Next entry: Bamboo Reviews: WALL-E
Previous entry: Obama Is The Leader Of Multiracial Teenage Fascists
From PZ, a story that’s horrifying both on its own and for its implications for the rights of all people, but especially women, whose bodies that the churches claim spiritual ownership over in the name of god. A bit of background: A number of fundamentalist churches believe that sin is caused by literal demons that are invisible but that cling to your body, and need to be expunged by regular exorcisms that are satisfying dramatic to suit their own beliefs that they’re waging war. Unsurprisingly, this tradition drifts over to sadism towards the sinners themselves, especially if the sinners are the young women that absorb so much of fundamentalism’s fascinated hostility. Which has, in one case at least, caused what sounds like a version of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Laura Schubert testified in 2002 that she was cut and bruised and later experienced hallucinations after the church members’ actions in 1996, when she was 17. Schubert said she was pinned to the floor for hours and received carpet burns during the exorcism, the Austin American-Statesman reported. She also said the incident led her to mutilate herself and attempt suicide. She eventually sought psychiatric help.
But leave it to the Texas Supreme Court to decide that physical assault, kidnapping, and generally traumatizing young women is a-okay if you say Jesus told you to do it.
Justice David Medina wrote that finding the church liable “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.”
This sort of logic chills me. I quickly can see the implications for women’s rights outside of just the basic right not to be assaulted during a bout of make-believe over demons that people have convinced themselves is real. Most of these churches are anti-choice---what if they argue that their religious freedom gives them the right to kidnap and contain women that they suspect of being sexual active or of seeking abortion or contraception? Is there a time limit on how long a church can restrain a woman because they believe their god gives them ownership over her body?
I joked the other day about Romanian churches that think they have some legal rights over the bodies of random girls and women in Romania. Maybe they should set up shop in Texas, where the reactionary court will give them license to abuse citizens.
------
Registration is now required! We're still in the process of getting it all squared away, so for the moment don't forget to Login or Register using the links in the upper left menu before starting to write your comment.
What I always learned was that one person’s rights extend only until they have a negative impact on someone else—the old “Your right to swing your fists around end when they impact my nose” thing. It’s scary that any court, much less a state supreme court, would lose sight of something so fundamental.
Maybe this is the perfect time for the Disco Ball Church to come up with some real teachings and doctrinal requirements, so they can be enforced by law…
When I wrote about this yesterday, my partner Amy noted in the comments that people who practice Santeria can’t get away with sacrificing chickens, but these people can do this with no repercussions. I guess the Texas Supreme Court cares more about chickens than they do women, and we all know how well industrial chickens are treated.
This is truly horrifying. Any word on whether she’ll be able to appeal to SCOTUS?
Well, it could have been worse, Amanda. The victim could have been given the burn-alive-at-the-stake treatment, which was believed to purge a person of her demons so the soul could ascend in a state of relative purity as the container expired. Kill the whore; save the soul. Win-win.
Carpet burns? What fay shadows of tradition those oppressed fundies have to work with in the face of all this human rights nonsense. First grape juice for wine in them radical United church ceremonies--now this.
I think that the issue here is whether the church as an institution can be held liable under some sort of virtual liability. The people who abused this plaintiff were not agents of the church, any more than my Catholic neighbor is an agent of the Catholic Church. Did agents/employees direct the assailants’ assault? If not, the church should not be held liable merely for teaching weird shit; teaching weird shit is what religious institutions do, period. The bad actors themselves are not immunized by this decision, nor is any church whose agents (not mere adherents) commit torts.
The best analogy I can think of is this: the Baltimore Orioles should not be held liable for my decision to punch a Yankees’ fan in the face unless owner Peter Angelos pays me to deliver the punch. Merely buying a ticket at Camden Yards doesn’t cut it to hold Angelos liable.
Wait, so a crime isn’t a crime if you do it in the name of religion?
So if my religion believes that property doesn’t exist, that means I can start knocking over bodegas as long as I have some sort of evidence that said religion considers theft a religious ritual?
And furthermore, how can Christianist Texans hold this up as a victory but at the same time vilify terrorism in the name of Allah, who after all is their own God?
“The victim could have been given the burn-alive-at-the-stake treatment, which was believed to purge a person of her demons so the soul could ascend in a state of relative purity as the container expired. Kill the whore; save the soul. Win-win.”
One of the “traditional” christian beliefs has been the existence of witches (and in these days of “attacks on marriage”, etc. we’re all about the traditional), working with the Devil to help destroy mankind. So why wouldn’t burning a woman at the stake, if she had been religiously identified as a witch, be perfectly okay?
After all, we wouldn’t want to prosecute them for murder, because that “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs."…
Bring back Blue Laws, make church attendance mandatory, have the government collect and disburse tithes, etc. After all, the “separation of church and state” is just a myth...like habeas corpus and banning cruel and unusual punishment, limited government powers, etc....
I always wondered why Andrea Yates didn’t try to use the excuse that since god told her to drown her children the worldly courts had no jurisdiction.
I guess that only works if te abuser is male
Secular humanism will be denied religious status in 3...2...1…
IOIYAM.
@idiosynchronic: translation, please?
It never ceases to amaze me the similarities between American conservative theocrats and the islamic fundamentalists that the vast majority of them support raging war on to “protect freedom”. I suppose the abuse of women is only all right when YOUR god says it’s okay. Abusing women in the name of religion must only be a backwards thing when the arabs do it...because they hate freedom. OUR theocrats do it out of love of Jesus...and freedom.
So why wouldn’t burning a woman at the stake, if she had been religiously identified as a witch, be perfectly okay?
Mike, did you miss the point of my (sarcastic) post, or I did I miss the point of yours? (I confuse easily). In any case, we agree (or I agree at least with all of your points). It was indeed OK (for many authorities and private citizens, but by no means all), to burn women at the stake for any number of reasons, be it witchcraft/possession (often linked), heresy or petty treason (the murdering of one’s husband). In a way, they’re all indignations cut of the same cloth--they are all acts that subordinate authority.
Because the history of execution in England is actually my current research area, watch me threadjack with unrestrained glee: What I find interesting re. petty treason is that, frequently, the woman would be strangled to death before the faggot was ignited, if she was sympathetic enough or had money to bribe her executioners--defeating the “traditional” reason for having her burned in the first place (purgation of demons). That tells me “tradition” might already have been pretty occult to many people even in the 16th and 17th centuries (or that human empathy sometimes trumped it).
I can only speak for English history, but Amanda has it right that sins (and crime in general) are considered by some Xian fundamentalists to be caused by inner demons, an idea left over from medieval Xian tradition. This held up in England until about the Augustan period, when more and more you’d be considered a lunatic if you blamed the devil for your crimes in a formal London court. Mind you, crime and religion were still linked causally even then; breaking Sabbath and lack of piety were among the smaller sins which, most Georgians and 18C Americans believed, almost inevitably led to committing capital crimes and the gallows, because sin/crime was a slippery slope. If you stopped praying, you distanced yourself from God’s grace; this is a partial vestige of the pre-Augustan view that demons made you do it.
I think that the issue here is whether the church as an institution can be held liable under some sort of virtual liability. The people who abused this plaintiff were not agents of the church, any more than my Catholic neighbor is an agent of the Catholic Church. Did agents/employees direct the assailants’ assault? If not, the church should not be held liable merely for teaching weird shit; teaching weird shit is what religious institutions do, period. The bad actors themselves are not immunized by this decision, nor is any church whose agents (not mere adherents) commit torts…
Bruce on 06/29 at 11:42 AM
You mignt think that, but that line of argument doesn’t appear anywhere in the stories Pharangulya cites. Instead, the court ruled that the church has a presumptive right not to have any of its doctrines brought into question--not just ruling out a choice by plaintiffs or (presumably) prosecutors to go there in proceedings, but actually ruling out any line of attack that has the effect of challenging them, even if the authorities scrupulously leave the whole matter of specific doctrines and practices of a particular congregation out of the picture and just focus on the matter of harm done. Because, if you read the articles, that is exactly what happened in the lower courts:
A jury, which was not permitted to hear references to the exorcisms, ordered the church to pay Schubert $300,000 after finding it liable for falsely imprisoning and abusing her. (http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/religion/stories/MYSA062708.EN.church.exorcism.46415f9e.html)
Court: Exorcism is protected by law
Texas justices throw out jury award after teenager alleged church ordeal
updated 2:21 a.m. PT, Sat., June. 28, 2008
FORT WORTH, Texas - The Texas Supreme Court on Friday threw out a jury award over injuries a 17-year-old girl suffered in an exorcism conducted by members of her old church, ruling that the case unconstitutionally entangled the court in religious matters.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices found that a lower court erred when it said the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God’s First Amendment rights regarding freedom of religion did not prevent the church from being held liable for mental distress triggered by a “hyper-spiritualistic environment.”
...
Abuse and false imprisonment?
The 2002 trial of the case never touched on the religious aspects, and a Tarrant County jury found the Colleyville church and its members liable for abusing and falsely imprisoning the girl. The jury awarded her $300,000, though the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth later reduced the verdict to $188,000.
Justice David Medina wrote that finding the church liable “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.”
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25423465/)
So the question of whether or not an organization is liable for the actions of its members if the organization could not be shown to have officially directed those actions just doesn’t come up. And it seems clear to me the Texas Supreme Court’s decision, if we grant it had any merit, would apply regardless of whether the church organization did or did not claim “plausible deniability.” (In fact, it would seem to me that henceforward in Texas, religious congregations would be on safer grounds if their hierarchies did formally direct such actions, because that would strengthen the case that the actions did stem from their doctrines that are supposedly immune to scrutiny, and were not the confused, deranged, or malicious acts of individuals.
There are just two straws of hope to grasp at here--one, that this was a civil matter, and so perhaps the decision sets no precedent and has no bearing on criminal law. The articles say nothing about whether the victim or prosecutors sought criminal action on their case still less what the outcomes of that line of procedure might have been. And I don’t know how separate the tracks of civil and criminal law are in this country or in Texas, whether or not this decision would have any tendency to protect the members of churches from criminal liability should their victims or officials seek to apply it.
The dissent of Justice Jefferson suggests to me that he for one worries about just that:
But Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, in a dissenting opinion, stated that the “sweeping immunity” is inconsistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent and extends far beyond the Constitution’s protections for religious conduct.
‘Intentional abuse’
“The First Amendment guards religious liberty; it does not sanction intentional abuse in religion’s name,” Jefferson wrote.(Second, MSNBC, link)
(wow, we have a word limit! I’ll finish this in next post...MHF)
The other faint glimmer of hope is that the Court did include this caveat:
The Supreme Court said churches couldn’t inflict intentional harm on their subjects and claim protections under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
“We do not mean to imply that “under the clock of religion, persons may, with impunity,” commit intentional torts upon their religious adherents,” the high court said.
Pruessner[the church’s attorney--MHF] said no one should think Friday’s ruling would give protection to a church leader accused of abusing a child.
(http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/religion/stories/MYSA062708.EN.church.exorcism.46415f9e.html)
But of course, by exempting this church, and any church, from any scrutiny of any practice they claim is a matter of doctrine, it certainly does protect, if not a “leader” than his organization from civil liability, and that certainly does give at least partial protection.
Not on the grounds that no organization can be held liabile for actions it can’t be proven to have formally directed, which actually if you think about it is questionable since plausible deniability is not that difficult to achieve, but on the grounds that apparently right and wrong is decided by each and every group that claims to adhere to doctrines on explicitly religious grounds, which simply cannot be questioned--even by implication.
As a (lately, very detached) Unitarian Universalist, BTW, this gives me no cover at all, since my congregation does not hold to any doctrines whatsoever, only guiding principles which we are all individually free and responsible to interpret as we see fit. But if any of us decide to found a cult and say it has doctrines, then I guess anything we do in that church’s name is at any rate immune to any civil scrutiny, in Texas.
And if the plaintiff does appeal and find this state court ruling upheld in Federal district court, I guess it would apply to the whole district, and at SCOTUS level it would then become law of the land.
“Mike, did you miss the point of my (sarcastic) post, or I did I miss the point of yours? (I confuse easily).”
I was agreeing with you (realizing it was sarcasm) and adding a sense of urgency (with less sarcasm).
If the Governor of LA can perform an exorcism (I realize not recently, but), when the fundnuts have to be consulted before you can be a POTUS candidate, etc., well, we can all see where this leads…
hbsweet, empress of ice cream: on IOIYAM.
Presumably it is related to IOIYAR: It’s Okay If You’re A Republican.
So IOIYAM would be It’s Okay If You’re A Man.
So sin is caused by body thetans?
Jesus was a liberal.
And frankly, let the ‘rapture’ come. (Or was it ‘raptors’?) I think Jesus would be piiiiissed at what he saw.
We must totally destroy the six who voted on ths ruling. We must dig up every kind of dirt on anyone affiliated with these six and get it out there. Hey, why stick to real dirt? Email every kind of evil rumor you can think of to as many people you know.
These six judges must lose their offices, have all their secrets revealed, and have their families subjected to public ridicule. These judges are the enemy. They are the American Taliban. I am a patriot and no part of my country must fall to the enemy.
The tatute of limitations for assault has run out in this case, but if she can provide evidence that they touched her crotch she might still be able to file sexual assault charges. These exorcists must go to jail or the terrorists have won.
BTW, if you happen to live in the are of this congregation be sure to show up with nasty placards acccusing them of whatever nastiness you can think of.
I want this church abolished. I want those judges humiliated. If we cannot make this happen our nation deserves to fade into third world obscurity.
The Texas Supreme Court has been a horrible laughingstock for a long time. Just do a search on Christie Lee Littleton.
Bacopa channelling Robert De Niro -
I want you to get these fucks where they breathe! I want you to find these judges, I want them DEAD! I want their families DEAD! I want their houses burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON THEIR ASHES! and .....
I want their secrets REVEALED !!!!!!
Glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought of body thetans.
leftshoe:
It never ceases to amaze me the similarities between American conservative theocrats and the islamic fundamentalists that the vast majority of them support raging war on to “protect freedom”.
Yep. I actually managed to shut up a wide-eyed Dominionist once by telling him exactly that. And I do think you’re being rather diplomatic by calling them mere “similarities.” The names and dates may be different, but the ideology is exactly the same.
Hey, she ought to consider herself lucky they didn’t decide to rape the Satan right out of her.
That probably would have been next.
When I think that these people are in charge, it makes me want to weep.
They resolve the hipocrisy of it by reassuring themselves that Islam/Muslims are part of the Antichrist—something that will for all intents and purposes mimic the way of righteousness in order to deceive people, this is why “secularism” is so bad. Christianity is the one true faith because it just is. They put their chips on the God who hates women, Islam, and communism. Any God, even the god from the same genus, who doesn’t hate all these things is just an antichrist come to confuse and deceive. So everything (even good works) that Muslims do is just the work of the Devil. That’s the public reason why they place so much of an emphasis on the “Saved through grace” passages of the Bible. The fact that those selfsame passages give them a “get out of jail free” card when they’ve, say, had an affair and contracted syphalis and given it to their wife… that’s just the gravy.
You know, there have been cases of people dying under Scientologist care because they were denied their medications. And there are plenty of Christian cults out there that won’t allow their children to get blood transfusions to save their lives because it’s a sin. Is that stuff okay now, too?
I live in Texas and I’m a witch, and - yeah - this crap terrifies me. Frank Perretti readers believe this stuff - heck, he based a WHOLE BOOK on a schoolteacher being wrongfully sued for exorcising a demon from a 5-year-old possessed kid - and there’s a LOT of Frank Perretti readers down here.
Double post, but this reminds me WAY too much of the Rapture movie where Mimi Rogers murders her daughter so that she can “go to heaven”. She reasons that murder can be forgiven but suicide (which her daughter was threatening) cannot be forgiven, so murder will get her daughter to the heaven she seeks.
Then she realizes that she can’t love (or even believe in) God because he, you know, let her murder her own daughter.
Did the court even note that the exorcism victim was a minor??
OT, that is one creepy painting. I feel like I’ve seen it before, but maybe it was just a nightmare. What’s the title/artist?
Roving
I think that’s Henry Fuseli’s iconic painting (title escapes). It crops up everywhere. I know there are several guides to Gothic literature that use it on their front covers.
Wasn’t it “The Nightmare” ?
Hey, did you ever get a REAL job? You can’t possibly be living on the pittance sales of your book
That reminds me: time to re-up my petition for my state to be annexed by British Columbia.
(Oh, Fred, I hear the wingnut recess bell ringing. Time go back and slather Rush’s knob.)
Dan,
“And I do think you’re being rather diplomatic by calling them mere “similarities.” --”
the EXACT same thought occurred to me: ‘similarities’ is just too weak a tea. perhaps ‘identities’ or something like that…
Page 1 of 1 pages
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
What I always learned was that one person’s rights extend only until they have a negative impact on someone else—the old “Your right to swing your fists around end when they impact my nose” thing. It’s scary that any court, much less a state supreme court, would lose sight of something so fundamental.
Maybe this is the perfect time for the Disco Ball Church to come up with some real teachings and doctrinal requirements, so they can be enforced by law…