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title, source, author, published, created, description, tags
| title | source | author | published | created | description | tags | ||
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| Oklahoma Christians And Their Plot To Kill Children | https://medium.com/deconstructing-christianity/oklahoma-christians-and-their-plot-to-kill-children-ca2ae615be39 |
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2024-05-31 | 2024-10-29 | In order to properly explain what is happening in Oklahoma, I have to give you a brief history of part of my own life first. I almost committed suicide at school once. I was in ninth grade and I… |
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If this becomes an enforced law, there will be blood on their hands
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Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
In order to properly explain what is happening in Oklahoma, I have to give you a brief history of part of my own life first.
I almost committed suicide at school once. I was in ninth grade and I couldn’t take the bullying anymore.
I didn’t have any weapons or pills, so there were only two ways left that I could think of to kill myself. I decided I’d either use some of my clothes to hang myself in the bathroom or climb onto the roof and jump off.
I was pretty sure I was going to do the first one because I didn’t want to make a scene. My classmates mocked everything I did and I could imagine them gathering around as I prepared to jump off the roof. I knew they’d egg me on and laugh at me as I killed myself. I imagined them kicking my corpse afterwards. I didn’t want to die that way when bullying was one of the major reasons I was suicidal.
I wound up calling my Mom first in my one last ditch effort to possibly keep trying to stay alive.
It was the nineties, so I had to use a pay phone to contact her. I said, “I’m going to stand in front of the school for the next fifteen minutes. Either pick me up or I’m committing suicide in the bathroom.”
My Mom insulted me a bunch because she was abusing me emotionally and physically. She said she might show up to get me, but she wasn’t sure. She thought I was being manipulative, even though she knew I had severe mental health problems, which she told me regularly were burdens to her.
So I waited the fifteen minutes outside and when I didn’t see her, I turned around to walk back into the school, ready to kill myself and believing at that point it was destiny.
I heard my mom’s voice shout behind me. “No, don’t go in. I decided to come. We can go home.”
I went home and hid in my room, barely clinging to my sanity. I just wanted to hide from everyone and everything for a while.
What I actually needed was social workers to take me out of that environment and a therapist to help me deal with my trauma. What I got instead was church and Jesus.
It made my suicidal ideation worse.
In church, we would regularly hear Proverbs 13:24:
Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.
The pastor would talk about the virtues of spanking your children, according to this verse, while insisting that parents should never hold back on assaulting their children or we would become spoiled.
It made me think that all the times my Mom spanked me so hard with wooden spoons that they snapped in half on my ass or when my Dad chased me around bottomless, whipping me on the bare legs and butt with a belt, that all those things were perfectly normal, even though I screamed while they did them.
I thought it was normal for my mom to smack me upside the back of the head every day, slap me in the face, kick me, punch me, and yank my hair violently while she screamed at me. I thought that’s just what she had to do because I was an evil kid going to hell, as she told me.
Since none of that counted as abuse in my mind, I didn’t know how to ask adults for help, even though I desperately wanted it.
I told my youth group leader one time, “My mother hates me.”
She didn’t question why I said that, what was causing it, or if anything bad was happening to me at home. She said, “Of course your Mom loves you. You have a house you live in and food to eat every day, don’t you?”
I knew something was wrong with her asking me that question, but I didn’t know how to explain how it was wrong. So I just said, “Yes.”
“Then your Mom loves you,” she insisted and I nodded my head, even though a year before, my Mom had beaten me for at least an hour, while telling me she was barely resisting the urge to murder me as I screamed for help from my Dad. He never came to help.
I developed agoraphobia, OCD, panic attacks, and PTSD. I stopped being able to act normal in public and I ran to the church for help.
They quoted 2 Timothy 1:7 to me.
For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control
They said I just needed to have enough faith and love for God and then I wouldn’t be scared anymore. It was a lack of spiritual strength that was making me this way. Not trauma or abuse by humans, I was being attacked by Satan and demons.
I accepted this since my Mom insisted that I was demon possessed all the time.
I read Psalm 91 constantly. I sang it to myself because it was supposed to be the protection psalm, desperate to feel it.
…5 You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.
7 A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.
8 You will only observe with your eyes
and see the punishment of the wicked.
9 If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
10 no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
I screamed prayers at God, cried hysterically in fear and begged Jesus to save me from my fear, but because I was still being beaten and bullied, that didn’t help.
The panic attacks still came.
“The demons keep attacking me,” I told my parents. “I can feel them trying to enter me.”
I was mixing up feeling fear with demon possession at that point because I’d been brainwashed at my most vulnerable moments to believe this was the truth. I’d been forced to stay in a situation that was dangerous to me and because of it, my mental deterioration continued.
I saw pastors for counseling. They prayed for me and read Bible verses because they had no psychological training. They couldn’t help me work through my trauma or even recognize the signs that someone was being abused. So they just lectured me on forgiveness and having faith or gave me platitudes about Jesus protecting me.
I just had to stop being so immature and start being a better Christian and then I wouldn’t have anxiety anymore, according to them.
It wasn’t until my mid twenties that I could even deal with my psychological issues at all. I had just started dating my husband and we had our first fight.
I had been taught to be super submissive in my relationships by my misogynistic parents and by my church that told me to always submit to a man. My ex was extremely psychologically abusive, often referring to me as his dog, his bitch, and even called me “pathetic” as a pet name. He has been my only long term relationship before my husband.
So I did what I was taught to do in arguments with a man I was romantic with. I got down on my hands and knees and bowed to him and begged for forgiveness as I insulted myself at his feet.
“What the fuck are you doing?” My husband, who was not raised to be religious or misogynistic, asked me in shock.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why he was still mad. I didn’t know what more he could want from me or how to explain myself.
He just stared at me in pity, then made me stand up and said. “This is not how you apologize to people. You were very badly abused, weren’t you?”
No one has ever used that word, abuse, to describe my situation, so I thought it was ridiculous. My mind was shouting, NO!
But then I thought about it. Maybe I had been abused? And it was only then that I started distancing myself from my mom and was actually able to talk for the first time to a therapist about what happened to me.
Abuse. That’s what had happened to me.
And I know this was a long story and I’m sure you’re thinking, “What the fuck does it have to do with the title of the article?” But I couldn’t explain my thought process until I explained my background first.
The reason I got trapped in that situation was because I was raised in an extremely religious family and an extremely religious small town that had taken over everything.
They didn’t know how to deal with people like me. They blamed everything on spiritual stuff, but I actually needed secular help from psychologists.
They said that taking pills for mental health problems and talking to a therapist was wrong. They said everything was a spiritual war and that if people had issues with these problems, they were just fighting the devil.
I mean, what else could they say, when they rejected science and inserted religion into many parts of life where it didn’t belong?
And it almost killed me. My mom could have murdered me and I was extremely suicidal, even back in elementary school.
I don’t know how I worked through all the brainwashing and couldn’t have done it without my husband’s help.
So it deeply disturbs me that Oklahoma just passed a bill at the end of April saying that ministers can be used as counselers at public schools instead of people with secular and scientific training. Pastors can use religion on children who aren’t religious to supposedly fix all their problems.
Just so you know, the bill did indeed pass, as the article I linked to above explains.
School counselors are supposed to be trained so that they can identify kids like me and get them help. It’s the kids’ only chance, often, of receiving help at all.
Pastors are trained in the Bible and no amount of Bible verses will fix a situation like mine was. I know because I tried them all.
Pastors should be dealing with only Bible stuff and church. They should be coaching people in prayer and giving sermons. Not being psychologists, not ever because these kinds of situations are tricky.
And yes, I survived my situation, but many children in similar situations do not survive.
A bill like this will put those kids in more danger. It will eliminate their only chances to be saved.
==Oklahoma politicians have blood on their hands as they ignore children’s screams.==
All these politicians care about is their religious agendas and how they can get more votes if they can indoctrinate children young. They don’t care how damaging any of this is. Sacrificing abused children is worth it to them.
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