Think Twice

Today - the here and now - The Republican party has all but outright declared itself the mortal enemy of America, plain and simple. From overwhelming opposition to the Lilly Ledbetter act to gross incompetence in displaying any factual knowledge of the state of the nation, and it's place on the world stage. The Republican Party is the party of the merchant, the businessman, the dollar-dealer. It cares nothing for "God", it only uses religion as an opiate for the weak-minded. It has no recognition of any class but the wealthy, and disdains any effort to uplift the poor or stabilize the working class. It detests an intelligent populace, and positively LOATHES WOMEN.

The unbelievable BAD JUDGEMENT of the Republican Party to support a candidate so ill-suited for the Presidency of this country is inexcusable, and displays a flagrant absence of respect for its inhabitants. A thinking man would at least have been given pause after Romney's first falsehood-laden speech, and why ANY woman would ever vote for a Republican in this day and age is beyond me.

The best any Republican candidate can hope to do right now is attack the weakest link Obama has (and there's not many to show, in all honesty). This is because they are impotent to do the one thing Obama CAN: Stand in FRONT of a nation and concisely LEAD IT.

Obama can stand on his own merits, he doesn't have to attack Romney. By and large, he hasn't. It was pathetically embarrassing to watch the Republican Candidate time and again hurl himself against the unyielding castle wall that was the President of the United States, hit the wall headfirst and fall flat on his Mormon ass, dazed and confused. Tonight, more than ever before, Romney stood in front of the American people and failed to provide ONE SINGLE REASON why he "might" be a better candidate for leadership.

NOT ONE.

His bluster, doublespeak and sleight-of-hand politics were played out at the first debate, and no one had the good sense to whisper in his ear "Hey, you've lost the fucking plot".

So here is a lesson you ALL should have learned: We don't lengthen our straws by shortening everyone else's. We don't rise above the rest by sinking the factory floor.

We do it through Integrity of leadership.

We do it by raising the standard to which we hold our civic leaders, and demanding a better quality of government.

So, judging from the comments on my last post, and the sheer volume of PM's that were waiting for me this morning, I'd like to make a statement for the record:

I am NOT a party member. Not a mouthpiece for the Democrats, nor a puppet for the Republicans. I write as I FEEL, based on three things: Depth of research, critical analysis of current affairs and lastly, gut feeling after the FIRST TWO have weighed in. The downfall of any good writer is emotionally shooting his mouth off without knowing what the fuck he's talking about. To those of you who didn't have a Steve Perry in your life to bitchslap you whenever you tried to do this, I can only pity you. You will be resigned to mere rants and one-liners, form without substance, until you learn it.

I don't vote for whom I feel is going to merely "swing my way" on the issues near and dear to my heart. I don't cast a ballot for the popular smile.

I vote for the candidate with VISION. Someone who will project what effect his policies will have in 10, 15, 20 years.

I sure as hell won't vote for the party that says "Our policy is to IGNORE the other party's policies entirely...even if they are mutually beneficial!"

If Romney bothered to TRY to present something within shouting distance of reason, I would have gladly given him a platform for his views. I mean that, as much as I detest religion, I would have heard the man out, and compared his plan to the one Obama presented.

Which is PRECISELY the one thing Romney didn't do. He didn't man up and take responsibility. He didn't OWN the problems we face today, he either cannot or WILL NOT address our national crisis, and his foreign policy is non-existent. Romney might have had a shot to be a real contender, but he went with the age-old dog-and-pony show instead. That he did it once wasn't real front page news, but when he simply put the CD player on "Repeat" for the second debate...I knew he had lost.

And frankly, I'm willing to bet a lot of you knew it also. But that's the problem with being locked into a party line, you must always toe it, no matter who's at the pulpit. This is the recurring cry I hear in the background, the undercurrent amongst Republicans everywhere; "We're willing to settle. He's not stellar, but at least he's not Obama."

I'm not willing to settle.

I'll leave out the sheer number of Romney's unprecedented lies, or go into detail about how many reversal-of-position moves he's attempted, because his fact-free campaigning is simply the logical continuation of a trend that started in the Bush administration back in 2001, when the Republican Party literally walled itself from reality.

Right-wingers feel a kind of justification that they don't have to confront facts they don't like any longer. If the truth is uncomfortable, they can give it a miss in favor of a war, or something. They no longer have to watch to Edward R. Murrow dress down Joe McCarthy for his un-American demagoguery. They don't have to listen to Walter Cronkite telling them the Vietnam War is lost. Those days are over -- they can simply switch the channel.

But now there's a tightly-wound cocoon consisting of FOX News, right-wing radio, conservative newspapers and wingnut blogs where high taxes and burdensome regulations are crushing the American dream, inflation is running rampant, businesses are suffering, global warming is a joke, homosexuality is a choice, illegal immigration is at all-time high, our scary Muslim enemies are on the march -- and if only Republicans could take power over the entire federal government again, those problems would all magically disappear.

Look around the world today, China or Iceland, for instance. There are entire countries changing, evolving into something greater for -->ALL<-- their inhabitants, faster than the rest of the world can keep up. Most of Europe has simply overtaken the U.S. overnight in health care, ecological concerns, education and a myriad of other directly-related issues. The children of those nations will be competing with our undereducated "No Child Left Behind" offspring raised on Monsanto corn and cellulose-rich artificial foodstuff.

We cannot continue doing business as if it's still 1985. Our country isn't made up solely of Christians. It doesn't consist entirely of Caucasians. We don't function from the upper 1% or the bottom 5% alone. We are not all heterosexual. We are not all male.

America cannot afford to continue in this manner, or we'll all be dead from stupidity, if nothing else.

Not The Quickest Country on the Uptake

 
Damn, why does no one want to talk about this? TWO UNFUNDED WARS. Do you know what that means? Married women, go into your husband's bank accounts, and gut the living shit out of it. Leave $5.00 - you know, for a happy meal, or something. Buy a new car with the money. No, in fact...buy TWO new cars.

When your husband comes home, and asks;

1: Where the fuck all the money went and-


2: Where the fuck those new cars came from-

Answer that you have no idea about either, but don't worry, everything's fine.

And when he whines that things like this need to be put on the books so he (or she) can balance the damn things, tell him he needs to suck it up, buckle down and start pulling in some overtime, because the rent's due!

...And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have a deficit. You can't put not one, but TWO wars on the fucking credit card and just slap on a shit eating grin when the bill comes around. Someone is paying that.

You didn't want to hear that there were no WMD's, no Yellow-Cake Uranium, no nothing. You didn't want to face the unyielding consequences we would pay for ignoring all the warning signs. You sure as shit didn't want to hear that for every bullet we put into the enemy, we were putting two in our own backs. I hear it all the time, "I'm so sick of people bringing that up! How long will you blame Bush?"

Clearly, you're not sick enough to take your fucking medicine. We're all suffering with it out here.

Obama put the wars BACK on the books. Maybe you don't like that. Well, we didn't impose "Right of Conquest" on the countries we invaded, so not only did we run the checking account dry with the wars, we cashed in our IRA's to help rebuild those countries in favor of getting our own house in order. In an attempt to look like "The Good Guy" (and at the time, it almost worked), Bush financed BOTH wars without raising taxes or making significant cuts in domestic programs. Instead, he cut taxes and ran up the national debt.

I remember watching Grover Norquist (remember him? The Bush adviser and anti-tax lobbyist?) saying that the tax cuts "helped create millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in new wealth", and that they will will ultimately make the debt easier to pay off.

And today, we get to pay for that. Is it easier, America? According to your former president, this is what "easier" should feel like. Are you feeling it yet?

Let me break this down for you armchair economists:

World War II was financed partially through the Revenue Act of 1940 and war bonds. President Roosevelt expanded the number of taxpayers from 4 million to 42 million, and then TRIPLED tax collections as a percentage of GDP. As the military budget sucked down more than a third of the economy, Roosevelt had to call for mass sacrifice, rationing food and gasoline, capping prices and wages and exhorting Americans to spend any money they could spare on war bonds and stamps. You can still find recordings of this online.

To pay for the Korean war, President Truman raised the top tax rates to 91 percent for individuals and an all-time high of 70 percent for corporations, while imposing wage and price controls. It didn't make him popular, but it got the job done.

President Johnson was forced to sign both a tax increase and spending cuts in 1968, after hedging for a few years about Vietnam - and kicked off more than a decade of inflation.

Over half the cost of the First Gulf War was paid for by Saudi Arabia.

Do you get it yet? Any of this sinking in?

We didn't pay THEN - so we're paying NOW.

We just inherited a two-war debt, albeit not out of the clear blue (as some of you like to think). And Obama has, although it's not perfect, presented the only plan for getting us out. I mean, seriously, I've actually LOOKED - No one else has anything tangible to go on, outside of "I think God might have pity on us, if we pray hard enough."

I'll blame Bush for the exact amount of time that history will: Forever.

 

 

North Carolina: Watering Hole of the Insane

I'm not surprised at the passage of Amendment One, to be completely honest. This is the state that told blacks and whites who they couldn't marry until 1971. In point of fact, you could replace every reference to gays in this Amendment and change it to references to mixed races and it would read like it came from half a century ago.

Why is Gay Marriage so important? Why is Amendment #1 in North Carolina one of the most bigoted and ignominious things ever to be put into legal practice this century? Who can say who is right or who is wrong?

This is the simplest and most direct answer: You cannot base discrimination on nonsensical laws.

A leper – no matter what form he takes – will always be ostracized from society, for they are dangerous to the health of it. Pedophiles, rapists, murderers, thieves, all manner of violence…these and others are necessary evils that occur and must be exercised from the group without hesitation. This is sensible, and a necessary discrimination.

However – a pedophile can get legally married. A murderer can legally tie the knot. Jail marriages happen all the time.

To base such exclusion on -->nonsensical<-- reasons, such as race, creed or sexual orientation is nothing short of BIGOTRY. There is no other excuse, and it is purely religious-driven.

Revoke the right to marry based on any religion that begins with the letter "M", or perhaps a law that forbids marriage to any woman who has seen an episode of "Jersey Shore", but not one episode of "Firefly", or hey, howzabout anyone who is deemed NOT a virgin cannot be wed, no matter what, and you'll see All you religious nutbars marching in the streets WITHIN THE HOUR. "It's not fair!" you'll cry, waving your pathetically misspelled hand-painted signs in the air like so much flotsam for the illiterate, "We're being oppressed! Our rights are being trampled on!"

I'll tell you: The religious should have been the fucking FIRST people to oppose this amendment; they should have jumped on it and torn it to shreds on the factory floor. The respect, support and unity for believers would have shot through the roof at a rate that would have been uncontrollable. I wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

I once had a girlfriend whose mother was an extremely devout Catholic. She believed the only "real" marriages were performed in the Catholic Church by a Catholic priest. I know of a radio minister who thinks the only legitimate marriages are between Christians. I've met people who think that it's an abomination before God when people of different races marry. You people can't be in the same damn room for ten minutes without going to war over the minutiae of what God supposedly meant in his written-by-a-human "word".

Who am I to say who's right or wrong? Who the fuck are YOU PEOPLE?

So listen up, I'll only say this once:

There are gays this very minute in the military, suffering and dying to protect and defend a right that they themselves don't enjoy. They have done so since the dawn of the American military. They are doing a job that, quite frankly, I would not under ANY circumstances. I have no use for militaries, war or combat. I decide when and how I kill, no one else. I won't – for ANY reason – defend the flag. Fuck a whole truckload of wars, you won't find me in one.

NOR WOULD ANY OF YOU…If you had to do so for a right you weren't privileged to have. Send the troops out to defend Jim Crow laws, let me know how many of you would TAKE A FUCKING BULLET for that? Or, to be more contemporary, stand in front of a firing squad to defend gay rights in Africa.

Homosexuals do this EVERY DAY. Without complaint, I might add, except the desire to be counted on the same list as every one else.

To say "There are no laws left standing that discriminate against gay couples" is disingenuous at best, and ALL of you know this. Whenever you cull a fourth (probably more) of humanity off, deny them basic civil rights and fundamental living entitlements, you tell the rest of the world; "It's okay to treat these people like they're not really human. Like they're not really a part of society. See, we've already taken the first step."

You give permission to the people of your society to act like animals, and turn a blind eye when they attack the innocent. You'll march into Hell itself to stop an abortion, but you'll turn that apple cart around as fast as your bigoted little legs can carry you when true innocence and injustice is happening.

God forbid you open your eyes to the plight of your fellow man. Wouldn't want the almighty to be anything but the petty, raging asshole you all make him out to be, now would we?

So why is it important to fight this on both the moral and religious front? Because they are united AGAINST everyone else, despite their proclamations to the contrary. This is an excerpt from an interview with George Bush Sr.:

Interviewer: "Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?"

Bush: "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

Atheists shouldn't be considered citizens. Say that with the same tone as "Niggers shouldn't be allowed to roam free with proper white folk", and you'll have the correct level of bile in your mouth that WE feel.

And this Amendment is a first step, for it only allows a foot in the door to bring back the religious dark ages, those times of fear when people like me couldn't walk down the hall of my middle school as a kid for fear of being called a "Devil Worshipper", and being spat on for my disbelief.

Whenever religion is holding the reins, it is NEVER for humanity. It happened before. It's happening *now*. The hangman never pauses long, he looks hungrily for the next throat to loop.

I can hear it now: "It appears to me as if everyone's beliefs are supposed to be respected and honored and allowed EXCEPT for those of the Christian faith."

No, you are so far out of the ball park on that, you could moonwalk blindfolded across homeplate without worrying. This bias comes from a lifetime of indoctrination – Christianity (let's just say "religion") has had an iron gauntlet on the reins of power in this country since it's inception, and since the conclusion of World War 2 has been slowly losing it's grip. It had no business being in control of such things, particularly for the run it enjoyed, and now what we're seeing is a leveling of the playing field…FINALLY. Nobody is trying to oppress religion, but we ARE trying to put it in its proper less-than status in society. It only seems like oppression because we're no longer turning to the Bible for legal matters…which is as it should have been from the start.

If there were laws in place that prevented YOU from becoming married because you were a Christian, you'd be completely up in arms about it. Or how about all the states in America that make it illegal to worship?

Oh, there aren't any? That's because Christians aren't persecuted. You're finally being told that you don't get to have exclusive access to indoctrinating people, and it's about time. People are waking up and are finally starting to push back.

I don't see it's necessary to demonize you (the Theists) for your beliefs, but I *DO* believe it's absolutely necessary to look accusingly at your religion, the anchor shackled around your leg that you're happily offering the rest of the world, and ask why this dated, obsolete piece of philosophy still guides your morality.

I believe it's irresponsible not to point it out, at the very least.

I hope that this Amendment is a last-gasp action of a dying breed. I hope in a decade or two, it will be bred out of Congress, hopefully out of society. At least, it's raising awareness in the young about who they elect, and the effect it will have on their well-being. Because some of the kids of those people who voted for this amendment are indeed gay. And they will grow up in the shadow of their bigoted parents, watching with disdain as they enter the time of their lives when they are left in control of the wheel.

I hope future generations don't look back on us and think we were all fucking insane. I'd like to show the rest of the world that not all of us were monsters.

A Warning for the Humanists

Mankind is enjoying a sort of awakening of their humanity recently, and I'm delighted to see more and more people coming forward and being counted amongst the rational, the logical and those who reject superstition over evidence and inquiry. This is good, this is what advances mankind further along in its journey of being.

However, I have a warning for my humanist brothers and sisters: It is with caution and reserve that we should fly our colors, and be vigilant in the observation of the religious movements in government. Honeyed words, cloaked in the mantle of reason will disguise true motives, such as Ron Paul's sleight-of-hand trick with Roe v. Wade, Mitt Romney's used-car salesman approach to covering up his Mormon agendas, or Newt Gingrich's outright demand that everyone bow and scrape before the cross of the one true God.

Not for them is the peaceful, logical and compassionate resolution of natural disaster, biological disruption or severe misfortune of the masses. They will not have it that bad things happen for no reason, and an Earthquake in Haiti means the island lies on an unpredictable fault line - not that God is punishing these devil-worshiping Negroes for some imagined sins. The logical fallacy, the unsolvable paradox of simultaneously campaigning that "All life is sacred", whilst their policies decree "Any who don't obey us must die" is always a three card monte illusion that will suffice for the majority of the voting public who don't realize the deeper implications such leaders will bring to the table, once it's too late to stop them.

Just you watch: The unforeseen tsunami, the random tectonic event coupled with a war on foreign soil and a drought here in America, and we'll be reduced to hellfire, brimstone and prophecy that was mass-copied out of unrelated selections from the book of Revelations. We shall have finger-pointing, mass hysteria and an uncountable number of charlatans wearing a cross proclaiming the end of days.

Just let the lights go out for more than ten minutes, and things start going bump in the dark...people will drop to their knees and begin muttering fervently and crying their crocodile tears in the hopes of avoiding divine retribution.

And then, driven utterly insane by their lizard-brain paranoia and unrequited prayer-groveling, they will begin to look for someone to burn in hopes of getting God's attention, or securing God's forgiveness. They will cast stones and rally together, shrieking; "See! We warned you! You let in the niggers! You let women kill their children! You took the heathen religions as your own! This is what you get, and you've made us suffer with you!"

This is ever the swan song of the apologist-turned-zealot, and there is no reasoning with such people; the lizard is now in charge. Those who would be happy enough to stay on their side of the fence and let the world turn peaceably on its own cannot be counted on to take a stand, indeed, it is the yielding branch that survives the gale-force wind. No, any who say "Live and let live" in times of peace will be amongst the first to crawl into a deep hole and wait out the storm, rather than be seen defending a nonbeliever. 

And then they will begin dreaming up reasons why everyone else but them should suffer, and how gloriously they can prolong the suffering of the innocent for the sake of their God.

Just you watch.

T.a.T. update patch 2.0

It's been more than a year since I've done any work on the blog. I'm redesigning it to make it a little less 2006. Old blog posts may lose their images temporarily while I pull my stuff off of that fucking shithole Photobucket.

When The Best You Can Do Is "Make Do"

Sarah Palin must be laughing her ass off right now...

I am so VERY tired of politics. Honestly, I don't see how politicians stand it for so long…Is the complete worship of impotence really that attractive?

I was looking over the list of candidates the other day, and I have to admit; we're in for some fucking bleak-assed days ahead. Like reading a menu in a restaurant that specializes only in recycled, three-day old food: Nothing looks good.

With the attempted privatization of Social Security and the now active NDAA, I have lost all faith in chocolate Jesus. (And believe me, I was RIDING HIS DICK beforehand.) I wanted to so desperately believe that he would at least attempt the job we had elected him for. I didn't vote for him because he was black, I didn't vote for him out of sympathy, and I didn't vote for him because "anybody is better than Bush". (Anybody probably WOULD have been, but that's not why I voted.)

The current problem I'm facing is that there is NOBODY on the bill that I would currently vote for over Obama. I mean, there is no "lesser of two evils" here...If Satan himself showed up on the ballots, he'd have a damn good chance for my vote, at this point.

Mitt Romney? Yeah, right - the day I vote for a Mormon will be the exact same day I stick a loaded gun up my ass and try to shave my taint with the barrel. The Mormon cult has gone a long way in at least covering their racist heritage, if not truly eradicating it. They put on smiles that would make a used car salesman envious, and glad-hand their preposterous beliefs under the cover of "family values" better than any zealot I have ever encountered. Their apologists are amongst the finest you will ever meet.

And they simply cannot wait to rescind emancipation, reduce women back into non-status and burn every homosexual in a slow-roasting pit.

Rick Santorum? You...You ARE joking, right? There's a reason his last name is synonymous with the most disgusting body fluid known to man. Ricky S., like all his opponents except Obama, is standing tall on the soapbox that God wants him to be the next leader of the free world, so they can "bring back family values". The problem being…Who the fuck wants a family like Rick Santorum's?

If his stance on gay marriage wasn't bad enough, his ideas about "Health Care Reform" qualify him as the single most retarded congressman running...right behind (see below)

Newt Gingrich - His name is Newt, and he's as delusional about God as Pat Robertson after a three week bender. He's as two faced about the Republican "family values" (so-called) as he is triple-jowled and disgusting. No more need be said.

And finally, Ron Paul. I will admit, I hadn't done much research about the man, prior to last month. But after hearing a few of his more Obama-esque speeches, I figured he deserved due shrift before I wrote him off. For the most part, I actually like what Ron Paul has to say…less interference from government at the federal level, closing of foreign bases, cutting to the core of our over-trampled legislature. He seems to be more grounded in reality than the other candidates, Obama included.

…Except, again – his religion. As both a Christian and an ob-gyn physician, Ron Paul is a staunch pro-lifer. So much so that he fully intends to overturn Roe Vs. Wade.

 

*sound of my support flying out the window*

All the other candidates want to do this as well, by the way – except Obama. He's just going to get us all black-bagged and held without trial. But overturning Roe V Wade would undo decades of struggle for women everywhere in America to choose whether or not to have a child. Leave out cases of rape or incest, many people get pregnant and simply cannot afford to raise a kid, ior aren't ready for one at that stage in their lives. Nothing more needs be said.

One of Ron Paul's more frequent quotes when defending his position on abortion is that "the morality changed" in the 60's, and people decided to take a different path in dealing with pregnancy.

Well, no…the morality didn't "change" - The morality evolved. Like it did in the mid 1800's, like it did in the early 1900's, and again in the early 1950's.

But, like all "Good Christians"…Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution. Ergo, something great cannot have risen from something less.

This is truly at the heart of what bothers me about Ron Paul; he seems perfectly content to reduce the decades-long struggle women went through just to have the right to clean, safe abortions.

Understand…If you overturn Roe V Wade, there will STILL BE ABORTIONS. Just unsafe, back-alley cloak-and-dagger affairs, such as we had in frequency before the 1970's. And people will die – both women and their babies.

Why do pro-lifers feel so concerned with "the sanctity of life" only BEFORE it hits the birth canal? Where the fuck were these people when I was growing up in an orphanage? I didn't see anyone rushing to protest the children being cast off, hustled through the system and left to rot in some cell until they were 17. Either they're just a bunch of God-crazy hypocrites, or pants-on-head retarded where the true value of life is. Either way, they have no business outside an abortion clinic. But then again, stupidity is SUCH an elemental force.

...So, I just don't know. I'm extremely disappointed in Obama (This must be how Obi-Wan felt, after slicing off Anakin's legs..."You were supposed to bring BALANCE to the budget, not destroy it!") but despite the bullshit - he's still the better choice than what's up for grabs at the moment. I don't approve of everything he's done, and some of his actions teeter between blatant disregard for the country he's supposed to be leading to shocking naivety about how politics really works. Either he's incompetent, or still struggling with his presidential baby steps, I can't tell which.

*SIGH*

This would be a fantastic time for the Great Beast to rise and conquer the Earth. It would make voting easier, at least.

Inside New Bethany

The first book dealing with New Bethany children's ministries is out.

Right out the gate, let me warn you: This wasn't a story of the triumph of good over evil. Steven Spielberg didn't write this script, and there was no friendly alien/police chief/German sympathizer to swoop in and save the day. The stories are exclusively focused on the emotional survival of children who have been traumatized, and some of the details are almost too much to take.

My brother, in a casual conversation with his then-girlfriend several years ago, offhandedly mentioned a couple of the punishments I had to endure that I had related to him. After a minute or two of listening, she looked him in the eye and said "You're making this up - nobody would allow that. No parent would do that to their children".

This is a recurring song on the hit parade of reality that many survivors face: Object disbelief. Without fail, parents, siblings, spouses and friends are averse to facing a tenth of the horror we faced every day, some of us for years on end. The argument is always the same; No "Christian Ministry for Children" could REALLY be that cruel, that sadistic, that...insane.

Ah, but they can - and often do - with impunity. Which is the other point I wanted to make here: They got away with it. The people who did this are still running camps, abusing children, preaching hellfire and brimstone. No one was punished. When one camp was closed by the state, another was opened two states away UNDER THE SAME NAME. No closure was ever given. Rifts between families and their children grew to uncrossable proportions.

The point is that some of us managed to pick up the pieces and rebuild our lives. We learned to trust again. We learned to find strength within ourselves (as any true survivor does) and carry on in spite of our circumstances.

The stories are told entirely from the female resident's point of view, and that's perhaps partially my fault - of the male survivors, few of us are willing to bring the ghosts back to life (there is an alarming suicide rate amongst New Bethany survivors, and many more are emotionally traumatized into a kind of "willing amnesia").

Fewer still care to go on record about events within the compound, myself included. There are no heroes in the story of New Bethany, just residents. By the time I was convinced it was the right thing to do (thanks in no small part to Teresa Lynn Frye, a fellow survivor & friend) the book was out.

Still, it's a worthy read, and a rare look at the inside of the cultish southern religious camps that many families turn to for "help" when a son or daughter might be going through nothing more than typical adolescence...and the price those children pay.

You can buy the book here: Inside New Bethany