This is so disturbing in so many ways. I can’t begin to imagine how these people think. Women are clearly an enemy of this church. To blame a child for her own rape. To humiliate her and force her to stand up in front of hundreds to confess a pregnancy which was a result of sexual abuse by a church deacon. It’s sick and depressing.
This sort of “logic” is strangely familiar to my experience with the church. There wasn’t sexual abuse that no one was talking about. Rather, there was this emphasis on confession of sexual sins for teenagers. A cousin of mine was more or less forced into marriage because she had sex with her boyfriend. She was barely out of high school. I remember this feeling of there being such a rush to right the wrongs of their sin.
I couldn’t tell you if the marriage was something she wanted. She didn’t seem very happy in those years. I was her maid of honor and she would barely speak to me. I don’t know her reasons. Maybe because she thought I would fuck her fiance (he totally tried the night before their wedding). When I think back though, she really did seem miserable. She had every right to be.
Turns out they forced her to marry a pedophile. She found out a few years down the line that he was meeting up with 12 year olds and having sex with them. He went to jail. She has nothing to do with him or the church any longer.
I just find the whole idea of sexual purity to be so disturbing. Forcing marriages and public confessions when that purity has been violated seems like such a crazy thing to demand. Teenagers have sex. That’s what their hormonal bodies are telling them to do. People really believe that there’s some supernatural father getting all worked up over the wrong people having sex with each other. The way churches and their members fixate on it seems so gross and wrong.
What really, really gets me though, is the IFB’s pattern of blaming rape victims. Who the fuck is sick in the head enough to make an abused child carry around the guilt of their assault? What loving and benevolent being says that’s ok? It’s an ugly thing, and I’m glad it’s getting some exposure.
The Horny Heathen 