Sean Faircloth is the writer of the excellent book that I am currently reading on my kindle, “Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All“. He also has some very impressive speeches that he’s given over the past several years working with the Secular Coalition of America and the Richard Dawkins Foundation; and he’ll be at the Reason Rally this weekend.
The following is a speech about child abuse at the hands of the religious.
THIS IS WHY
This is why it’s absolutely necessary for secular people to make their voice heard, because it is not being heard by the government. The government is so overwhelmingly controlled by the religious that they have carved out special rights that destroy people’s lives. If adults want to throw their lives into the nonsense, that’s one thing, but harm perpetrated against children should be an offense to everyone.
So, I will see you at the Reason Rally. This is our opportunity to demand a voice. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
(Another excellent resource about religious child abuse is “Breaking Their Will” by Janet Heimlich. I read it last year and it was not only a very fair book, in terms of its approach to mainstream faith, but also a very disturbing and necessary book about child abuse and how cults and religions lead to it.)
I know waaay too much of this firsthand. More than I really want to get into in a public forum, though I’ll note you can see a marked difference in my childhood pics pre-church and after mom joined (when the abuse started). Suffice to say that this is a much bigger problem than most people realize, and why I am adamantly opposed to the deference culture in the south–we give people a free pass whenever they couch something in religion, and it needs to stop. It makes me ill to think of the thousands of kids who are permanently scarred by this, and how many of those never get over it.
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