Public mockings of even judges are tolerated on-line in the West.

We had best appreciate this liberty while some of it exists and start recognizing perhaps why this is tolerated as other systems fall into place. For example this same digital world has a double-edged sword, affecting basic processes in the judicial system, (google Joseph Zernik or Janet Phelan, or see my recent posts) and compromising basic concepts of due process, and of the states/federal distinction. Technology, technology, technology! often extinguishes and changes politics. If some cartoons go online, small deal in the larger picture.

Remember, the U.S. being the world’s largest jailor, supposedly to stop crime — what if crime ceases? If immigrants are expelled? Will the buildings go empty and those jobs shift to another sector of the marketplace?

We are allowed to mock several things on-line, with cartoons, but I feel the situation is further along than we realize. While others are less affected, those stuck in the courts often exhibit many of these symptoms:

1. Extreme identity confusion
2. Dissociative states – “floating” (getting triggered back into cult mode)
3. Panic and anxiety attacks
4. Depression
5. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.)
6. Psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, backaches, asthma, skin problems)
7. Problems with decision-making- dependency
8. Retarded psychological development- loss of psychological power
9. Guilt
10. Fear
11. Sleep disorders/ nightmares
12. Eating disorders
13. Sexual problems / Sexuality Issues
14. Lack of trust/ fear of intimacy and commitment- personal & work
15. Harassment and threats from group {{Again, that’s not a internal psychological problem, but an external experience that can cause such problems. In short, this is what cults, or gangs, DO if obedience is challenged, or disloyalty feared.}}
16. Grieving loss of friends, family
17. Spiritual “rape” of the soul

Source:

Common Psychological Problems
of Victims of Cult Mind Control

Some people will be stronger, and maybe less susceptible to such controls or threats; their strength sometimes makes those who don’t stand up uncomfortable, and as such, group attempts to monitor, marginalize, slander, or silence others often increase.

What do Scientology, cults, gangs, and other subjectyourselftoourgroupmentalityorelse have in common with each other, with the family law system, and with, say Islamic gender apartheid? Or, woman-hating ultra-right conservative Christianity, for that matter? Already the parallels between domestic violence experience and the war vet (as to trauma) have been made.

How it’s done in some cultures:

Women the Future of Freedom

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali | Weekend Australian
Saturday, August 26, 2006

The liberation of Europe’s Muslim women is the best way to encourage assimilation into Western society, but the opportunity is being wasted.

One of my heroines is Samira Ahmed, a 24-year-old girlishly pretty woman with large, brown, doelike eyes, dark, curly hair and a smile that seduces even the gloomiest of faces to lighten up and smile back. Besides her good nature, she is inquisitive and has a strong will to be her own person. Born to a family who left Morocco in the early 1980s and settled in The Netherlands, she is one of 10 children.

In the (northern) summer of 2005, I attended her graduation ceremony at a training college in Amsterdam. Samira received a diploma for pedagogy and a record 10 score (the highest possible) for her thesis.

This is the celebratory side of Samira’s story, for there is also a tragic side

. . .

On Samira’s stand none of her family showed up: no brother, no sister, no cousin, no nephew, no niece. Two years earlier, Samira had to sneak away from home because she wanted to live in a student house like her Dutch friends Sara and Marloes. At home she had shared a bedroom with some of her siblings and had no privacy at all. Every move she made in the house was monitored by her mother and sisters; outside the house her brothers kept watch. They all wanted to make sure that under no circumstances would she become Westernised.

Samira had endured terrible physical and psychological violence at home. Her family always had a pretext to question her, go through her stuff and forbid her from setting foot outside the house. She was beaten frequently. There were rumours in her community that she had a Dutch boyfriend. The beatings at home became harsher. Samira could bear it no longer and left. Soon afterwards, in the summer of 2003, she got in touch with me. I went with her to the police to file a complaint against her brothers, who had threatened to murder her. According to them, Samira’s death was the only way to avenge the shame she brought upon the family for leaving their parents’ house.

The police said they could do nothing to help her except file the complaint. They said there were thousands of other women like her and it was not the police’s duty to intervene in family matters. Ever since she left, Samira has been in hiding, moving from house to house and depending on the kindness of strangers. Mostly she is brave and faces life with a powerful optimism. Samira reads her textbooks, does her homework, and turns her papers in on time. She accepts invitations to student parties from Sara and Marloes and makes an effort to enjoy herself.

Sometimes, however, she has a sad, drawn look on her face that betrays her worries. Once in a while she just weeps and confides that she wishes her life were different, perhaps more like the lives of her Dutch friends.

How awful that her own, large family, could not rejoice with her successes, in fact threatened to kill her for it.

Her worries are far from over, though. She has no money; she has to find a job, and with her Moroccan name that will be far from easy in The Netherlands; she has to find another new place to live; she lives in an unending fear of being discovered by her brothers and slaughtered by them. This is no joke, for in just two police regions in The Netherlands (The Hague area and the southern section of the province of South Holland), 11 Muslim girls were killed by their own families between October 2004 and May 2005 for ”offences” similar to those committed by Samira.

In other words, in some cultures, such independence is punished by simply killing them: “honor killings.” Existing as a (female) individual outside the family is anathema. Their honor is worth more than her life. Think that’s only Islam, or radical Islam? By the end of this post, you might — as I do — realize that while presently, maybe so, that’s not the PLANNED future of the U.S. or other countries…to each its own slavery institution.

In my mind, there are three categories of Muslim women in Dutch society. I suspect that this distinction applies to other European Union countries with large Muslim populations as well. First, there are girls such as Samira: strong-willed, intelligent and willing to take a chance on shaping their individual futures along a path they choose for themselves. They face many obstacles as they try to assimilate in Western society and some may lose their lives trying to attain their dreams.

They chose — had to, to live with their own consciences, perhaps — “live free or die.”

Second, there are girls and women who are very dependent and attached to their families but who cleverly forge a way to lead a double life, and…

The third group are the utterly vulnerable. Some of these girls are imported as brides or domestic workers from the country of origin of the immigrants with whom they come to live. Some are daughters of the more conservative families. These girls are removed from school once they attain puberty and locked up at home. Their families get away with this form of modern slavery because the [EUROPEAN] authorities rarely take notice of these young women. The girls have often been brought up to be absolutely obedient: they perform household chores without question. Their individual wills have been bent to the servitude taught at their parents’ house and put into practice in their husbands’ homes or the homes of the people who import and enslave them. They can hardly read or write.

When they marry, they generally bear as many children as their individual fertility allows. When they miscarry, most of them view this as God’s will, not as a lack of proper health care, which they are usually prevented from seeking because of their families’ religious reasons.

Now, at the risk of alienating readers through length, or offending them through graphic description, I”m going to continue to post what this author, writing for AEI (of all places!) reports. Perhaps some of the qualitative parallels between this and MUCH of our family law system — or some of the most hated headlining cults or individual cult family situations (<>a father in Austria keeps a pregnant daughter in the basement, <> a married couple in Antioch, California, keep a young kidnapped, repeatedly raped girl in the back yard sheds, where she has two girls, raises them out back there (becoming a woman herself) helps him with his print business, and is finally sprung 18 years later when a female security officer at UC Berkeley recognizes the children acting “odd” (Garrido/DuGard), costing California taxpayers $20 million in damages, but at least all are alive ; <>a young woman in Colorado is forced to father 4 kids starting too early, by her mother’s “ex,” loses custody of them, temporarily regains custody of them, and is later forced to give them up to foster care and PAY the government, because the government’s charges to her, she cannot pay (search: “Girl, Interrupted!” or “It’s a Cryin’ Shame”)– will begin to show. <>A woman in Houston, Texas area is forced into a shelter, but but the courts insist Dad get visitation; four kids die. . . Here’s, from this same article:

The biggest obstacle that hinders Muslim women from leading dignified, free lives is violence–physical, mental, and sexual–committed by their close families. Here is only a sample of some of the violence perpetrated on girls and women from Islamic cultures:

• Four-year-old girls have their genitals mutilated: some of them so badly that they die of infections; others are traumatised for life from the experience and will later suffer recurrent infections of their reproductive and urinary systems.
• Teenage girls are removed from school by force and kept inside the house to stop their schooling, stifle their thinking and suffocate their will.
• Victims of incest and sexual abuse are beaten, deported or killed to prevent them from filing complaints.
• Some pregnant victims of incest or abuse are forced by their fathers, older brothers, or uncles to have abortions in order to keep the family honour from being stained. In this era of DNA testing, the girls could demonstrate that they have been abused. Yet instead of punishing the abusers, the family treats the daughter as if she had dishonoured the family.
• Girls and women who protest their maltreatment are beaten by their parents in order to kill their spirits and reduce them to a lifelong servitude that amounts to slavery.
• Many girls and women who can’t bear to suffer any more take their own lives or develop numerous kinds of psychological ailments, including nervous breakdown and psychosis. They are literally driven mad.
• A Muslim girl in Europe runs more risk than girls of other faiths of being forced into marriage by her parents with a stranger. In such a marriage — which, since it is forced, by definition starts with rape — she conceives child after child. She is an enslaved womb. Many of her children will grow up in a household with parents who are neither bound by love nor interested in the wellbeing of their children. The daughters will go through life as subjugated as their mothers and the sons become — in Europe — dropouts from school, attracted to pastimes that can vary from loitering in the streets to drug abuse to radical Islamic fundamentalism.

{My bolding certain phrases is not to diminish the others, but to point out my theme of attempts to stifle the will, and psychological affects of it, including suicide. Also, these practices ensure the next generation will also endure subjugation, making total enslavement easier through physical AND mental control.}}

European policy-makers have not yet understood the huge potential of liberating Muslim women. They are squandering the single best opportunity they have to make Muslim integration a success within one generation. Morally, governments need to eradicate violence against women in Europe. This would make clear to fundamentalists that Europeans take their constitutions seriously. Now, most abusers simply think that Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and hypocritical, since Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they’re told it’s in the name of freedom of religion.

Note WELL those last comments — in the non-Muslim households of the West, this is tolerated (in different forms) under the name of the supremacy of family. This has a theocracy root, and makes a mockery of the constitutions. Either the constitutions exist, and women, or fringe/marginalized populations are equally people, or they do not, and as such are a fraud, misleading women who hope that they were real, only to find out, “not for you.”

ALSO: there is a social need (survival, perhaps) to distance onesself from the outspoken, the rebels, and the weak and distressed. It is a hard thing to lose one’s social moorings; for years, I sought to understand the varieties of silence on my own abuse, and the vicious post-separation response of my own (supposedly liberal) family to it, and utter refusal to recognize me as an individual, that strength, determination, and resourcefulness had helped me break free – as well as determination that comes from my connection to children. That connection “had” to be broken. No recognition of my accomplishments post-separation (which were significant) was permitted; my kids were trained to dismiss these also, although they kept racking up. I was eliminated in the family terminology as a person — I had no past, and my future was to be at their discretion. Having broken the emotional and economic strengths, even as I sought to replace them, it is as though the moorings of society are exposed by these “canaries in the mines.” I had not experienced significant abuse or sexism (that I was aware of) as a young woman or professional — ONLY in my own marriage, and afterwards. Friends, whether religious or work, made during the marriage — none of who really intervened, or referred to any legal source for help — had to be replaced; new ones made professionally afterwards faced (second-hand or sometimes too close for comfort) the same relentless pressure I was experiencing, and no court, agency, or nonprofit was going to compensate.

I began to wonder why the experience of my family of origin was feeling like the writings of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or of Nonie Darwish, regarding polygamy. I began to distance myself from “support” groups (while IN the abuse) to simple economic freedom resulting in permission to escape. The family courts had the system of constant contextt with my ex-abuser, so I still pushed for choice within those limits, and to stay in the profession I’d rebuilt. And – as things escalated — to switch to another “domestic violence-proof” alternative, which I had begun to undertstand — or at least believe — existed, if only certain conditions could be met, namely geographic flexibility (stalking had become an issue, and home no longer felt safe).

Once I began to see the economic forces in the family law system (typically lost in the “rhetoric”), and how psychobabble is actually just a mask for financial (corruption), plus the role of the INTERNET in centralizing the court system grants, and other things, I reported as I learned.

Part of regaining personal integrity is understanding — from one’s own (evolving) choice of sources “What happened?” and “What next?” People who have not been through some sort of cult experience may not comprehend how important this is; as brainwashing is relentless unless communication can be cut off with certain people, as Samira had to do, as a brave, but largely deserted, young woman, above.

On the other hand, once you see the connections (and my tendency is towards research, curiosity, and synthesis) there really is no going back to other understandings. I also pray more these days, as analysis doens’t “cut it” all, and I do believe that –while separate — emotionality and spirituality relate. I would sooner deal with a person enraged with me — and honest about (his or her) rage — than person driven by anger, yet repeatedly declaring they are not.

Below this section on “psychology” (as a means of control), is the BUSH/MOONIE/MONEY connection which (as my style is) was the heart of my post. This tells me, perhaps, WHY it feels so similar in these supposedly different venues.

How it’s done in other cultures:

Outright, upfront theocracy is unacceptable in many “Western” cultures. Although, toleration of the above behavior in Western cultures on the basis of, it’s a family matter, is common — note, this above was from WHICH European country? But generally, for the atheistic (supposedly) norm, there is always psychiatry & psychology to bring someone to heel.

Psychological Abuse: 3 Signs of Crazy-Making by Family, by Friend, by Enemy

(this book summary — and it is a promotion — by Dr. Jeanne King — details the behaviors — not the felt experience — of what people reporting abuse, or leaving a battering relationships (etc.) may face. As I look at it, it’s practically a recipe for what the family law system does, period. If possible).

1) Your “loved one” encourages you to see a counselor with them or see a counselor of their choosing. They say you need help or your relationship with them needs help, and they want to assist in your getting the help they want you to have. Yet, you have no symptoms for which you know to warrant such an intervention.

2) Your “loved one” or the counselor chosen by, or consulted with, your loved one encourages you to self-admit yourself for a psychiatric evaluation in the absence of symptoms that disturb you. Your voluntary admission into a psychiatric evaluation is much like you taking the weapon they seek to use to compromise you and your liberties, aim it at yourself and pull the trigger.

This protects those involved in the crazy-making maneuver from any liability of falsely utilizing the system to have you committed. It’s much like talking you into your own suicide, after which there is no murder, no murderers…no one to blame but you.

3) Your compliance with your own psychiatric admission becomes the condition for you to maintain rights that are being denied or being threatened to be denied. If you resist your voluntary admission into the sought-after psychiatric evaluation, then the thing you fear losing becomes the “carrot” to manipulate you to re-consider. This reconsideration re-invites you, manipulates you, to cooperate in your voluntary psychological evaluation and ultimate crazy-making maneuver.

Sounds crazy? You bet, it’s crazy. And sadly, this happens more often than most mental health professionals care to admit.

If you find yourself confronted with another person’s campaign to make you “crazy,” certifiably so, take a hard and honest look at what’s in store, before you become another victim of this form of psychological abuse.

The “Unification Connection” came up this past JUNE, 2010, as I looked at Congressman Danny Davis, in association with voting for more Fatherhood Grants at the House Ways and Means Committee website. I caught this coronation ceremony photos in a Senate Building in Washington, D.C. Say, what? ?? (Search my posts);

Note: This theme won’t show up in a typical, say, NOW Family Law section, or other arenas. I don’t know that even any of fellow-bloggers on ANY side of the family law crisis reporting will echo as to this theme. Then again, I’m typically the one researching the HHS grants and very upset by having the marriage forced on women after they have left violence; I am also sensitive to religious themes along those lines. The U.S. Government Grant — Unification Church connection is established in several strands: Illinois, Washington, and Arizona (N.A.M.E. being one). Ultra-conservative right-wing so-called Christian groups find out that some of this ain’t Christian. We as Americans should ALl be considered bout the constant erosion of individual rights (as in the bill of Rights and in the Constitution) and we should be grown-up enough to acknowledge that that often carries a religious theme. Well, here we go:

Since the following article, and my connecting this Unification church with the Forcing-marriage policies in the United States, may sound outrageous, here’s its author

Robert Parry is a veteran investigative reporter, who broke many of the Iran-contra stories in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek. Robert Parry’s latest book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It can be purchased at http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com.

To see two of the DIA documents, click here. http://www.consortiumnews.com/moondocs/index.html

For more background on the Moon Organization, see Steve Hassan’s Web site, http://www.freedomofmind.com/groups/moonies/moonies.htm

Bush, Moon, Money, and Marriage issues: A marriage not made in heaven:

The Dark Side of Rev. Sun Myung Moon
Part 1, Hooking George Bush

By Robert Parry

July 28, 1997

Last fall, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s latest foray into the high-priced world of media and politics was in trouble. South American journalists were writing scathingly about Moon’s plan to open a regional newspaper that the 77-year-old founder of the Korean-based Unification Church hoped would give him the same influence in Latin America that the ultra-conservative Washington Times had in the United States.

(TIMELINE: VAWA/National Fatherhood Initiative — 1994, 1995 Clinton letter, 1996 PWORA (welfare reform), 1998, 1999 Congressional resolutions regarding fatherhood, and so forth — see my site and others.).

EVIDENTLY, A Bush in the Family is worth Two in the Hand:

Given the controversy, Argentina’s elected president, Carlos Menem, did decide to reject Moon’s invitation. But Moon had a trump card to play in his bid for South American respectability: the endorsement of an ex-president of the United States, George Bush. Agreeing to speak at the newspaper’s launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane, arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22. Bush stayed at Menem’s official residence, the Olivos. But Bush failed to change the Argentine president’s mind.Still, Moon’s followers gushed that Bush had saved the day, as he stepped before about 900 Moon guests at the Sheraton Hotel. “Mr. Bush’s presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige,” wrote the Unification News. “Father [Moon] and Mother [Mrs. Moon] sat with several of the True Children [Moon’s offspring] just a few feet from the podium.”Bush lavished praise on Moon and his journalistic enterprises. “I want to salute Reverend Moon, who is the founder of The Washington Times and also of Tiempos del Mundo,” Bush declared. “A lot of my friends in South America don’t know about The Washington Times, but it is an independent voice. The editors of The Washington Times tell me that never once has the man with the vision interfered with the running of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C. I am convinced that Tiempos del Mundo is going to do the same thing” in Latin America.Bush then held up the colorful new newspaper and complimented several articles, including one flattering piece about Barbara Bush. Bush’s speech was so effusive that it surprised even Moon’s followers.”Once again, heaven turned a disappointment into a victory,” the Unification News exulted. “Everyone was delighted to hear his compliments. We knew he would give an appropriate and ‘nice’ speech, but praise in Father’s presence was more than we expected. … It was vindication. We could just hear a sigh of relief from Heaven.”Bush’s endorsement of The Washington Times’ editorial independence also was not truthful. Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation of the news by Moon and his subordinates. The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984, confessing that he had “blood on his hands” for helping the church achieve greater legitimacy. Money Talks

• But Bush’s boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America. “The day after,” the Unification News observed, “the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized that the event had the support of a U.S. president.” With Bush’s help, Moon had gained another beachhead for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire. After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know Moon. “Bush told me he came and charged money to do it,” Menem said. [Nov. 26, 1996]. But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By last fall (Fall 1996), Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least a decade and a half. The ex-president also had been moonlighting as a front man for Moon for more than a year.In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in Asia for the Women’s Federation for World Peace, a group led by Moon’s wife, Hak Ja Han Moon. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo, Bush insisted that “what really counts is faith, family and friends.” Mrs. Moon followed the ex-president to the podium and announced that “it has to be Reverend Moon to save the United States, which is in decline because of the destruction of the family and moral decay.” [Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1995]
  

. . .

In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. Bush addressed the Moon-connected Family Federation for World Peace in Washington, an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of his contract after learning of Moon’s connection. Bush had no such qualms. [WP, July 30, 1996]

Throughout these public appearances, Bush’s office has refused to divulge how much Moon-affiliated organizations have paid the ex-president. But estimates of Bush’s fee for the Buenos Aires appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000. Sources close to the Unification Church have put the total Bush-Moon package in the millions, with one source telling The Consortium that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million.

Ka-CHING! and Diatribes against individuality, especially as found among American women:

Moon’s jingle of deep-pocket cash also has caused conservatives to turn a deaf ear toward Moon’s recent anti-American diatribes. With growing virulence, Moon has denounced the United States and its democratic principles, often referring to America as “Satanic.” But these statements have gone virtually unreported, even though the texts of his sermons are carried on the Internet and their timing has coincided with Bush’s warm endorsements of Moon.

“America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists,” Moon preached in Tarrytown, N.Y., on March 5, 1995. “You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan.”

In similar remarks to followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church’s eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism. “Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people,” Moon declared. “The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested.”

During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women. “American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position,” he said. “However, woman’s shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. … Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place.

“Does woman contain the seed of life? [“No.”] Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent.“

In case we’re not clear, this was addressed to women, particularly any woman who wants to become a mother.

A fellow-blogger, “rightsformothers.com” posts alternating photos at the top. ONE of them reads — on a sign held by a man: “Women are not Incubators.”

Well the man who wants to improve upon Jesus’ model (NB: who was respectful towards women) disagrees. And so, increasingly, does Federal policy towards mothers as seen in the family court programs subsidized by federal grants, many of which go to faith-based institutions. What happened?

I also wonder, if this same “spirit” has not entered into mainstream very conservative Christianity — slavish obedience. “God wants to use you, too.” While shunning works well for dissidents (there’s another church somewhere nearby more suited to your tastes), in the past about 10-15 years, I’ve seen it get worse — not better — on confronting domestic violence (i.e. wife-beating to ensure dominance) in the ranks of individual congregations.

ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE, No PRIVACY — Sound like family court Archipelago yet?

One-World Theocracy

Despite growing disaffection among many longtime followers and other problems, Moon’s empire still prospers financially, backed by vast sources of mysterious wealth. “It’s a multi-billion-dollar international conglomerate,” noted Steve Hassan, a former church leader who has written a book about religious cults, entitled Combatting Cult Mind Control. At his Internet site, Hassan has a 31-page list of organizations connected to the Unification Church, many secretively.

“Here’s a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy,” Hassan said in an interview. “Yet he’s wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he’s benign.”

Hassan argued that perhaps the greatest danger of the Unification Church is that it will outlive Moon, since the organization has grown so immense and powerful that other leaders will step forward to lead it. “There are groups out there that want to use this organization,” Hassan said.

Who is Hassan?

Steven Alan Hassan, cult counselor and mind control expert, is the Nationally Certified Counselor and licensed Mental Health Counselor who has developed the breakthrough approach to help loved ones rescue cult mind control victims.

A former member of the Moon cult, ex-cult members and others seek him out for specialized counseling to help them recover from symptoms other mental health professionals are not trained to address.

Unification Church and “Family” Agenda:

(excerpts from “Religious Tolerance” website — its disclaimer at bottom of page).

History:

The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity*** was organized in 1954 in Seoul, South Korea by Rev. Sun Myung Moon [“One who has clarified the Truth”]. Some sources say the organization started in Pusan, not Seoul. Its followers are often called Moonies by persons outside of the Association. However, this term is considered derogatory by its members, who refer to themselves as Unificationists.

**Counterpart to, or to replace, the Pope, one might ask?

Rev. Moon was born in what is now North Korea in 1920 and was raised in the Presbyterian Church. He is a Professional Engineer by training. When he was 15 years old, at Easter, Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision, charging him with the responsibility of completing the work in the world that Jesus had started. During his adult life he has had trouble with legal authorities, having been arrested for practicing capitalism (a crime in North Korea), charged (but not convicted) in South Korea of other activities, and convicted of tax evasion in the United States. The Presbyterian Church of Korea, in 1948, felt that his views were incompatible with traditional Christianity; they excommunicated him.

In 1957, Rev. Moon published Divine Principle which is a collection of his beliefs, as written by a member of the Church. Two years later, Young Oon Kim moved to North America as a Unification missionary to establish a church presence there. Many of the members in the US expected a type of apocalyptic event in 1967. When nothing of that nature occurred, some members became disillusioned and left the organization. In 1972, Rev. Moon moved to the United States and started a major recruitment drive. A decade later, he performed the first of many mass wedding ceremonies in which more than 2000 couples were married. In 1984, he was convicted of tax evasion in the US and sent to prison for 13 months.

. . .

The third Adam was born in Korea between 1917 and 1930. (The first Adam was the individual described in Genesis; the second Adam is Jesus). He will be recognized as second coming of Christ, the perfect man. He will marry the perfect woman, and will become the “true spiritual parents of humankind”. Some members of the Unification Church regard Rev. Moon and his second (and current) wife Hak Ja Han as these parents, although the Church itself has never made this claim.

Practices:

	The Unification Church is a profoundly family-centered Church. Members are expected to remain celibate during their youth. They are to subsequently marry, have children, and create an ideal family which contributes to world peace.  {{cf. Ron Haskins / Urban Institute / HHS “fatherhood” policies –do it for your country and your kids…}}
	The Blessing or mass wedding ceremony is the most important Unification ritual. Rev. Moon matches up each couple a month (or less) in advance, selecting from among the membership. The bride and groom are expected to marry, but can decide to opt out without disgrace. A Holy Wine Ceremony is conducted before the marriage; this purifies the couple so that they are able to have children free of Fallen Nature (resulting from original sin inherited from Adam and Eve). A special Three Day Ceremony is performed by the married couple some weeks after their wedding, before they engage in sexual activity.
	A Pledge Service is celebrated at 5 AM each Sunday, and on the first day of each month and on January 1.
	They celebrate four major seasonal days of celebration:  True God’s Day, True Parents’ Day, True Day of All Things. Chil II Jeol: Declaration Day of God’s Eternal Blessing True Children’s Day Foundation Day for the nation of the Unified World

. . . Other disturbing allegations:

Unification Church Books and Publications:

The Unification Church’s main religious text is the Bible. It is seen as teaching truth, but is not viewed as truth in itself. It is only a partial revelation. Rev. Moon’s interpretations of Christian beliefs and additional revelations from God are contained in the book Divine Principle, which was written in Korean in 1959 and translated by Young Oon Kim in 1959. The Church publishes the Unification News, and Today’s World.

They also publish a newspaper, the extreme-right wing Washington Times. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC): “The Washington Times is relatively small (circulation 102,000) and money-losing (it’s been estimated that its backer, the Unification Church, has spent more than $1 billion to keep it going over the past 22 years). But its influence cannot be measured in those statistics. President Reagan once described it as his favorite paper. The first President Bush said it ‘in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C’.” President George W. Bush gave a personal tour for top staff of the Washington Times during 2005-JAN.

Marian Kester Coombs, wife of managing editor Francis Booth Coombs, has had at least 35 news and opinion pieces published in the Times. SPLC quotes excerpts from some of her articles:

	America has become a “den of iniquity” because of “its efforts to accommodate minorities.”
	White men should “run, not walk” to wed “racially conscious” white women and avoid being out-bred by non-whites.
	Latinos are “rising to take this country away from those who made it…[the] Euroamericans.“
	Muslims are “human hyenas” who “smell blood” and are “closing in” on their “weakened prey,” meaning “the white race.”
	Blacks, are “saintly victims who can do no wrong.”
	Black solidarity and non-white immigration are imposing “racial revolution and decomposition” in America.
	The whole of human history as “the struggle of … races.”
	Non-white immigration is “importing poverty and revolution” that will end in “the eventual loss of sovereign American territory.“
	Muslims In England “are turning life in this once pleasant land into a misery for its native inhabitants.“

According to the SPLC, the Washington TImes has published articles taken from white supremacist hate groups, anti-Semitic ads for a book called “For Fear of the Jews,” and an ad from a key Holocaust denial group. ₈

Conflict of interest declaration:

The author of this essay was able to attend a convention on religious tolerance and freedom in Washington during the 1990s. The meeting was sponsored by the Washington Times, which is owned by the Unification Church. Airline fares, meals and accommodation were heavily subsidized by the Times.

Although the constitution of Singapore guarantees religious freedom to its citizens, it has banned the Unification Church. See: “Infringement of Religious Freedom” at: http://members.tripod.com/~teopl/ and “MERCILESS REPATRIATION ” at: http://members.tripod.com/~limcm

This site is almost too much to handle. Nevertheless:

W.’s Christian Nation

How Bush promotes religion and erodes
the separation of church and state

by Chris Mooney

The American Prospect, June 2003

n November of 1992, shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president, a telling controversy arose at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association. When a reporter asked the governors how their party could both satisfy the demands of Christian conservatives and also maintain a broad political coalition, Mississippi’s Kirk Fordice took the opportunity to pronounce America a “Christian nation.” “The less we emphasize the Christian religion,” Fordice declared, “the further we fall into the abyss of poor character and chaos in the United States of America.” Jewish groups immediately protested Fordice’s remarks; on CNN’s Crossfire, Michael Kinsley asked whether Fordice would also call America a “white nation” because whites, like Christians, enjoy a popular majority. The incident was widely seen as exposing a rift between the divisive Pat Robertson wing of the GOP and the more moderate camp represented by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Fast-forward a decade. Republicans have solved their internal problems, and the party is united under our most prayerful of presidents, the born-again believer George W. Bush. Though not originally the favored candidate of the religious right-John Ashcroft was-Bush has played the part well. Virtually his first presidential act was to proclaim a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving; soon he appointed Ashcroft to serve as attorney general. Since then the stream of religiosity from the White House has been continuous.. . .

. Clinton also showed immense political sympathy for religion, but he didn’t nominate a slate of right-wing judges who could give the law a decidedly majoritarian, pro-Christian bent. And Bush has gone further than that. From school-prayer guidelines issued by the Department of Education to faith-based initiatives to directives from virtually every federal agency, there’s hardly a place where Bush hasn’t increased both the presence and the potency of religion in American government. In the process, the Bush administration lavishly caters to the very religious right groups that gave us the dubious Christian-nation concept to begin with.

Consider Bush’s faith-based initiative. In October 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services doled out $30 million to ~ 1 religious and community groups as part of the faith-based program. Sure enough, $500,000 went to Pat Robertson’s religious charity Operation Blessing. In addition, according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a grant of $700,000 went to the National Center for Faith-Based Initiative, founded by Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, who has declared church-state separation “a fiction.” Another $z.’ million went to Dare Mighty Things, a group affiliated with Chuck Colson, a Watergate felon turned evangelist who tries to convert prison inmates to Christianity and has the ear of the Bush administration. All of the religious recipients of Health and Human Services grants were connected to Christian ministries, mostly evangelical ones.

These grant allocations suggest that while Bush may not say he’s forging a Christian nation, at the very least he’s blending church and state to fund Christianity. And Health and Human Services is just one government agency now engaged in promoting faith-based initiatives. Under Bush, notes Americans United Executive Director Barry Lynn, the departments of Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and Education all “are issuing regulations, guidelines and other directives that promote religion.” Bush has also placed influential religious-right figures in his administration. Consider a few little-noticed examples. David Caprara, the head of AmeriCorps/ VISTA, directed the American Family Coalition, a faith-based social-action group affiliated with Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Kay Coles James, a staunch anti-abortionist who was formerly a dean at Pat Robertson’s Regent University and senior vice president of the Family Research Council, is now director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which monitors the federal workforce.

. . .

I don’t think Bush has set out to reshape church and state relationships, but by doing the kind of politics that he’s been doing, there are some strong implications,” says the University of Akron’s Green. Those implications were summarized, in their most radical form, by Pat Robertson in his l992 book, The New World Order. There, Robertson wrote, “There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.” America is certainly on top of the world, and with George W. Bush in the White House, religious conservatives are standing there with him. ~

In case this is NOT sinking in, it goes approximately like this: Unification Church (mass, arranged marriages, propagate and help save the world; woman as object/incubators, America as kingdom of Satan because of individualism, 100% obedience, one-world religion, mega-riches behind this, and well, SOMEONE has to be the head of that)(oh yes, and certain ethnic minorities — particularly Muslims, Latino — are devilish, dogs…) + BUSH (faith-centered initiatives, backed by the HHS grants, abstinence, marriage, fatherhood, we are a Christian nation, and Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times is great reading ….) . . . . And we got “Dubwa Trouble.”

From “Metamyth – KoreaGate: Conservative Financial Ties to Billionaire Cultist Sun Myung Moon.

The Unification Church has funded, usually furtively, various conservative groups in Washington. One conservative insider told me over ten years ago that many Americans would be shocked at how much money for conservatives in Washington comes from Moonies.

It is rather anomalous that many political conservatives, and especially politically conservative Christians, work as closely with the Unification Church as they do. There should be more voices warning against the lies of Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. Does character matter?

David Becker, editor of the Christian Religion and Politics Digest

 

The enormously wealthy Reverend Sun Myung Moon has powerful friends in Washington and he uses his influential newspaper, the Washington Times, to keep these friends supportive of him. Moon has skillfully used the fear of Communism to gain powerful allies and to intimidate threatening foes. What few do not understand is that Communism is really not an issue with Moon, it is merely a banner which Moon uses to rally a large enough force to exert a powerful influence on society.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon may preach that he is the Adam and the Christ reincarnate, but he has been accused in a 447 page Congressional report with bribery, bank fraud, illegal kickbacks and illegal sale of arms. He was also accused of attempting to secretly build nuclear weapons for Korea. A Congressional report also indicated that Rev. Moon’s Unification Church was founded by a director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Chong Pil, as a political tool in 1961.

The House report states, “Kim Chong Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK (Republic of Korea) Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which has a membership of 27,000, as a political tool.” Kim was among the inner core of Army officers who led the coup that brought President Park Chung Hee to power in 1961. The Moon organization denies any ties with the Korean government or intelligence community.

In 1977 Congressman Donald Frazer launched an investigation into Moon’s background. The House Committee report states that it uncovered evidence that the Moon organization had systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency and foreign agent registration laws. The investigator for the report commented, “We determined that their primary interest, at least in the U.S. at that time, was not religious at all, but was political, it was an attempt to gain power, influence and authority.” But after the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan all investigations were halted. Moon was Vice President George Bush’s guest at the inauguration and was a major financial contributor to the Washington conservative establishment.

A federal investigation into Moon’s finances led to a 1982 trial on charges of conspiracy and filing false tax returns. Moon was sent to the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut. He remained there for 13 months.

The Moon organization has spent an alarming amount of money in the United States in an effort to influence the government. More than $800 million has been spent on the Washington Times, alone. Most of Moon’s money comes from Japan. For almost 20 years there have been consistent reports that one of Moon’s most important financial supporters and advisors is Ryoichi Sasakawa. Sasakawa describes himself as “the world’s richest Fascist”.

In addition to his riches, according to author Walter Pat Choate [1996 Reform Party Vice Presidential candidate], “for more than half a century Sasakawa has been one of the primary political brokers inside Japan”. Choate claims that Sasakawa is part of Japan’s attempts to influence America’s politics and policies. “Many of Sasakawa’s and Moon’s operations parallel each other. They operate in the same way, giving away money, a great deal of attention to media and media organizations which operate across national borders, and the maintenance of a very right wing conservative focus,” states Choate.

Meanwhile, under religious tolerance + it’s a family matter, Westward-wishing Muslim young women, watch out.

Phyllis Chesler “gets” this and I think always has, from “Women & Madness” to her present warnings about politically-correct fear of telling the truth re:  Jihad, and “Palestinization” of feminism . . . As others may speak about the LGBT-ization of N.O.W. – – leaving mothers somewhat in the lurch, in the church.:

The Muslims are Coming, The Muslims are Coming

Excerpt:

In France, young Muslims have been rioting for days—not about the age of retirement but in a display of hostility towards the French Republic; some are now describing this violence as “anti-French racism.” In Holland, young Muslims riot incessantly and call out the vilest hate speech imaginable against America, Israel, Jews, Holland, and infidels—and yet Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, is still the one on trial for telling the truth about Islamic jihad because it offended some Muslims.

No, the Wilders trial is not yet over; three judges must first agree with both the defense and the prosecution who have both asked that all charges be dropped.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Juan Williams was just fired by NPR aka National Palestinian Radio for admitting that he, like so many others, including many Muslims, “feels” some trepidation when he sees Arabs in Islamic clothing board a plane.