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In Reply to: Re: Where's that right found in the social contract? posted by Moderate Systemite on September 13, 2007 at 07:47:51:
I have not proposed revenge, and I have not talked about forgiveness. God doesn't forgive us until we ask, and Christians have no obligation to forgive perpetrators who have not asked. What I've talked about is how the System metes out justice to criminals who cheat on their taxes, abuse children, and engage in charity fraud. I've also talked about how making an amends is separate from being forgiven by a victim.
If what I've talked about seems harsh to you, perhaps you are not aware of the harsh outcomes many SGAs must deal with in their adult lives as a consequence of growing up in the cult. I know of four who have been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and jails (the defacto psychiatric wards in California) for the last 15 years. I know of six others who have successfully committed suicide.
Who pays the price for cleaning up the messes wrought by followers of David Berg? Systemites do! We shoulder the taxes that pay for the jails, the psych wards, the police and emergency response to SGAs when they crash and burn. I'd like to send Karen Zerby the bill for cleaning up the room where her son tortured and killed the woman who fellated him as a toddler. Did you know that Rick's mother raped him at age 12? I don't agree with Rick's act of revenge, but I do understand how perpetrating unspeakable acts on a child leads to murderous rage.
And that's the difference between the two of us. Tell you what: Try living with the memory of sex with your mother, your adopted father, and your sister as a 12-year-old boy. Or the memory of watching your older sister get raped, beaten, shamed, and rejected. Or the memory of exorcisms and public shamings for wetting your bed. After a few sleepless years of nightmares, come back and talk to me about how Rick should have just gotten over it.
The Family did not invent child abuse, but it DID institutionalize it and then refuse to take any responsibility for the extremely serious, lifelong damage done to a generation. It's been my experience that people who rationalize or minimize the heinous nature of child abuse are individuals who haven't dealt with their abuse issues, which may be their complicit participation in the abuse of children or their insistence that all those beatings they got as children were really for their own good.
Finally, the fact that TF no longer overtly sexualizes young children doesn't mean the children growing up in that group are safe from abuse or that the crime of having damaged a generation in this way has been addressed.
