This is in response to Tree Climbers: Church Condones Child Abuse.
The above post served to harden my already enormous hatred of religion and religious institutions.
Abuse suffered in a religious home, in this case LDS, but it could have been any other religion, a child abused and punished who sought help from religious authorities. These church authorities failed to yield to decency and delivered that child and its mother back into the hands of hostility and abuse.
I must give honor to my Atheist parents for their principles of decency in honoring me as a child, as a new individual, as a new person. I honor them for honoring my beginning. I honor them for giving me the tools to at least recognize that one must strive for decency and honor, for teaching me how to recognize in many ways the virtues of decency and honor.
I Googled "Honoring the Child" and found a website hosted by Raffi.
To me it is the beginning of a task we must undertake. Margaret Sanger said it well, years ago:
Every child a wanted child...
I was lucky to be a "wanted" child. I wish that every child in the world could be a "wanted" child.
A wanted child. An honored child. Until we as a species achieve that we are less than animals.
From Raffi's site:
A Covenant for Honouring Children
We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving “village.” And to pursue a life of purpose.
We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.
We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come.
An
interview in November, 1993, with Bill Clinton's newly appointed Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, echoed the earlier words of Margaret Sanger:
Every surgeon general has priorities. My priority is to make sure every child born in America is a planned, wanted child. That should markedly reduce poverty, markedly reduce crime and violence, markedly reduce drug and alcohol abuse, and also reduce the prison population, since 90 percent of the young men in prison between the ages of 19 and 35 were born to children.
.... I feel that we as women are going to have to become much like the AIDS activists and make our policymakers respect reproductive choice. As long as we do not have choice about our reproductive health, we really don't have much of a choice about anything. And if you really look at our teenage women, most of them go to their parents anyway before an abortion. Where do we think they get the money? For teens who can't go to their parents, there's a real reason why they can't. At the time when they most need consultation and help, we make them j ump through unnecessary hoops, which does not improve family relationships, does not make things better. It's of no value.
We cannot have children parenting children because of spurious religious values.
We cannot have an ongoing Republican War Against Women, exemplified by Rush Limbaugh's verbal Molotov cocktails hurled at Sandra Fluke.
We cannot have a patriarchy, an ancient and mummified male hierarchy hurling imprecations at the infamy of sexually active women who seek to control their own lives and sexuality while at the same time these dried up old sticks turn a blind eye on the evil of child sexual abuse.