Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It

by Faircloth, Sean

  Child-care standards represent minimum standards designed for the best interests of children. It’s wrong that one set of child-care providers should be subject to rules and regulations, while another category of child-care business gets special rights to ignore the very same laws. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies says, “When states categorically exempt centers sponsored by churches . . . children are less protected and the whole regulation system is weakened.”

  In Alabama, where at least two children have died in religious child-care centers, one fly-by-night religious child-care provider that had lost its lease stayed in business by moving around, switching children from apartment to apartment. Who looked out for the children in this tawdry, vagabond business as it bounced from location to location? The state sure wasn’t helping. Since religious child-care centers remain exempt from state inspection, the state didn’t know for some time that the religious child-care provider had no fixed location. Bad things can, and do, happen at secular child-care centers, but the lack of inspection and the lack of any health and safety laws inevitably leads to greater risks for children in Alabama’s religious child-care centers as a whole. Even if one takes the libertarian perspective that there should be no regulation at all, surely no one can justify two entirely separate laws for like facilities, the only difference being religion.

  In one religious child-care center, investigators found children sitting in feces-filled diapers for nearly four hours. In another religious child-care center, children were forced to use outdoor porta-johns instead of functioning toilets. In another religious child-care center, where dirty carpets were littered with dirty diapers, one adult “tended” to nine babies—in a building with no fire sprinkler!

  The religious exemption also serves as a refuge for scofflaws. For example, the owner of three nonreligious child-care centers was ordered to suspend the transportation portion of one of his facilities after a driver at one of them allegedly left a child unattended in a van. Rather than comply, this owner, shall we say, “got religion,” and filed his religious license exemption—solely for that one facility. Despite the documented suspension, the “religious” child-care paperwork sailed through and the owner continued to ignore the transportation-safety regulations for children—all under the transparent pretext of being a religious facility.

  In the past, owners of religious child-care centers in Alabama at least had to file an affidavit stating that their centers were in compliance with health and safety laws. Even this minimal requirement is no more, because one Alabama governor removed the affidavit requirement for religious child-care centers. Yet still, your federal tax money flows to these religious child-care centers, which can ignore the law that secular child-care centers must follow.

  Several states in addition to Alabama give special rights to religious child-care centers. When the Florida government shut down Lillie Laster Jones’s secular child-care center because of repeated violations of health and safety regulations, Jones knew just what to do: set up a religious child-care center so the law could be ignored. Less than one week after being forced to shut down her secular child-care center—where a toddler was found wandering a deserted playground in only a diaper—Jones opened up her new “religious” child-care center. By affiliating with a church, Jones could operate beyond the scrutiny of state child-welfare officials through a religious exemption to Florida’s child-care laws. Only the church and the religious accrediting entity approved by the state could monitor the health, safety, and sanitation of her child-care center.

  Two years later, Jones’s “religious” child-care center was shut down when a fourteen-year-old sexually assaulted a five-year-old under Jones’s supervision. Jones’s response? Six days later, she reopened her religious child-care center under a new name in a new location upon receiving approval by a religious “accreditation” agency. Consider this: religious child-care centers in Florida like Lillie Laster Jones’s can get federal funding as long as they are associated with a church or parochial school and are endorsed by a private, religious accrediting agency.

  More than ten states allow federally funded, unlicensed religious child-care facilities. Depending on the state, this can mean that some of these religious child-care facilities are exempt from a broad range of health and safety laws. Others are offered fewer exemptions, but the real question is why would any exemption exist at all, particularly when the safety of children is at stake?

  Child-care centers are businesses, but they are not your neighborhood convenience story. These businesses are charged with caring for our communities’ youngest and most innocent—one of the most important tasks in which society engages. This type of business can have significant and long-lasting impacts, for better or worse, not only on individual children but also on the health of our communities and our economy. The United States invests billions in federal funds on child care each year, including through Child Care Development Block Grants, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Head Start, and more.

  In the late 1980s, America nearly passed federal child-care standards. Child advocates, educators, and parents were united in support. But religious child-care centers wanted your federal tax dollars, without having to conform to federal standards. So religious groups went to President George H. W. Bush and got just what they wanted—they killed the standards and continued to get the money.

  So know this: in Alabama about 25 percent of children in “religious” child-care centers receive federal tax dollars through child-care subsidies.

  Federal money benefiting state child care should be contingent on uniform child-care health and safety laws. Your tax money should not be grabbed by those who ignore basic health and safety laws for children just because they label themselves religious.

  Such abuses extend beyond religious child-care centers, because exemptions are often made at the primary- and secondary-school level as well. For example, in the 1990s, the Rolf “disciplinary” school in Texas was cited for whipping sixteen teen girls and placing them in solitary confinement. Despite numerous such incidents, then governor George W. Bush sought a statute exempting religious businesses like the Rolf school from many safety standards. Later, after Bush’s exemption passed, the Rolf school was convicted of criminal conduct for requiring boys to dig a filthy pit while being subjected to sleep deprivation. You know a policy has gone too far when even the Texas legislature feels compelled to withdraw an exemption championed by Bush. Yet, some other states, including Missouri, continue to allow such schools to function.

  Legislatures across the United States that exempt religious child-care centers by law made a moral choice. Or was it an immoral choice?

  Children’s Medical “Care”

  I served in Maine’s legislature ten years, including a term in legislative leadership. Maine is not a state dominated by fundamentalists. And yet, in Maine, parents can deny their infant eyedrops—eyedrops that prevent blindness—if the parents simply state that they wish to deny their child medical care for religious reasons.

  It doesn’t end there. If parents simply say they are religious, then Maine exempts them from having their children tested for lead levels. If parents simply say they’re religious, then Maine exempts their children from receiving vaccines for measles, mumps, and diphtheria. Religious vaccine exemptions exist in the vast majority of states despite the fact that the person deciding is not the child who may become severely ill or die. Furthermore, such exemptions endanger children who come in contact with unvaccinated children.

  Thousands of adults treat their children as religious property based on the Epistle of James and other ancient texts. Christian Science “nurses” are completely untrained, but they themselves have reported trying to “heal” children who were convulsing violently, vomiting repeatedly, urinating uncontrollably. How—and why—these “nurses” could watch such torture, and not rush them to a hospital, is morally astounding.

  Federal law exempts so-called faith
healing from the minimum federal definition of medical neglect under the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act (CAPTA). I’d be completely for so-called faith healing if there were actual healing involved. That’s the problem: there is no healing. Let’s call it what it is: faith harming or, in the worst cases, faith killing. Next time you hear someone use the term faith healing, please let them know of the real torture involved. Leaving aside the horrific deaths, think of the many more children who have been “merely” tortured and disabled due to faith harming. This is particularly hideous in those cases when the pain is preventable and the illness is curable through modern medicine.

  In the book When Prayer Fails, Shawn Francis Peters details the horrors resulting from so-called faith healing:

  A two-year-old is left to bleed to death from an easily treatable cut.

  A tumor grows from a four-year-old’s eye, equaling the size of the child’s head. As the child walks through her home blood trails are left on the walls as her massive tumor smears the house. Later the child dies.

  A child’s untreated tumor results in the amputation of a limb, because the parent believes that the child was being punished for sin that could only be cured through prayer.

  A two-year-old with a treatable bowel obstruction dies after vomiting fecal matter. The two-year-old screamed in agony for several horrific days before dying.

  A twelve-year-old’s treatable tumor is allowed to grow to over three feet in diameter. When the child is finally hospitalized, the staff and patients are overwhelmed with the smell of decaying flesh that permeated the entire floor of the hospital. Later the child dies.

  An eight-year-old girl is left in “excruciating pain” for two weeks from treatable meningitis before she eventually dies.

  A study by the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect states that “more children are actually being abused in the name of God than in the name of Satan.” We don’t know how many children are killed each year by “faith healing.” Some deaths are entirely uninvestigated and not included in statistics. However, a study of Faith Assembly congregations, many of whom use “faith healing,” found that the mortality rate for Faith Assembly infants in their first four weeks was 270 percent higher than the national average.

  I know you might be thinking, Tennessee (Jessica Crank), Alabama (Amiyah White), just stay away from the Bible Belt, and you’re fine. In fact, largely due to the stamp of approval for such exemptions at the federal level, over thirty-five states offer some form of faith-harming exemptions from commonsense child protection laws that the rest of us must obey.

  The largest outbreak of measles in the last two decades in the United States occurred in Missouri. Why? The measles took hold in a number of Christian Science schools and spread from there. The result? The state had a handful of entirely preventable deaths and witnessed the needless suffering of numerous children. On top of this, public school children experienced countless hours of lost school time and missed valuable educational instruction, while families lost wages due to parents having to stay home with their sick kids, leading to the waste of taxpayer money.

  Bizarre sects outside the Bible Belt include a sect in Massachusetts with secretive rituals and “faith-healing” practices that buried small children in a “holy ceremony” at Mt. Katahdin in Maine. Christian Scientists are more well known than this sect, but both contribute not to freedom but to isolation and endangerment of children.

  The Constitution prohibits religious discrimination, so any religion, no matter how small, can claim “faith-healing” protection. Once a government gives its stamp of approval to religious child abuse to one denomination or sect, the government is constitutionally bound to accept this same behavior from all denominations—and judgments as to which religion is bizarre or fly-by-night is not relevant. Consider one so-called Internet-based Native American “religion” whose leader happens not to be Native American. One boy’s parent, also non-Native American, claimed adherence to this new-found religion and refused to have him treated for a treatable cancer.

  So, where are the self-proclaimed “right-to-life” groups when it comes to Amiyah White dying alone in that van? Life is sacred, they say. Where were they for fifteen-year-old Jessica Crank?

  More importantly, where were we? Why aren’t all of us who care about basic human rights organizing and calling Congress right now? Federal law should have one standard for protecting children from abuse and neglect—not one standard that applies to most of us but that allows a chosen few to intentionally ignore the desperate medical needs of their children, all in the name of religion.

  It is not enough to simply eliminate the various exemptions at both the federal and state level. Federal and state statutes should impose civil liabilities on “faith-healing” treatment providers. In addition, federal dollars for state child-abuse programs must be made contingent on a uniform child-medical-neglect standard.

  Politicians sometimes justify these horrific legal exemptions as a religious constitutional right. This is a lie. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 in Prince v. Massachusetts that the religious have no constitutional right “to make martyrs of their children.” Medical science and compassion must be the decisive factors in children’s health.

  Today, the exemptions in federal and state law are the result of lobbying that places religious special rights above basic ethics, a basic sense of humanity, and basic science. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National District Attorney’s Association all oppose religious exemptions for so-called faith healing. Doing away with the torture of children is a moral imperative.

  As with the exemptions given to religious child-care centers, legislatures across the United States that exempt “faith healing” from child-abuse and child-neglect laws made a moral choice. Or was it an immoral choice?

  Sexual Abuse

  Religious exemptions in child care, and religious child-sacrifice exemptions, are less notorious than a third form of child abuse: pedophilia. Sexual abuse certainly isn’t a problem unique to priests. I knew excellent priests at the University of Notre Dame, during my studies in Ireland, and when I served with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in a Yupik town in Alaska. So I don’t paint all priests with one brush, and it’s a sad reality that pedophilia extends well beyond the walls of the Catholic Church. But how has the Church handled charges of abuse? It is the institutional decisions that are most reprehensible and utterly immoral.

  The reason? Let me explain by example.

  Bishop Thomas Daily knew—knew!—from more than one report that a priest in his jurisdiction had made more than one positive statement about man-boy sex. Indeed, Bishop Daily had reason to believe that the priest had attended Man-Boy Love Association meetings.

  Forget priests. What should and would any sensible and moral employer do under such circumstances? Well, as someone who started a children’s museum back in Maine, let me suggest two obvious reactions: first, remove the suspect from any position that involves access to minors until an investigation is conducted, and second, request an investigation by proper law enforcement authorities. What did Bishop Daily do in response? Isolate the priest? Report the matter to the police? No. He gave the priest a promotion. I repeat. He gave the priest a promotion and transferred him from one parish to the next, thus endangering even more children.

  It gets worse. In a 1993 piece written for the Boston Globe, Father Andrew Greeley calculated that there were 100,000 victims of pedophile priests in the United States. This estimate comes from a respected priest—before the worst of the charges about pedophile priests surfaced. Whatever the actual number, let’s focus on two things: (1) the systemic pervasiveness of the problem and (2) the legal defense that the Church has asserted. Church lawyers argued that internal administrative documents and decisions (like moving suspected pedophiles from parish to parish) was, get this, religious free expression. Walk through this looking glass again: Church lawyers argue that covering up employment policies regardin
g pedophiles is a form of religious free expression. Church leadership successfully delayed cases with this argument.

  Physical Abuse

  The specifically religious justifications for legal exemptions that put children at greater physical risk are not isolated but part of a pattern. Consider this interesting quote: “Pain is a marvelous purifier.” These are not the words of an avowed masochist, or a sadist. These are the words of James Dobson, easily one of the most powerful religious leaders in America today, author of books such as Dare to Discipline. Dobson’s organization, Focus on the Family, has an annual budget of over $100 million.

  Let’s be clear: when James Dobson says “pain is a marvelous purifier,” he means pain for children. Dobson asserts, “spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” Dobson advocates spanking children as young as eighteen months.

  Dobson states that if children cry for more than five minutes, “the child is merely complaining” and “I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” As a former assistant attorney general who handled numerous child-protection cases, I assure you that such a practice could easily result in tragedy. Given the sway of Mr. Dobson, I fear for the children who attend one of the religious schools that has the “privilege” of using corporal punishment (not to mention the many children in homes under the influence of Dobson’s “moral” pronouncements). Unfortunately Dobson’s disturbing attitude is not an isolated one.

  Michael Pearl—another prominent fundamentalist and author whose books have sold over 1.8 million copies—influences parents and teachers in fundamentalist schools nationwide. Regarding child discipline, Pearl states, “A length of quarter-inch plumbing supply line is a real attention-getter.” It certainly got some attention when a seven-year-old girl died after an apparent repeated beating—with a “quarter-inch plumbing supply line.” A parent had listened carefully to Mr. Pearl’s detailed suggestion.