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In Reply to: 'A Few Replies' by James Penn posted by Reposter on August 28, 2004 at 17:09:46:
When I jumped up and down and made a lot of noise about "Take the Money and Run," I wanted James Penn to convince us that he's not totally clueless about the issues his disclosure raised for people victimized by TF's criminal leadership.
My alarm about Penn’s admission that he took money from child-abusing thieves was provoked by how he seemed to interpret his actions in retrospect. At the time Penn made his decision to leave & take a buy-out, he could not have clearly perceived the criminal nature of the leadership he served for so many years. We all do what we need to do in order to survive, and I don't fault Penn or anyone else who leaves for doing what seems necessary and opportune to make the difficult transition back.
My major goal in arguing for the ethical standards of social justice was to point out the need for a set of guiding principles & values by which exFam can evaluate the relative merit of their actions as they move on and acquire a sense of personal responsibility for the past.
If there's one thing that stands out to me about TF's criminal leadership and those who faithfully serve them, it's that they are seriously limited in their capacity to evaluate the impact their personal choices have had on others and infer some measure of social responsibility for their behavior.
Penn is a good role model for long-term members who leave, imo. The past cannot be changed. It's what we do in the here-and-now that matters, and Penn has demonstrated that he knows how to do the next right thing.
