:Naiahdot

In his open letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry and 51st District Court Judge Barbara Walther, Samuel W. Roundy illustrates the fundamentally flawed nature in which the state has gone about ‘learning about’ the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with an intriguing metaphor. Brother Roundy writes:

These people, according to their own admission, have been schooled for a year or more by lying apostates from our society. This is akin to taking the testimony of an ex-wife who has left her husband and had a bitter divorce to find out what his character is like without using any other source of information.

I would like to take this metaphor a step further.

I am under the impression that, in the field of psychology, it is commonly accepted that perpetrators of abuse need the abused to be at fault, need them to have ‘deserved it.’ If it were not so, then their abusive actions become unconscionable. Unable to cope with that unconscionable truth, they convince themselves, and all too often their victims as well, that the responsibility rests with them.

In the state’s ‘informants’ we have a body of people who have, for their own reasons, turned against their faith. Since doing so, they have written books, filed lawsuits, engaged in slanderous media circuses, broken up families, and, through their self-advocacy, inflicted untold harm on hundreds of children.

Some of these ex-members have truly suffered at the hands of certain individuals; I do not deny that, but their indiscriminate response has resulted in the mass-abuse of all members of their previous faith to some degree or another. I purport that rather than that of just a bitter ex-wife, the state of Texas has been relying on the word of an abusive ex-spouse, a pack of self-justifying abusers–abusers with a vested interest, both psychological and economic, in the perpetuation of their cover stories.

Of course they haven’t gotten the truth.

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