1. Avoid any organisation offering counselling for sexual abusers and sexual-abuse victims founded by someone called "Gothard".
2. Avoid organisations where the main advice to sexual-abuse victims is "It was your fault for tempting him. Feel repentance and allow Christ into you."
3. Avoid sexual-morality-enforcement organisations which are essentially job-creation schemes for the founder's family, especially if the founder's brother was eventually sacked for treating its secretaries as his personal harem.
4. Avoid counselling / sexual-morality-enforcement organisations if the founder's name frequently occurs in connection with words like "sexually grooming".
5. "Gothard". Ha.
5 comments:
Gothard is arcane English for goatherd, but some etymolgies place it squarely in the period of the Danelaw, where a "hard" refers to either a cull of the herd or a single animal isolated for killing, shearing, or heavy petting.
Also, when a Huckabee asks,"What if the Supreme Court decided who was president? Hunh? Hunh?" you know his ambitions have been scaled back to something more realistic, like goatfucking.
Ugh. I really, really hate the whole "suffering gives spiritual strength" when it is applied to other people.
I mean, look, I might personally feel that I have gained some immaterial things by way of going through a lot of awful things. (Although I might also feel irrevocably damaged in certain ways as well. "What doesn't kill you can only make you wish you were dead," I always say.) But I would never dream of going around to other people and saying, "Gee, it sucks that you got raped an all, but just think of all the spiritual strength you'll gain from this!"
(I was once counseled, as a young teenager, that I should just try to find meaning in all the awful shittiness of my life. The person who was doing this was using some misreading of Viktor fucking Frankl to try to make the "point.")
I am also reminded of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society's My Book of Bible Stories, which a Witness aunt had given to me as a young child quite a while before my dad bit the dust and my mom converted. This was a book of all the Bible stories, pretty much, including the one about Dinah, which ended up being an illustrated rape-shaming story for children.
I can't find an image of the actual story online, but I am fairly partial to this parody of it. (Some translations of the scriptures in question seem to suggest that Dinah actually had consensual sex with some Canaanite guy, not that she was raped, which makes her brothers' reaction seem really over the top.)
I also really like this version of the Jonah story.
the one about Dinah, which ended up being an illustrated rape-shaming story for children.
The Christian pro-rape counselling literature uses Dinah as an example of someone who had initiative and stepped out from under her father's umbrella and therefore deserved to be raped (also it was part of God's genocide plan), and Tamar as an example of someone who listened to her father and and therefore deserved to be raped (also it was part of God's genocide plan).
http://wonkette.com/586401/how-not-to-counsel-your-daughters-when-theyve-been-molested-by-josh-duggar
http://www.recoveringgrace.org/2014/04/there-is-no-victim-a-survey-of-iblp-literature-on-sexual-assault-and-abuse/
If the whole sick culture were based somewhere in the Middle East, people would be calling for drone strikes after hearing the reports of their belief system and behaviour.
These people are possibly even a little worse than the Jehovah's Witnesses, which is saying something, but I'm not quite sure yet.
The J-Dubs are also pretty awful when it comes to wife beating and pedophilia.
Then again, Witness kids usually go to public school, and they are typically allowed to listen to the evil rock music, go to the movies, etc. They are not supposed to have non-Witness friends, although I did anyway. This can lead to significant problems if they leave the religion, because they will not have anybody to rely on when everybody they ever knew is required to pretend like they are dead.
Speaking of which, I wonder if the IBLP people do the whole shunning thing?
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