I am always angry when I see stories like this one, because it reminds me what a hypocritical society we really are:
Last June, 76-year-old Burrell E. Mohler Sr. seemed a perfectly reasonable choice to give the Father’s Day sermon at his tiny Bates City Community of Christ Church.
After all, he was a family man. Proud of his four sons. Loved all those grandchildren. […]
He’s in jail now, after allegations from at least three grandchildren that “sleepovers” on his farm at 3067 Old Concord Road often meant incestuous rape, and that when granddaddy sang “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” his hands ended up in wrong places.
After allegations that their uncles wedded and bedded first-graders in a chicken coop and that their father did unspeakable things to them less than a mile from that little white church.
Once the charges — 42 so far — were filed, it seemed the Mohler family was shattered as irreparably as the bad-memory jars the little girls purportedly buried and authorities earlier this month hoped to dig up.
It’s a dark and ugly family portrait, causing dismay and disbelief among relatives and friends. They paint a starkly different picture — one of people who took joy in their children, their churches and friendships.
I get angry because you see this sort of hypocrisy all the time. He was a good church going, God fearing man. He believed in traditional morals and values. So how could this possibly be true? Too many people in our society don’t want to believe that good Christians could ever be guilty of such heinous crimes. Read the article a little further down past the paragraphs I excerpted, and you will see testimonials from Mohler’s friends and fellow believers decrying this vicious slander of a good man. No matter it is his own grandchildren who have brought the accusations of incest and abuse.
Just like the stories of all those children abused by Catholic priests had to be lies and had to be swept under the rug for years and years while the abuse continued unabated. Just like the “smears” against the Good Christian businessman and his wife who operated “boot camps” in which teenagers were abused and tortured on a daily basis. No one wants to believe that “men of faith” could be this monstrous. Because it doesn’t fit the official narrative, and besides, it might make their faith look bad, too:
In the 1980s or early ’90s, at least some of the grandchildren reportedly went to their mother about the abuse, according to police documents. Instead of going to law enforcement, she told the head of her Mormon church. And nothing happened.
And nothing happened.
These are the same people who, no doubt, are quick to accuse gays of a propensity for pedophilia (without any factual basis for that belief) and of having an “agenda” to seduce their children into the “gay lifestyle and who believe gay marriage will destroy their marriage.
The same people who believe “secularists” and “atheists” and liberals in general can’t possibly have any morals or values because they don’t believe in God, or they don’t believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and the Evolution is a lie straight from the Devil’s lips.
The same people who are quick to shout for wars of revenge and the murder of innocent people halfway across the world because they practice a different faith and some of theirs killed some of ours. Who proudly called for the nuclear annihilation of Muslim countries. Who think torture is a good thing.
There are many, many decent, honorable people of faith in this country. Decent people who oppose the actions and hateful rhetoric of those who proclaim themselves to be the only True Christians and condemn anyone else who suggests their interpretation of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth might be the least bit wrong, or that their apocalyptic extremist theology is cruel and immoral. The good Christians understand the damage that has been done to our country by these grandstanding hypocrites in our midst.
Unfortunately, these are not the “Christians” whose views dominate the news media coverage and who have achieved political power all out of proportion to their numbers. They are not the Sarah Palins and John Hagees and John Ensigns and Pat Robertsons and James Dobsons of this country who are worshiped as idols and whose sins and crimes and immorality is excused or ignored by the faithful idiots who follow them. They are not the people of the National Organization for Marriage who, because of their bigotry, go to such lengths to deny other loving couples the same right to marry that they have.
Thanksgiving begins the traditional American Holiday Season. A time that reaches its climax with Christmas. Someday, I pray this country will be free of the grip of all these zealots and religious hypocrites who think that only they know what is right and good and true, and who are quick to condemn and spew hatred against people who are different from themselves whether in matters of politics, religion, race, culture or sexual orientation. That day, if it ever comes, will truly be a day to offer thanks. And it can’t come soon enough.
I think the real problem with the way stories are reported, and stereotyping accusations lobbed at various groups (Muslims, gays, or even Southerners), is that people for get that we are humans first… everything else second. And human beings have an amazing tendency to be morally fallible, if not altogether corrupt, beings and being part of a supposedly ‘clean’ group like Christian or from a rich family does not eliminate that propensity.
As for the “nothing happened,” from the stories I’ve read about these sorts of activities it is usually the case that a family knows about the problem and likely had some level of involvement (as victim or offender) and so is unwilling to deal with a problem that would then drag them into it.
Isn’t it obvious? The folks who don’t want children to know about sex don’t want them to have the words to describe what abusive adults are doing to them. Or don’t want their children to know the words to describe what abusive adults did to them when they were children.
If children had the words to talk about their experience, they might call out daddy or mommy or grandaddy or grandmommy or uncle or aunt or…Rev. so-and-so or Father so-and-so for what they are doing.
And in a portion of cases, the abused become the abusers.
And what better way to preserve silence but by cloaking it in morality, insisting on abstinence even while knowing that the teens they are purportedly worrying about have already been abused.
It takes no great investigation to discover that the communities in which abuse is most prevalent are also the ones in which the churches are most moralistic. It is not that one causes the other, or the reverse. It is that they are a societal syndrome that operates together.
But trying to end the syndrome can draw forth hysteria and a witch hunt by the formerly abused crusaders. One has only to look at the paranoia over missing children that popped up in the 1980s (not that there aren’t serious child abduction cases) or the trial of the owners of the Little Rascals Pre-School in Edenton, NC.
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When I Googled …
He taught English and Classics, first at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute and then at Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto. He was beloved and respected by students and teachers. He sang in choirs throughout school and was a member of the tenor section of the Mendelssohn Choir in Toronto. He devoted his life to teaching and mentoring. His sudden death is a great sorrow to his family, friends and students, both past and present.
A boys choir, sport club and phys ed are often spots where leaders should be carefully selected and background checks made. A tough environment for innocent young kids growing up and parents alike.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I wouldn’t consider Mohler Sr. a man of faith – people like him take refuge in the most respectable and rigid social structures because it gives them cover and accusations by kids will elicit just the response from the community that it did. Then some people sort of know but don’t really want to know because it will upset things too much if a pillar of the community crumbles. There’s a malevolence in someone like Mohler Sr. – not an uncontrolled acting out of something that was done to him as a kid, but lots of planning to set up a situation that allows him to destroy childrens’ lives.
“The good Christians understand the damage that has been done to our country by these grandstanding hypocrites in our midst.”
What has soured me on organized religion is not so much the deviants and the crazies — such are found everywhere. It’s the “good Christians” — the “mainstream” or “traditional” sects that don’t want to discuss whether one can claim to be Christian while acting to propagate death, suffering, and destruction.
I think we saw it recently in the Catholic bishops denying “salvation” (I guess) to Kennedy for his failure to be “pro-life” enough, while they continue to welcome mafiosi, warmongers, death-penalty lovers, and their own child abusers into their club. Not that that particular sect is unique among the churchly. It goes beyond mere hypocrisy, which infects us all, to just another version of “he may be a murderer but he’s our murderer” — as long as he parrots the required mindless boilerplate.
These sanctimonious hypocrites do more damage to religion than all the atheists put together — and it has always been so. The outrage they provoke is probably the main cause of atheism.