented bus they were traveling in had a breakdown and started putting out thick black smoke. The smoke poured into the bus over the course of about a block and a half. Kids fainted, people coughed and the asthmatics in the group reached for their inhalers. They finally got off the bus and the Teen Mania leaders took 6 of the kids to a nearby hospital. One of the girls that fainted and had not recovered they refused to take to the hospital, citing the reason as “She’s an anorexic”. Interns had to literally carry her to her room and lay her on her bed.

Two months later Laura became extremely ill. The doctors could not figure out why she was having lung troubles and respiratory infections that didn’t respond to the medication. In retrospect of what happen with the bus I have to say that it must have been damage from the smoke exposure. I cannot tell you how sick inside and guilty I feel over this. Again, I feel like I failed to protect my precious child.

The next year Laura went back to Teen Mania and over to Germany and Poland. It was a great experience with none of what happened in Romania. I asked her why she thought this was. Turns out on that trip they partnered with Jesus Revolution and it sounds like Teen Mania packed away all of their abusive corrosive behaviors. Sort of like those folks that are holier than thou at church yet morph into something quite different behind closed doors.

For Laura it seems that finding the My Teen Mania Experience website is a part of her healing and that can only be good. I hope her healing is swift.

I wish I had checked out Teen Mania with an unbiased eye back then.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum! Comments are also open below.

Read all posts by Calulu!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NLQ Recommends ...

'Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment' by Janet Heimlich

‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland

‘Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement‘ by Kathryn Joyce

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Tea Party Family Values and the World's Greatest Freak Show

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:08:23 -0400

On fundamentalist counterculture & juvenile black market adoption fantasies ...

by Vyckie Garrison @ No Longer Quivering

Do you remember when it first dawned on you that your relatives are all a bunch of crackpots and weirdos? Seems like I was around 8 or 9 — my mother worked all night in the casinos and slept most of the day, leaving me alone to protect my naïve older sister from the depraved advances of Mom's alcoholic boyfriends and worry about my big brother's drug addiction. I couldn't count on my grandparents to help — they were too preoccupied with their own divorce, dating, and remarriage dramas.

"Holy sugar," I thought to myself, "these people are seriously messed up!"

That's about the time the fantasies began. My home, I imagined, was a three-ring circus — and my relatives were the freaks and the clowns. In my daydreams, I was not really one of them. No — surely, I was of aristocratic origin. My REAL family were royalty in a faraway Kingdom and I was born a beloved Princess in a fancy castle with many servants and my own Fairy Godmother. Somehow, I'd been separated from my blood kin as an infant — I was captured by gypsies and sold in a black market adoption — that's how I ended up being raised by this group of crazies! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ABC's Primetime Nightline recently aired a segment featuring the Gil & Kelly Bates family — a conservative, Evangelical mega-family of twenty. The Bates, who are close friends of JimBob & Michelle Duggar of TLC's "19 and Counting" fame, hold to the extreme fundamentalist ideals of the growing "Quiverfull movement."

During the one-hour special, Gil, Kelly, and their children explained the family's lifestyle which, to all modern appearances, represents a throw back to the imaginary 60's-style "Leave It to Beaver" family combined with strict, Victorian Era sexual mores and the atavistic gender roles of ancient goat-herders. The Bates eschew all forms of birth control and adhere to the marriage model of the biblical Patriarchs — with Gil as family leader and Kelly as submissive "help meet." Kelly and the girls adorn themselves in modest, hand-sewn dresses, while Gil and his clean-cut sons teach bible study and participate in local Tea Party politics.

Aren't they lovely? Don'tcha wanna be just like them?

I sure did! I left home at 15 and embarked on a quest to recreate my long-lost perfect, happy family — my REAL courtly family, where I truly belonged. After a false start involving marriage at 16, a baby at 19, and divorce after seven years of abuse rivaling the most astonishing freak show acts Mom's circus family had ever performed — I remarried, found a "bible-believing" church, and worked hard within the Quiverfull counterculture to implement the best of the best biblical family values into our home life. I had six more children. I homebirthed, homeschooled, and home-churched. I submitted to my husband and joyfully sacrificed my time, energy and talents to build him up and help him to succeed. I published a "pro-life, pro-family" Christian family newspaper to inform and encourage other Christians to defend "Traditional Family Values."

In 2003, we were honored as Family of the Year at the Nebraska Family Council's "Salt & Light" awards. I'd finally made it! I had built my own Magic Kingdom where my husband reigned as King and I was his Queen, the children were our loyal subjects and we could all live happily ever after ...

Like the Bates family, we were the perfect picture of the "biblical family values" fantasy — an idealistic vision of big, happy families: devoted husband and wife surrounded by a passel of respectful, obedient children — we were all sweetness and smiles. It is this mesmerizing dream world which energizes and motivates Tea Party Republicans like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann to work tirelessly to implement the "pro-family" theocratic agenda into every aspect of American society: not only in politics, but religion, family, media, education, business and entertainment.

Fundamentalist Christians are convinced that contemporary American society is the World's Most Spectacular Display of hideously mutated, diseased and anomalous freaks. "Step right up folks!" the preacher yells, "and witness a grotesque parade of ho-mo-sex-uals, lesbians, Wiccans, radical feminists, godless liberals, secular humanists, and ..." (congregation gasps!) "Muslim extremists!!"

Simultaneously fascinated and horrified, respectable religious parents scramble to shield their innocent children's eyes and ears from the depravity and corruption of "The World." They homeschool and form special Chastity and Creation Science clubs designed to insulate and isolate their vulnerable young from the miscreants and most depraved elements of popular culture.

It's completely understandable and normal for preteens to create imaginary worlds — their own private, safe hideout where they can dream of nobility, of rising above and doing so much better than the clowns running the Big Top's Museum of Mutantstrosities. The grown-ups watch in silent, knowing amusement as kids disavow their relatives as "psychos" and "bozos."

But when otherwise responsible, Christian adults in recent years set out on a mission to create a radically distinct way of life based on "biblical family values," the resultant countercultural movement known as "Quiverfull" has become an all-too-real Hall of Mirrors horror show.

In my own life, perpetual pregnancies destroyed my health, and my indiscriminate acquiescence to my husband's every whim transformed him from a loving father into a tantrum-throwing tyrant. Burnout and disillusionment led to abuse, neglect, family disintegration and a particularly nasty divorce.

When the dust settled, I took a good look at myself in the mirror. I could no longer deny the strong family resemblance — I saw my mother in my own face staring back at me. After all those years of fighting and denial, I had to finally accept the fact that I really am one of them — I belong to these crazy people. I, too, am a conspicuous oddity — a bizarre spectacle and an embarrassment to my own noble children.

Funny thing is ... these days, I don't mind so much being associated with my misfit clan of circus freaks. Life experience has given me perspective and a deep appreciation for the inevitable realities and desperate circumstances which deformed and mutated Mom and the rest of us into shocking and extraordinary creatures worthy of society's disquietude and awe.

Black market adoption fantasies and youthful idealism are important wayposts on the journey to adulthood. Rebellion against blatant injustice, hypocrisy, moral compromise and the myriad of other common grown-up failure is a healthy manifestation of a kid's personal power and strong moral agency. Arrogant and annoying, yes — but in moments of truth we have to admit, the kid's got a point.

Society sucks. Bigotry, racism, inequity, corruption, greed, depravity, malevolence, and all manner of evil abound. Let's just face the fact that in many ways, the contemporary American social and political scene has devolved to become the World's Greatest Freak Show.

No wonder Tea Party Patriot families like the Bates and the Duggars escape into their own personal fantasyland.

Ironically, with maturity comes humility — along with a profound sense of connection and belonging to that wacky bunch of buffoons who share our DNA. We see our people with new eyes. Sure, Grandma's got a beard and Uncle Stan is a charlatan — Aunt Betty's such a lunatic, she may as well have two heads. But in the end, they're all we've got. That perfect, royal family whom we imagined searched frantically for us for years and never gave up hope that one day we would return to our true home? They're not real. Cousin Roger is real — never mind that he doesn't have a lick of sense and the only thing he's good for is shoveling elephant shit — he's the one who truly understands you, knows all about you, and loves you anyway.

Tea Party family values are the fundamentalists' desperate attempt to deny their own imperfections, vulnerability, and their inescapable mortality. Sure it hurts that they look down on us regular folk — those of us who make no pretense of actually having our acts together — they avoid being seen out in public with us, they disown us, and they shrink away in fear of catching our cooties.

But take heart — perhaps they'll grow up.

I did. Not saying I don't still sometimes get all starry-eyed and visionary over the possibility of influencing our society for the better — I've got a bit of spunk left in me and I'm doing what I can to stick it to The Man. But I no longer think of myself as qualitatively different or "other" than all the rest of my fellow human beings — my family. My freakish, crazy, wonderfully imperfect people.

I don't believe in God anymore, but I still have faith. I have hope and I trust that collectively, we're all gonna make it — we are learning from our mistakes and growing more compassionate. Our shared experiences make us wiser and I have confidence that better times are just ahead.

I Spy With My Little "i" ~ Bachmann's "Marriage Vow"

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 02:07:55 -0400

The Not-So-Subtle Misogyny of THE FAMiLY LEADER's Marriage Vow

THE FAMiLY LEADER, a federally-funded public advocacy organization associated with Focus On The Family has garnered plenty of media attention recently.

Republican presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have signed on to the para-church group's “The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY” – a right-wing political policy document which calls on candidates to support a federal "Marriage Amendment," oppose same-sex marriages, pornography, abortion, no-fault divorce and adultery and to encourage "robust childbearing and reproduction" in order to ensure U.S. global economic and political domination.

The public outrage is justified. The Marriage Vow pledge, which ironically makes a show of rejecting “Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control" is one of the most misogynistic and totalitarian political policy proposals in recent history.

There's one "little" detail in The Marriage Vow that critics have overlooked - small, subtle, and yet glaringly obvious once you see it - an alarming point which warrants the careful attention of freedom-loving women and everyone concerned with human rights.

A quick visit to THE FAMiLY LEADER’s website reveals the self-abnegation ideal which is expected of American women according to THE FAMiLY LEADER's extremist paradigm. Notice that in their logo, in The Marriage Vow document, and throughout their website, the “I” in FAMiLY is never capitalized?

The first footnote to The Marriage Vow explains this consistent use of the little “i”:

“Sociological data squares with tradition to argue that self-centered adult egos and agendas in American families must be subordinated to the long-term interests of America’s children.”

Simply stated, women who are unwilling to subordinate and sacrifice themselves to populate America’s economic and political war machine are selfish with a capital “I” - s.e.l.f.I.s.h.

Female self-abnegation is a core principle of the growing “Quiverfull” contingent of the Evangelical community’s “Biblical Family Values” movement which calls upon submissive wives to stay at home to conceive and birth large quantities of ”foot soldiers for Jesus” to advance the Kingdom of God on earth.

The little "i" on THE FAMiLY LEADER's website caught my eye immediately because, as a former Quiverfull believer, I have been there, done that. I lived the lifestyle of submission and prolific motherhood for nearly two decades, producing seven "arrows" (children) to fill my patriarchal husband's "quiver" - the means by which fundamentalist Quiverfull Christians intend to take back America for God.

Burnout, combined with what small flicker of self-preservation I had left, finally forced me to abandon the “Biblical Family” vision which had consumed my life until there was practically no recognizable “ME” left at all.

An interview with Kathryn Joyce, author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement” led me to start a website to provide information and support for other Quiverfull walkaways: No Longer Qivering.

Notice the subtitle: There is No “You” in Quivering.

The misspelling is deliberate – it is a visual cue which suggests the same principle which THE FAMiLY LEADER intends to convey by using a lower-case “I” in FAMiLY throughout their website.

Here's the point which THE FAMiLY LEADER plasters all over their website and yet hopes we won't notice: The "I" means nothing. I as a woman, I as a human being, "I" am of no consequence to the purveyors of "FAMiLY values."

THE FAMiLY LEADER is fighting to save an INSTITUTION. Tradition and domination are all that matter - individual people, especially individual women, the "I's" in FAMiLiES - are little, insignificant and expendable in the "culture war."

Born to Breed

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:06:10 -0400

NOTE: This excerpt is from an interview by Sarah Jones which first appeared at PoliticusUSA.

My thanks to PoliticusUSA for the opportunity to raise awareness concerning the growing threat of the Quiverfull movement to women's equality in the American political arena.

Born to Breed: The Quiverfull Movement and its impact on patriarchal policies and right wing politics; an interview I conducted with Vyckie Garrison, a courageous woman who left the biblical patriarchal Quiverfull movement.

Sarah Jones: Can you define “Quiverfull movement” and what you’ve identified as the patriarchal beliefs behind it?

Vyckie Garrison: I like to define Quiverfull as a very powerful head trip. It’s an all-encompassing vision of a big, happy family which infects the mind and affects every aspect of a Believer’s life. The term “Quiverfull” comes from a reference in Psalm 127 which likens children to “arrows” in the hands of a mighty man, “blessed is the man who has his quiver full of them.”

Quiverfull Believers eschew all forms of birth control in favor of “trusting the Lord” with their family planning. The Quiverfull ideal embraces a “biblical” model (read, fundamentalist) of the traditional family which insists that the husband is the head of the household and the wife is the submissive “helpmeet.”

Sarah Jones: How do those beliefs manifest for wives and female children? Can you give us some examples of expectations of wives and daughters that might surprise our readers?

Vyckie Garrison: In practice, the Quiverfull ideals often result in larger-than-average families (think, Jim Bob & Michelle Duggar of TLCs “19 & Counting” fame) in which the woman stays at home having babies, homeschooling, homesteading, dressing “modestly,” and most importantly, serving and submitting to her “lord,” i.e., her patriarchal husband.

The Quiverfull lifestyle is extremely demanding and the only way a woman can hope to succeed is to rely heavily on her older daughters. It is expected that a Quiverfull daughter will be fully capable of running the household, including all meal-preparation, laundry duties, child care and homeschooling of younger siblings by the age of twelve. Many girls are doing all this by the time they’re eight or ten because their mothers are so consumed with birthing more and more “arrows” to fill the quivers of their husbands.

A Quiverfull daughter is taught from a young age that her purpose in life is to serve the man whom God has placed in authority over her. She serves her father while she lives at home (she does this primarily by assisting her mother in domestic duties and child care). She absolutely must remain a virgin and is taught to expect to meet and marry her future husband through a father-led match-making process called “courtship.” Her education is geared toward developing domestic skills ~ college is generally considered unnecessary and even dangerous for her spiritual well-being.

Sarah Jones: What justification was given for the rule of the patriarch and how does that fit in with mainline Christianity versus fundamentalist, extremist versions of Christianity?

Vyckie Garrison: It is my contention that the Quiverfull movement is regular Christianity lived out to its logical conclusions. When Christians teach “the husband is the head of his wife” (Eph. 5:23), Quiverfull Believers put that into practice ~ and nearly every time, the husband becomes a despot in his own home.

While the majority of Christians will have their excuses for why their wife has to work outside the home, or why they personally cannot have more than two children, or why it won’t work for them to homeschool. If you ask the average Evangelical what a truly godly, “biblical” family looks like, they will begin to list Quiverfull ideals:

• Husband as head of the household and final authority (Eph. 5:23)
• Wives submit to their husbands (Colossians 3:18)
• Obedient children (Eph. 6:1)
• Trust the Lord with family planning (i.e., no birth control ~ Psalm 127)
• Stay-at-home-mothers (Titus 2:3)
• Homeschool the children (Matthew 12:17 ~ “render unto God that which is God’s” ~ since children bear the image of God, parents ought not render them unto Caesar, i.e., government schools. See also, Deut. 6:7)
• Modest dress (1 Peter 3:3)
• Debt-free living (Romans 13:8)
• Political domination (Psalm 127 and The Dominion Mandate in Genesis 1:28)

In my experience, the “average Christian” believes most all of the principles of patriarchy taught in the Quiverfull movement, fortunately for Christian women, few actually put it into practice the way Quiverfull Believers do.

Sarah Jones: How did these beliefs impact your political positions while you were still in the movement, and were you encouraged to get your political worldviews from a particular source?

Vyckie Garrison: As a Quiverfull Believer, I considered myself “radically pro-life,” which I described this way:

“Why do Christians seek to limit the size of their families through the use of chemical birth control? The truth be told, our reasoning generally parallels that of the abortion culture – additional children will cause inconvenience, financial hardships, lifestyle constraints – all this coupled with the desire to separate sex from procreation. How can the Church expect to speak with any moral authority on the evils of abortion when we ourselves are guilty of the very anti-life values fueled by the family planning mentality?” [Excerpt from a column I wrote for the “pro-life, pro-family” newspaper which I published from 1993-2008.]

The most prominent “pro-life” groups such as National Right to Life, Concerned Women for America, etc., were much too wishy-washy for me. I was exposed to the most extreme aspects of Dominionism. I felt that James Dobson, Tony Perkins, even Don Wildmon were lightweights; I much preferred the uncompromising Randall Terry, and Paul dePairie was better yet. When Flip Benham of Operation Save America came to Nebraska, I baked chicken-pot pies for him and we packed all our friends and associates into our livingroom to hear Flip speak about what it really means to storm the gates of Hell (Planned Parenthood) and take back America for God.

A woman’s “choice” was anathema to me because I believed that I was not my own; I had been bought with a price (the blood of Christ ~ 1 Cor. 6:20) and therefore, I sought to “honor God with my body” which essentially meant dutifully birthing seven “foot soldiers for Jesus,” nearly losing my life on more than one occasion.

Sarah Jones: Do Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann (both of whom share a belief in the bible replacing the constitution; i.e., a theocratic takeover of the American government) represent the beliefs you were taught and if so, how? If not, why?

Vyckie Garrison: When I was a fully-convinced Quiverfull believer, I did question how Sarah Palin could justify her political activities so long as she had children still living at home. I also thought it ironic that, according to the ideals she espouses, women should not hold authority over men, or even be allowed to vote for that matter.

Still, I supported Palin because she understands and promotes conservative Christian “family values.” I was especially impressed by her convictions with regard to “taking back America for God” — in my Quiverfull-colored opinion, Sarah Palin “got it.” Meaning, of course, that she has a decent understanding of Dominionist principles and she has a plan to lead America toward a “truly Biblical” (read, theocratic) society.

I left the Quiverfull movement before Michelle Bachman came into much prominence on the political scene, but … ditto for her.

Sarah Jones: How do you see this far right religious movement impacting far right politics today?

Continue reading the interview ....

Focus on the Family's Chilling New Marriage Agenda

Tue, 24 May 2011 13:05:46 -0400

I just came across this article from WORLD magazine about Focus on the Family's shift in focus concerning marriage: (excerpt)

We're winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage? We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.

Where are we? We've got to look at what God is doing in all of this. . . . Have we done such a poor job with marriage, is He so upset with our mishandling of it in the Christian community, along with our lust of the flesh as a nation, that He is handing us over to this polygamy and same-sex situation in order to, perhaps, drive the Christian community, the remnant, into saying, "OK, there's no no-fault divorce in our church"?

So churches would have a standard of marriage higher than the state's? We'd say, "The piece of paper that you get at the state to recognize your marriage is worthless. It's like registering your car. But if you're going to be a part of this church and you're married, you're going to be committed to your marriage. There's no easy way out." What if the Christian divorce rate goes from 40 percent to 10 percent or 5 percent, and the world's goes from 50 percent to 80 percent? Now we're back to the early centuries. They're looking at us and thinking, "We want more of what they've got," because we're proving in front of the eyes of the world that marriage in a Christian context works.

What's the current perception of gay activists about Christian marriage? I sat down with one. He said, "You guys haven't done so well with marriage. Why are you upset about us having a try?" We've got to look at our own house, make sure that our marriages are healthy, that we're being a good witness to the world. Then we can continue to work on defending marriage as best as we can.

It does seem that many of our national symptoms go back to the failure of marriage and the absence of fathers in the home. . . . One researcher found that it costs the government $300 billion a year because of the impact of dads not being in the home. In looking at the social problems we face, we should start with how to get dads reconnected to the family and committed to their marriages. If we could do that, we could achieve a lot in this country.

Do family problems contribute to poverty? Journalists will say to us, "If you're a Christian organization, why don't you fight poverty directly?" My response is, "We do." The No. 1 predictor of poverty is a divorce. Women and children land below the poverty line most often after divorce.

Some European governments, noting the costs of having children, are providing large child subsidies, in essence paying couples to have children. . . . But on the back end you have to tax families to pay for that. This then creates the need for both parents to have salaries.

Can't we just print more money? Seriously, do you recommend some non-financial ways for governments to help marriage? Make divorce more difficult. Have mandatory waiting periods. Have 90-day mandatory counseling for people so it's not just "we don't like each other any more." There are different things to do that do not involve taxing other families to pay for them.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

So ~ the "refocus" of FOTF is shifting away from opposing same-sex marriage and instead focusing on making it more difficult to obtain a divorce.

Does anyone else think this is scary? ... and I was seriously pissed when I read Jim Daly's remark, "... so it's not just 'we don't like each other any more.'" WTF? What woman is ever so flippant about divorce?

Truthfully ~ filing for divorce for me did mean a major step down financially ~ my income and assets took a huge hit ~ and we actually were already living close to poverty level before the divorce. BUT ~ IT WAS SO TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!!!! I'll take poverty over abuse any day.

If FOTF and similar "pro-family" organizations succeed in reducing the Christian divorce rate to 5% ~ that's going to represent a huge increase in misery for a lot of Christian wives who are already seriously oppressed in their "traditional" marriages ~ with husband as patriarchal head of the home and wife as subservient "helpmeet."

These women do not need divorce to be more difficult ~ it's already almost impossible to leave an abusive marriage when it's supposedly God's will and the domineering man is simply fulfilling his biblical role as head of the home.

Daly's thinking is that by reducing the divorce rate among Christians and holding up the "Biblical family" as the key to marriage "success," the secular world will have to admit that God's way is truly the best way ~ and somehow, that's supposed to convince gays to repent of their deviancy, I guess. Ugh. As though the only reason gay people are gay is because they've never seen a long-lasting heterosexual marriage.

Some days, I seriously want to become an outspoken divorce advocate ~ kinda ironic considering that I spent 16 years publishing a "pro-family" Christian newspaper with the message that "God hates divorce." Of all the women I've encountered through No Longer Quivering who have divorced their abusive husbands, the only regret has been not filing years sooner ~ not one woman has told me she wished she'd had to wait a little longer or gone to another counseling session to try to make it work. They do regret the extra years their children suffered because they kept holding out hope that somehow the Lord would work on their husbands' hearts.

Focus on the Family's concession on marriage is not progress and the group's shift in focus will not benefit families ~ Christian or otherwise. It's never helpful to value the institution of marriage over the individuals ~ the men, women and children ~ real people, living in real families.