Ambassador de Sade ~ et al

[Karl-777]

out there?

 

These stories are typical of the religio-Nazi mindset:

( cited from http://www.alternet.org/story/27725 )

 

Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.

 

Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind Sembler's back.

 

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.

 

"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She told AlterNet that she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by counselors that her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl for her own good.

 

Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run but was hauled into the back by older girls. Inside, as was standard operating procedure, she began the atonement process that cost over $12,000 a year: all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the arms ("motivating") and chanting signaled submission to "staying straight." She was coerced, she says, into confessing to being a "druggie whore" who went down on truckers for drugs. "You're forced to confess crimes you never committed." (Some survivors call it extortion.)......

 

.......Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a "host home" overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant future, going to the bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop -- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had been molded into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and join the winning side, becoming the hall monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules........

 

.....Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a "host home" overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant future, going to the bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop -- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had been molded into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and join the winning side, becoming the hall monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules......

 

.....Despite their cheery names -- SAFE in Orlando, Florida; Kids Helping Kids of Cincinnati, Ohio; Growing Together of Lake Worth, Florida -- these barely regulated warehouses cry out for oversight. Hungry for recruits, they appeal to the fears of parents by warning a child will die on the streets if uncorrected by their methods.

 

In the TV report, the presence of a spokeswoman named Loretta Parrish was evidence that SAFE was the child of STRAIGHT -- she'd been the local STRAIGHT's marketing director until 1992, when the old company closed under state scrutiny, and SAFE, a new company, almost immediately sprang up to replace it. A new head for the hydra: Parrish didn't dispute the visiting sister's horrifying experience, but called it necessary, as if explaining something something obvious to her since the '80s.

 

"Yes we do require that," said Parrish. "And if they don't, then they have to remove the other child. This is a family treatment program. And unless the entire family is in treatment, it doesn't work." "We do not do a strip search that is different from any other treatment program," she adds, and later described the teens and moms attacking SAFE as "a coalition of cockroaches." Gov. Jeb Bush even endorsed SAFE in a letter he wrote as "a valuable tool."

 

And so with the former STRAIGHT bosses rich in Republican honors, and insulated in a political Xanadu not unlike the alternate reality field engulfing the White House, a new generation of teenagers is going under the hammer, as an old generation of victims finds cold comfort for their own suffering. If this is the compassionate kind of conservatism, how harsh the other variety must be.

 

The article is long, but IMO a very good read. The main page for the site: http://www.alternet.org/ is well worth bookmarking.

 

Equally disturbing: ( cited from http://www.teenliberty.org/TwoNations.htm )

 

In a small faith-based residential "schoolroom" in northwest Florida -- actually a converted garage -- children stand and pledge allegiance to the flag. But which flag? The stars and stripes of the United States? No. The children solemnly pledge allegiance to the flag of the Christian Nation, "and to the Christ whose coming is at hand...."

 

"When their school day is over," says Alexia Parks, author of An American GULAG, (How the Wrong Specialty School Can Destroy Your Child) "these children don't return home to their parents. These are captive children," she says. They have fallen through a loophole in state law that has, in effect, created a separate Christian Nation within the state of Florida which is governed by the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies (FACCA). This law, which also exists in Texas, allows any faith-based, Christian child caring facility, whether a mainstream group or "cult-like" fundamentalist sect to operate outside the laws of the state. Unlike faith-based daycare centers, where children go home at night, residential (long-term) facilities make all the difference in the world, says Parks. These children have become the "cash crop" of a fast-growing industry which, may use harsh techniques, forbidden in public schools, to change their belief system against their will.

 

Anti-American? Are these faith-based "schools" training foot-soldiers for a religious war? According to Parks, the children who emerge from high security, faith-based facilities are like walking time-bombs. They carry their Bible with them to protect them from the "evils of the outside world." But in time, she says, they will explode.

 

Parks has spent the past two years counseling worried parents of troubled teens, and teen survivors of harsh faith-based schools. "America," she says, "has created a GULAG for its children; a harsh, private prison system for children who are incarcerated against their will by their parents. Behind closed doors, many of these children suffer child abuse and child torture, as their tormentors seek to change their belief-system."

 

Phrases that define extremist, faith-based facilities that use corporal punishment, isolation and gang-beatings to convert children, says Parks, include "the bluer the bruise, the closer to God," and the constant reminder that "the outside world is evil."

 

"The odd thing," says one Southern Baptist Minister, quoted by Parks in her book "is that many faith-based schools were a direct outgrowth of desegregation in the South. When the South was required to desegregate their schools in the 1960's faith-based schools sprang up everywhere as White Folks pulled their kids out of public school and put them into private schools where they would be 'safe' from us black folks." ###

 

{T.E.E.N. Box K, Eldorado Springs, CO 80025, Publishers of An American GULAG, Secret P.O.W. Camps for Teens ($19.95) ISBN # 1-930418-01-9}

 

Another interesting read: http://www.asfar.org/zine/18th/cover.php

 

These abuses further illustrate the bondage, abuse, violence and dementia that is fundamentalism, which has manifested in Xtianinty and its baseless dogma since its inception, and which has continued throughout its sordid and abyssmal history. The American Treasury continues to be looted to the tune of millions of dollars for "faith-based initiatives", in what amounts to a criminal violation of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, it's not just some poor saps being bilked out of their money by "evangelists", it is...the entire country........

 

K

[Fweethawt]

In a small faith-based residential "schoolroom" in northwest Florida -- actually a converted garage -- ....................

I'm getting to a point where I pretty much have to either witness this stuff myself, or it has to affect my family in some way before I can entertain the thought that this sort of news is real.

 

This just sounds a little too out there.

[Merlinfmct87]

It's shit like this that makes me loose all hope in mercy, compassion, reason, or humanity.

 

the bluer the bruise, the closer to God,"

 

I doubt any god that inflicts pain for his own pleasure

 

Merlin

[Thurisaz]

:angry: