Christian Identity is a religion based on race.  It believes that the historical Jews of the bible, the Israelites of the old testament, God’s Chosen People, were the white Aryan race.  According to Christian Identity, it is the white race that God created in [his] own image.  It holds that other races are so-called "mud people" – descended from a race God created before Adam and Eve…I suppose as a test.  The mud people are the ancestors of all the people of color of the earth.  The people we now call Jews are another story however.  Christian Identity holds that the Jews are an entirely separate race, created when Eve had sex with the devil in the Garden of Eden.

In short, Christian Identity holds that Jews are, literally, the spawn of Satan.

This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…

Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.

Dig it.  LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.

And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon.  This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed.  Someday, it might well get me killed.  Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.

And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this.  Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews.  The Gays are in league with Satan…  Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):

…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.

What was soft peddled before the re-election of George Bush is coming out of the closet, free, free at last to dispense with the loathsome hypocrisies of Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin.  Now the message is clearly and unambiguously that homosexuals are in league with Satan.  Not mere sinners, we are destroyers of the world.  We will give birth to the Antichrist.  Next thing you know, we will be all four horsemen of the Apocalypse too.  Whatever it takes, to make everyone hate us, as much as they hate us. 

And then watch them wash, wash their hands of our blood…

Imagine you’re a gay teenager, and you’ve either just come out to your parents, or been outed to them.  Imagine they react with anger and shame and contempt.  You’re a kid, going through adolescence, struggling with your emerging sexuality.   It’s a  confusing, embarrassing time when you begin to feel things, things about the attractive sex, that you’d never felt before.  Thrilling, confusing, embarrassing things.  You are a pervert, your parents tell you.  You’re going to catch AIDS and die before you’re 40 they tell you.  You’re a shame on your family name, and on them.  You’re going to hell.   

Imagine your parents force you into Love In Action to be cured.  Imagine you find yourself one day, inside the Love In Action program.  You are a young teenager, and you are in one of the group sessions, surrounded by older adults who have in their past engaged in sexual perversions and addictions the likes of which your teenage mind could never have conceived.  Imagine being force into exposing yourself, your deepest sexual thoughts and feelings, to these men, and being forced to listen as they expose themselves to you.  They are sexually broken, say the staff at Love In Action.  You are sexually broken, they tell you.  You, and the man next to you telling you how it is to fuck animals, are both sexually broken.  You are the same as they.  The sessions last for weeks.  There is no place inside of yourself that is safe from the staff at Love In Action, and you must expose it all to the men who fuck animals, rape children, and have never known what it is to have a healthy adult sex life.  You’re a young teenager.  Throughout it all you are told in word and in deed that you are no different from them.

Eventually, you begin to believe it.  You are finally dismissed from the Program, and perhaps you decide you are still gay and there is nothing wrong with that.  Or perhaps you try, as so many do, to stop being gay, only to discover you can no more choose your sexual orientation then you can choose whether to be right or left handed.  Perhaps some logical, rational part of your mind rejects what you were told about your sexuality at Love In Action.  But deep down inside, the seed is planted.  I’m a freak…There’s something wrong with me…with my sex…I’m a freak…I’m a freak…  You try to go on with your life, find yourself failing utterly to find love, emotional intimacy, peace…

Surely, nobody would do this to a child, even if they think that homosexuality is sinful and wrong.  Right?  You don’t understand.  Faith excuses everything.  Faith, and hate.  Peterson Toscano has an expanded post up now that you should read.

Back in January 2005, I met with the BBC crew that had just finished filming LIA/R. The presenter and the crew expressed shock at the treatment of the youth in the facility. They told me that adults and minors gathered together and talked about serious issues including prostitution, sexual abuse, and beastiality. They told me of a 16 year old lesbian placed in the program against her will. And the message that she received by being there is that her same-sex attractions are on the same level as a man having sex with animals.

I couldn’t believe it, so on June 1, 2005, when I bumped into John Smid at the Atlantia airport, I questioned him about this. (I had not yet heard of Zach’s story as it was just unfolding). He assured me that although the youth and the adults attended the some of the same sessions, they did not talk about their particular "issues", just their feelings.

Even if that were true, any 16 year old I know is smart enough to figure out within a half a day why everyone is in the program.

This fall, I spoke at length with a young man who was in the adult program this summer when Zach was also in attendance in Refuge, the youth program. I asked him to describe the sessions and he confirmed that adults and youth met together. When I asked, "But of course they don’t talk about issues, just emotions, right?" He replied that they talked about the issues often, in fact, each participant had to give an introduction which outlined the exact nature of their issues.

[Emphasis mine] Notice how John Smid was able to look Peterson right in the eye and tell him it wasn’t happening.  And it was.

Today, pumped up on the war rhetoric of saving youth from a culture set out to destroy them, potentially thoughtful and kind human beings who run LIA/R end up employing harmful strategies designed to scare these kids straight by any means necessary. Even if it means exposing them to pedophiles and people with extreme sexual fetishes. (The language reminds me of the fear-fueled war talk of the US Christian fascist group BattleCry)

I know folks from my time at LIA who before they entered the program never had sex with another person and were quite naive sexually. By the time they left, often with the shame of failure, armed with loads of details about what we thought of as "the gay lifestyle", they ended up living self-destructive lives filled with anonymous sexual encounters and worse addictions than they ever experienced before.

Go read the whole thing.   This is why I’m going to be in Memphis on June 5th.  If doing this to kids in the name of love appalls you, and you can make it to Memphis, then be there too.

Via a friend on MySpace, comes this appeal for letters.  First, from the Wikipedia, a little background…

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), formed in 1987, is a rebel paramilitary group operating mainly in northern Uganda. The group is engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in what is now one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts. It is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself a spirit medium, and apparently wishes to establish a state based on his unique interpretation of Biblical millenarianism. The LRA have been accused of widespread human rights violations, including the abduction of civilians, the use of child soldiers and a number of massacres.

It is estimated that around 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the group since 1987 for use as soldiers and sex slaves. The group performs abductions primarily from the Acholi people, who have borne the brunt of the 18 year LRA campaign. The insurgency has been mainly contained to the region known as Acholiland, consisting of the districts of Kitgum, Gulu, and Pader, though since 2002 violence has overflowed into other districts. The LRA has also operated across the porous border region with Southern Sudan, subjecting Sudanese civilians to its horrific tactics.

God save this poor world from your prophets…  My friend passes along this request that you send a letter to the U.S. State department, urging them to keep this horrific conflict high on the agenda.  In includes the story of one boy who was kidnapped and forced into The Lord’s Resistance Army…

Ms. Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
U.S. State Department
Washington DC 20520

Dear Secretary Rice,

I am deeply concerned about the conflict in northern Uganda, and particularly its devastating impact on children. I am writing to urge you to place this forgotten crisis higher on the United States’ agenda, and to use the U. S. influence to end the human rights abuses by both sides that lie at the heart of the conflict.

Since the war began in 1986, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted more than 30,000 children to serve as soldiers, laborers and sex slaves. These boys and girls are forced to fight against the government Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), carry out raids, beat and kill civilians, and abduct other children. Girls are additionally forced into sexual slavery as "wives" of LRA commanders. Children who refuse to follow orders or try to run away are often captured and killed.

I want to tell you about a boy who I will call Peter. Peter lives in Gulu, Uganda, on of the most targeted areas in the country. One horrific day, while attending his primary school in Gulu, Peter was abducted by the LRA along with 6 other schoolboys. The same day the LRA went to Peter’s house and murdered his two uncles and his father, and later took Peter home to see their dead bodies, and watch his mother get beaten unconscious. Additional members of his family were also tortured and murdered before his eyes.

Peter was dragged into the bush where he endured severe unspeakable brainwashing meant to turn the abducted children into brutal soldiers. If the children dropped their guns they were beaten, if they tried to escape they were tortured in front of the other children as an example of what would happen in the case of disobedience. Peter lived among this nightmare for 10 long years, quickly rising to the rank of Joseph Kony’s (the leader of the LRA) personal bodyguard. Peter managed to escape the LRA when he was 19 years old and has now lived the last 5 years of his life doing everything he can to spread awareness and end this treacherous war.

Peter is only one story out of the approximate 30,000 children that have been abducted into the LRA.

The threat of LRA abduction is so great that every night as many as 40,000 children leave their homes in the countryside to sleep in the relative safety of towns. They seek refuge overnight at churches, hospitals, bus stations and temporary shelters before returning home again each morning. These children are known as "night commuters" because of the long distances they travel nightly on foot.

Top UN officials have called the war in northern Uganda the world’s biggest forgotten crisis. Child abductions and other human rights have now continued for nearly twenty years,

I urge the United States government to take stronger action to address this crisis. The United States should use its leverage with the government of Uganda to push for increased protection for children and other civilians in the north of Uganda. It should press the new government of Sudan (the government of National Unity, formed with the former rebel forces in 2005) o cut off all support, formal or informal, for the Lord’s Resistance Army which operated in southern Sudan. The U.S. should also support efforts through the United Nations to strengthen human rights and child protection operations in the North.

Under President Bush, the United States played a significant role in achieving peace between long-warring parties in Sudan, Uganda’s northern neighbor. I urge our government to place a similar priority on addressing the crisis in northern Uganda.

Respectfully,
 

In addition, the request is that you also send a copy to John Bolton.  Now…I strongly doubt that Rice or Bolton give a good goddamn about the fate of impoverished children anywhere, let alone in Africa.  But it can’t hurt to try and prick somebody’s conscience in the State Department.  And while you’re at it, send a copy to your congress critters too.  War is hell enough on children but this is beyond evil.  It might not seem like much, but sometimes just knowing that people are aware of and watching what’s going on is the difference, that makes a difference.

Via Peterson Toscano, a powerful reminder that James Dobson’s greatest crimes against humanity aren’t the ones he’s committed against gay and lesbian people, but his methodical and systematic breaking of the bond of love between parent and child.  Ex-ex-gay blogger Christine writes about what it was like growing up in a fundamentalist household, where Dobson’s pathological hatred of children had found its soil, and taken root…

I was disciplined and guilted and shamed into submission for many years. It somehow seems appropriate to me that Focus on the Family is such a partner with Exodus. My parent’s treatment of me as a child (using Dobson as their guide) no doubt made me all the more vulnerable to the ex-gay message. I was ready and willing to believe myself a damaged and broken person that needed to be fixed, with my sin nature needing to be beaten down and submerged, subdued, and dominated. I was willing to believe that my homosexuality was a part of my own strong-willed defiance gone horribly wrong and satanically out of control.

I can’t even look at Dr. Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline without wanting to weep…

Well somebody needs to look at it.  Because this man has single handedly shattered the lives of countless thousands of helpless children.  And he did it by manipulating their parent’s fundamentalist religiosity, their fear of Satan, and that secret empty place inside of them, where other people have a conscience and a capacity for basic human sympathy…

For parents like mine, who got almost all of their parenting advice from Dr. Dobson, is it any wonder that everything turned into a battle of wills and they saw their child as a "strong-willed tyrant" that needed to be battled into submission? Dr. Dobson is a man who says that "If discipline begins on the second day of life, you’re one day too late." What kind of discipline could a one-day old infant possibly need?!?

I have heard of Dobson-style parents commenting on how "manipulative" a four-month old baby is, because the baby will smile when an adult is playing with them, but cry when it is left alone.

This is sickening.  Of course an infant will cry when its left alone.  Look at that, because the temptation is to think that Dobson desensitizes parents and he doesn’t.  Infants are helpless and vulnerable and need to be cared for.  For Christ sake they’ll cry when they’re hungry too, when they’re sick, when they’re in some kind of pain.  The first reaction of any normal human being to the sound of an infant crying is that anxious sensation  that something’s wrong.  But the problem Dobson’s parents face isn’t that they don’t know what to do with a crying infant, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel. 

And Dobson supplies them with an explanation of child parent interaction that fits their sensibilities perfectly: there are no genuine human emotions…everything is manipulation.  Love… affection… tenderness… anxiety… grief… sorrow…  Dobson tells them that all of that is really just different ways humans manipulate one another.  Ask yourself what kind of person this makes sense to, and the horrors inflicted on so many children in this world by their own parents stop being so surprising.

There’s also the story of how Dobson treated his own dog, Siggie (yes, after Freud) in a battle of wills between man and beast. Dobson relates this story in The Strong-Willed Child:

"I had seen this defiant mood before [defiant mood being indicated by Siggie not wanting to leave a warm spot in the house and go to his kennel, and subsequently growling at Daddy Dobson], and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud."

You can read the chilling conclusion here.

If you decide to click on that link, brace yourself.  They say that the abuse of animals is a prime indicator of deeper sociopathologies.  Its something they watch for in young children as a warning sign of potential for serious pathological violence later in life.  Dobson however, is in the enviable position of being able to exercise his pathologies by proxy.  Why abuse children yourself, and risk a very long prison term, when you can get their parents to do it for you? But not just any parents mind you.  You need the ones who are missing that extra something most humans have…a capacity to feel sympathy.  A heart, capable of whole hearted love for another.  You find yourself enough of these, and then the rest is just a matter of invoking the name of Jesus, and telling those parents that their children are Satan incarnate. 

No…I’m not exaggerating…

This brings me to another thing I’ve wondered of late. In talking with other ex-ex-gays or those who have survived fundamentalist upbringings, many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally. These parents do things and say things that most parents would not utter to their children no matter how upset they were with them. Is it the idea of sin or satan somehow controlling our lives that gives them license to think of us this way, or talk to us this way? Is it a lifetime of thinking of us as "defiant tyrants" that gives parents the idea that their child is in league with the devil himself?

My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!" because she was convinced that he’d looked at her in a defiant manner that gave her chills and that she could only attribute to Satan. She told our family about this later, with an air of pride that she’d had the guts to speak out against Satan in this manner (nevermind the poor child who probably still remembers that church lady calling him "satan"). For those of us whose parents see us in this light…could this be an explanation for why they are so willing to throw us away, to denounce us and reject us? Do they truly still see brazen and defiant tyrants controlled by satan when they look at us?

(emphasis mine)  I’ve seen that with my own two eyes.  Guy I dated once had a father like that.  Couldn’t love unconditionally if Jesus Christ gave him his heart to do it with.  And there’s the problem, in all its horrible stomach churning glory.  There’s the Pit you don’t want to stare into for too long, because it also stares back into you.  The fundamentalist demands structure, tight all controlling structure to their world, because the world of intimate human interaction is utterly incomprehensible to them.  If they have to manage their way in the human community the way the rest of us do, by building bonds of trust and Empathy and love, they’re completely lost at sea and cannot cope.  Without that all controlling structure to tell them how to conduct their lives at the interpersonal level, they simply can not fathom right from wrong. They just can’t figure it out.  Telling a five year old boy that he’s the devil no more disturbs their conscience then telling him the time of day would.  The boy does not exist in their conscience as a boy, but as an incomprehensible…thing.  It might be human…it might be a child…on the other hand it might be the devil himself.  They’ve just no way of knowing, apart from some structure, some tradition, some religious dogma, telling them what the boy is.

And into this soil fertile for every human horror you can imagine, because none of them have any brakes beyond the traditions and social structures they live inside of, comes Dobson – telling these parents that their children are, in fact, the very images of satan himself.  The growing child who expresses the slightest shred of their own human individuality is, in fact, channeling the serpent in the Garden of Eden…

Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.

To suck the human identity out of a child, leaving their soul an empty blackboard that any authority figure can scribble their will upon, is Exactly Dobson’s purpose here.  But I don’t think Dobson means to be that authority.  I think he just takes pleasure in the emptying of a human soul, and leaving it with nothing left to Be. A vampire gains some nourishment from the people whose blood they take.  Dobson is one of those toxic human voids that just suck the life out of everything they touch, for the pleasure of watching something they could never themselves become die. Oscar Wilde once said that we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.  Dobson is the man handing out hot pokers to parents, determined that every child will grow up blind, so they will never know that the stars above his gutter and beyond his reach, even exist.

…many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally… My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!"…  Never mind the stacking of the Federal Courts…here’s the legacy of the ascendancy of the religious right that America will be suffering under for generations to come.  Tens of thousands of soul wounded children, walking into adulthood with their only understanding of what it is to trust and love coming from parents who were taught to regard them as satanic beings.

[Edited a tad…]