Yes, these really are serious, heavy thoughts. I thought it would be nice to have a place to jot 'em down. The use of "thoughts" in this title implies no challenge to the trademark of "Thought of the Day", owned by Paul Caskey.

I've also been studying up on Satanic child-abuse scares, as part of my ongoing study of oppression of religious minorities in the U.S. Someone asked me this morning why anyone cares what other peoples' religions are, and why they have to construct these elaborate myths like the idea that there's a worldwide network of Satanists who systematically abuse and kill children.

It's a desire to have a simple explanation for a simple and epidemic problem: child abuse. It's also a scapegoat tactic, an honorable tradition spanning millenia, back to the time when the first Christians were accused of raping children, eating newborns, and so on. (Sound familiar? The legend then attaches to the Jews for a long time in Medieval times, so much so that modern Satan rumor-panics continue to have anti-Semitic references.) Basically, we can't believe something that, while complex in its reasons, is actually quite simple: in the U.S., child abuse and rape are pretty normal.

But it gets deeper and heavier than that. Also recently I've been reflecting on how anti-gay dogma often focusses on the idea that we "corrupt" children or "convert" them. I think this fear derives not from any real desire to protect kids from anything, but rather to protect the *parents* from any challenge to their narrow belief systems. Nothing is harder to ignore than your own child coming to you with a big fat dose of reality that you just don't want to deal with, like sex, or death, or the simple unfairness of physical existence. Many parents, rather than taking the opportunity to learn, by teaching their children, instead fall back on blaming the world for being such an awful place. I agree that it's damned tragic that kids have to deal with stuff like their friends getting killed in gang wars, or being abused themselves by authority figures they're supposed to be able to trust, and so on.

But calling it "those homosexuals", or "those un-Christian people", or, incredibly, "that worldwide Satanic conspiracy" doesn't educate, and in no way truly protects, any child, anywhere. It protects the parents' worldview. And this continues the cycle of abuse, in a subtle way, by refusing to look at the world from the child's point of view. (I wish to point out here that I don't mean to support pablum like "listen to the children", the admonition of the cult-believers. There is ample evidence that the lurid details these multiply-abused children {the secondary abuse coming from the sytem of "helpers"} is planted. Kids have excellent bullshit detectors generally, but are eager to please grownups.) In all the cries to "help the children", the voice leasts included is that of the child.

I've boiled this all down, just this morning, into a simple statement: in this country (and possibly many others in the Wester world), we don't regard children as people. They are intellectual property.

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