-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, Chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is concerned with the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) and the Scouts’ “possible problematic relationships with other organizations.” Rhoades is also concerned about various “problematic” program materials, although specifics details are being withheld.
The GSUSA is “a secular organization that refrains from teaching religious or spiritual beliefs or practices” that tries “to further girls’ leadership.” Therein lies the problem.
The Bishops are just the latest combatants in the War on the Girl Scouts. The first salvo was fired by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family when the Girl Scouts made their religious oath optional for membership. On the political front, Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris, R-Fort Wayne claimed:
A Girl Scouts of America training program last year used the Planned Parenthood sex education pamphlet “Happy, Healthy, and Hot.”
The GSUSA’s response was unequivocal: “No, we did not.”
Morris also claimed that “Planned Parenthood instructional series and pamphlets are part of the core curriculum at GSA training seminars.” GSUSA’s responded that they do “not have a relationship or partnership with Planned Parenthood.”
Indiana Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma mocked Morris by offering Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints, to his colleagues in House chambers.
The GSUSA does not take a position or develop materials regarding human sexuality, birth control, or abortion. In the words of Rep. Morris: “If you’re not against it, you’re for it.”
CNN contributor Dana Loesch has suggested that conservatives should protest by boycotting Girl Scout cookies. Although I haven’t in the past, in the future I’m going to be buying Girl Scout cookies at every opportunity. I will donate them to the local food bank.
H/T: Steve Benen, David Crary (AP), Rob Boston (AU), Carol Morello (WaPo), Joseph L. Conn (AU).
Gene & Swarthmore,
It depends on what you DO with the Thin Mints.
😉
Gene, If you were catholic, you would know it is a venial sin. lol.
If they try to declare Thin Mints a mortal or venal sin, there’s going to be a throw down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZKiQub0ZnA
Bob Morris was right.
Kate, trust me, this GS leader was not explaining that obedience meant to question authority. I won’t go into the six or seven other stories that would back up this statement and I have forgotten the woman’s name. Her daughter’s first name was Geraldine but that’s all I can remember now. In fact, if her point had been “question authority,” she would have explained that afterwards, and I would have explained that to my mother, and my mother would actually have discussed it with me as well.
But on to the other question you have asked. I will tell the story. Many other stories have arisen from that community, but I was not as intimately involved in them, so this is the only example I’m going to use (for the sake of accuracy).
Amy Neustein, Ph.D. was a dutiful daughter of the Orthodox group in Brooklyn of whom I have spoken in such a derogatory manner. Her father was a well-respected Rabbi and her mother was a well-respected Rebbetzin. Common “knowledge” has it that the Rebbetzin’s family — several generations back — had a Jewish convert in it, so “if quiet be kept,” there were some European non-Jewish genes in the mix. This information only came to me recently, and was not known to me at the time of the events, but it may have some explanatory power.
Neustein’s mother held a position of great respect in the Congregation where Neustein’s father was Rabbi.
Neustein looked what the neighbors in her ultra-Orthodox community would regard as “goyish,” in that she was tall, angular and blond. Actually a very pretty woman, but a bit out of place in the community. She was sent to a public high school rather than a Jewish private school, although her siblings went to private school. I don’t know the reason for that. One way or another, she started to be an outcast.
She married an Orthodox man but one could tell that HE was basically “settling” for someone who was not on the top of the charts for the matchmakers in that community. IN THAT COMMUNITY, BEING ABLE TO MAKE A GOOD ORTHODOX MATCH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE.
Husband was a physician, and still is. Things happened. Neustein claimed that Husband battered her but she did not reveal it to the civilian authorities — it is not acceptable within the community to do that, particularly back in the late 1980s when it was happening. Neustein gave birth to a baby girl, and the marriage struggled along for a while and then broke apart. The parents divorced, mom took the daughter to live with her back in HER parents’ house — the elder Rabbi’s and Rebbetzin’s house.
Neustein traveled a lot for her work — sociolinguist. While she was in Seattle, I believe, her mother, who took care of the child, hosted a visit by the father (who still used to bring his laundry to his mother-in-law to wash for him, reportedly). Grandma reported seeing the father give the little girl a “ride” on his “horsie” by lying on his back, placing the pre-schooler on his pelvic area, and gyrating and bumping up and down while holding her wrists firmly in his hands so she couldn’t stand up and pull away. The Rebbetzin made written statements and confirmed that she witnessed this, and when she interrupted the “game” and took her granddaughter off the “horsie,” the father stood up and his trousers were unzipped and he had ejaculated. She threw him out of the house. The child asked why Daddy’s pants were all wet and Grandma said he had just not made it into the bathroom on time and, with that particular brand of “say no evil,” did not discuss the situation with the child any further. She told Neustein when she got home, and the mom and grandma decided not to do anything about it but to have all future visits supervised by one or both of them, in a public place, so there could be no repeats.
BUT the matter was not over. Neustein’s brother-in-law was very hostile to Neustein’s mother, and he apparently sent a letter out to everyone in the Congregation saying very humiliating things about the Rebbetzin. Brother-in-Law and Husband got into an unholy alliance (that Neustein’s sister later confirmed, and then recanted) and decided to destroy Neustein and her mother, and to “bring shame” on the family.
Neustein’s mother eventually did tell the civil authorities, causing a child protective services investigation to open, but the organization (“Ohel”) that ran the organization is notoriously corrupt, so everything went South.
First, they took the child and put her in foster care, where she insisted that (a) she had not lied about the incident (indeed, how could she?); and (b) she wanted to go home to her mom and grandma. Then they informed Neustein that they were going to put her daughter up for adoption. They informed her that they had already received permission for the adoption from the father, and that was true.
ADOPTION? WHY?
Here’s the big one: Once a child is involved in some kind of a scandal, they will never be “marriageable” because they come from a “bad family.” Therefore, if she does not want her daughter’s life to be ruined (by not being able to marry within the Orthodox community), she has to allow her daughter to escape the stigma of having come from a troubled home. Once the daughter is adopted, she’ll have a spanking new family and she will be approvable, marriageable, acceptable once again.
Neustein refused.
She was dragged through 51 court hearings, all about whether she “lied” or not. NOT ONE HEARING about whether the abuse took place or not.
She was bankrupted, slandered, attacked, ostracized, hated, criticized, watched by “community watch personnel,” cursed, denied contact with her daughter.
She went through years and years of the most insanely barbaric mistreatment and abuse. One very kind-hearted Orthodox woman, Rachel Anolick, whose husband was also a Rabbi, reached out to her to provide her at least an approved home in which she could be permitted to have supervised visitation with her daughter after she lost custody, visitation, and everything else.
Rachel was a friend of mine. She and her wonderful husband, Rabbi Zvi Anolick, were towers of strength, charity and morality in the highest tradition of Jewish Law and Ethics. Yet on a certain day when the daughter was seven or eight years old, and was on a visit at Rachel’s house, both Rachel and Amy Neustein recognized that the child was dreadfully sick, as a result of self-starvation (anorexia nervosa) and they took her, against a court order saying the mother was not permitted to seek medical help for her own child, to the emergency room.
That child was hospitalized immediately and put on an i.v. to save her life. She was so dangerously dehydrated and underweight that the emergency room doctor filed an affidavit saying that she would have died in a matter of days had she not received emergency care when she did.
The mother, nevertheless, was never allowed to visit her daughter again, because she disobeyed Judge Alvin Deutsch who decreed that she must not take her child to any doctors. (That was, of course, because by the time the father had sole custody of the child, she was being both sexually abused and medically neglected in ways that a pediatrician could have identified in undeniable ways.)
This daughter was not only physically and sexually abused, she was so effectively brain-washed that she engages, to this day, in a hate campaign against Amy Neustein. Her husband (whom she married about a year ago in a ceremony from which Amy Neustein was publicly banned, to the great shame of all concerned) also attacked his to-be mother-in-law by actually contacting the publisher (or collaborator or contributing author — now I haven’t remembered one of the details) of one of her books, and trying to convince that person not to work with Amy Neustein because of what he perceived as the woman’s lack of credibility and/or mental instability. Neustein heard that her “future son-in-law” had said bad (and untrue) things about her and she did not know she had a “future son-in-law.”
I met the daughter, as an adult, when she was fiancee of this “future son-in-law,” at a seder given by a friend of mine who is an Orthodox woman. She sat silent and withdrawn at the other end of a long table, next to her fiance, who sat there silent and withdrawn as well. That is the only contact I have had, directly, with the young woman. Yet at that Seder (before I knew who she WAS!) I formed a sort of intuitive impression of her as a person who had been horribly neglected. The inference came from a single story she told, which was in fact the only real conversation she indulged in that whole evening.
She said that she had gotten a bump on the head — adding that she was “always clumsy” — from a lamp, I think it was. She had passed out, but only briefly. The pain did not last long. She wondered if she should seek medical attention. There were three doctors (not her father) at the table: two psychiatrists and one neurologist (still in training, I think). They all opined that she did not need medical help. I was very worried. A friend of mine had recently undergone neurosurgery as an emergency matter because he ignored a bump on the head when he lost consciousness briefly. He was at death’s door — lucky to recover — lucky his surgeon was so good and his body so healthy before the injury. I knew that any head-bump that causes unconsciousness, even briefly, merits a trip to the doctor. So I held my peace and then, the next day, called the prospective mother-in-law to give her my input, and she thanked me profusely and said she would tell her son’s fiancee immediately.
These same people, when I went to them to ask that they help bring Amy Neustein back into the family, as a gesture of the Jewish principle of charity and family values, heaped such a burden of abuse and hatred upon me that I will never forget, for one minute, the whole thrust of their campaign: ONCE a person has been declared WRONG AND BAD by the self-protecting, abuser-friendly, corrupt organization of the “Divinely-Blessed-Authoritarian-Rule-Community” they are the same as a Catholic who has been excommunicated. NO QUARTER. NO RECONCILIATION. One of them, a well educated person, actually hurled the following accusation at me:
“You want to bring that mother into the same ROOM with her daughter!”
When I pointed out that the mother saved the daughter’s life, they have no answer for me. I was told (by seemingly sane people) that by my contributing to a web-page praising Amy Neustein as a “mother of valor” I was risking becoming guilty of causing the daughter to commit suicide. I was told that every time something went up on the web positive about Amy Neustein, or even challenging things said negative about Amy Neustein, the daughter flew into a suicidal condition and her fiance (now husband) had to spend 24/7 preventing her from taking her own life. I went to see several Orthodox Rabbis about this issue. One of them told me that I had to stay silent about it. WHY? Because if I spoke about it, and the in-laws then put me on their “hate-list,” when the young woman had her inevitable breakdown — which she would have — they would not have ME as a resource to turn to for help. Figure THAT one out! Another Orthodox Rabbi (not from the same Tribe) told me that he understood and appreciated what I was trying to do but it could not be done. He knew that the in-laws’ Rabbi wouldn’t help — which he wouldn’t — and that “they will circle the wagons even tighter.” He did say that he hoped some outsider, like a patient at the VA Hospital where the father worked, would make an effective allegation against him some day. But of course, that Rabbi was from a different city, and didn’t understand that Hyne, being in on all the abuses of that community, would protect that particular guy no matter who made allegations against him.
The father is, upon information and belief, still a physician for the Veterans Administration in New York. He said, at the time his daughter was hospitalized for starvation, that he had not noticed her condition because her clothes were loose. He was never charged with medical neglect.
There’s much more. I can’t say all of it, obviously. There is a lawyer in New York who devoted years to defending Amy Neustein and he is also Orthodox, although not from the same tribe. He has written about the case, analyzed everything, he is an expert. A core of corrupt and vicious people have tried to ruin him. His name is Michael Lesher. He was called, by the new (very powerful) in-laws, an “agent provocateur” for trying to affect a rapprochement and a decent approach to a Jewish wedding — with the mother of the bride present. Neustein has been insulted and slandered; Lesher has been insulted and slandered; David Paterson, who held hearings on the case, was threatened with destruction to his career, on and on and on and on.
There is not a day that goes by that Amy Neustein does not STILL suffer the pain inflicted upon her by her own community, for the act of saving her daughter’s life.
Come on, who here has never thought about investigating girl scouts? Stop bashing the bishops.
“I will donate them to the local food bank.” Good idea. But if you try one, they won’t all go to the food bank. : )
I was a girl scout for while and learned a lot of good things. A pamphlet from PP would certainly have been useful. But that was back in the stoneage when such things as (shhh) you-know-what weren’t discussed. Thank goodness for a pastor’s daughter who had one.
Malisha — I think your Girl Scout leader was trying to teach you a lesson about obedience — that is, that you should question authority. If a leader tells you to drop dead (or to vote Republican, or to let someone abuse you), would you do it? Maybe she should have explained it better.
In another post you wrote, “If a child rebels, that child is forced back into the mold. You don’t want to know how. If a mother tries to protect her child, the mother is cast out and punished hideously — you don’t want to know how.”
Actually, I do want to know. Can you share those things with us?
Thanks!
Kate
Bishops don’t like it when girl scouts flash their cookies.
Perhaps the Church is getting riled that nowadays the Girl Scouts are NOT only about making girls into submissive, sweet, pleasing wives and mothers. Now they seem to be about genuine human development and advancement — FOR GIRLS. I remember the first Girl Scout meeting I went to, in a small town in New Jersey. The GS leader was the mother of one of the girls in my class. I had been in the Brownies so I thought the GS were going to be a continuation of the activities — art, adventure, sports, drama, visits to hospitals and senior centers and so forth to perform, learning pet care and gardening, making nice things for presents for “the poor,” and so forth. But at the first meeting, the leader had us each stand up in front of the group and say the GS pledge and then she gave us an example to explain, or to show how we would do it. When it came time for me to stand up and do mine, I felt very confident. She chose “obedience” as my word to explain and I gave a little explanation, and I said something like, “if you’re the leader here, then I will do what you tell me to do.” She said to me, without a smile on her face, “DROP DEAD.” I froze. I thought, “should I fall on the ground and play dead?” But I couldn’t. I think probably only a few seconds passed, but it felt like an hour. Since I had a reputation of being “nice” back then, and since my mother was a teacher in the community so we had a good FAMILY reputation as well, what raced through my mind was — strangely — the house we were in (furnished much better than my own) and the family of this GS Leader herself (richer than mine but not as well educated). To this day I don’t know why those issues arose in my mind at the time. I can still feel, in my neck muscles, the tension of that few seconds before she said, “OK Malisha I was just kidding” and everyone laughed.
I did not join. My mother was scandalized when I told her what the GS Leader had said to me, and she said, “Anti-Semites; YOU’RE NOT JOINING!” (My mother assumed they were anti-Semites because there were only three Jewish families in town and there was in fact plenty of anti-Semitism — that plus none of the other girls got targeted like that.)
Years later I knew girls who were in GS and I was delighted to see that the program was fantastic. I never heard a bad story about them. I just presumed that the experience I had was a result of the nastiness of the one individual GS leader, which I am sure it was, and that was the reason I didn’t join, which was fine. But the girls I knew who were in the program benefited from it, learned a lot, gave a lot to their communities, and loved it.
This “Attack Anybody Who Doesn’t Do What We Want” mentality (AAWDDWWW) (let’s see, how to coin that phrase — This “Awd-Wah”)
THAT’S IT! Awd-Wah Mentality. It’s just the very same thing as the Fatwah Mentality. Extremist Islamists issue Fatwahs against people and organizations and whole countries they feel have offended THEIR RELIGIOUS SENSIBILITIES. That is exactly what the anti-Girl-Scout (and anti-everything-else) gang is doing: Issuing its own Awd-Wah!
I hope they start printing up “I SUPPORT THE GIRL SCOUTS” T-shirts and so forth to counteract this Awd-Wah.
I think what we are seeing in the RCC in recent years is directly attributable to the current Pope, whose history not only in includes the Hitler Youth, but also Opus Dei. I think there has always been a tension within the RCC between people who wanted to put the tenets of the real Jesus into action and those who are bedazzled by the authority bestowed by the Romans, thus mindlessly
protecting the RCC’s prerogatives via the fear of everlasting damnation. The authoritarian side has mainly held the upper hand, but enlightened souls like
Pope John XXIII fearlessly moved the RCC towards implementing the real Jesus. His actions so threatened the authoritarians within the power structure that they have worked tirelessly to erase them. We see this trend occurring lately and I believe it has been escalated as in this instance.
Nal sets the stage here with:
Chuck Hagel had some words of wisdom that are relevant to this debacle:
(Foreign Policy). Some older saints may not recognize some of the right wing bishops in their church either.
At least girl scout cookies don’t have human flesh in them.
Idealist707, about a certain group of the Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn (DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT from Orthodox Jews in most other places — I think we are talking about tribes instead of groups, here) fighting those among themselves who would report child sexual abuse (and other kinds of abuse) to civil authorities, this is nothing new at all. I did not read the NY Times article, by the way, and don’t have time to do so. But I am a Jew, and have had some (unfortunate) contact with the Haredi gang in Brooklyn and some of its tentacles that reach out into other areas. They are the ones who have such uncanny and inappropriate control over Hynes, the prosecutor who will not behave as if he is a government employee. They exert such terrible control WITHIN their sect that they have drawn fire from other Orthodox Jews, even — and this is in spite of the fact that ordinarily, Jews realize that openly opposing something other Jews are doing can be deadly dangerous to innocent parties and certainly can have terrible unintended consequences.
Mike Spindell corrected me, quite properly, for negligently grouping the Haredi with “the Orthodox” in a prior thread somewhere and I accepted his very wise correction and put up a post acknowledging that, as well. The point is not, however, that ONLY a small group of morally impaired tribalist Orthodox in a Brooklyn neighborhood are giving a bad rep and a bad rap to millions of people who have done nothing to deserve it, the point is that any time you get a little egg-shell-boundary community run by questionable “authorities” who are so authoritarian (shades of RWA again) that they brook no push-back, and who wield the “power of G-d” against those in their own community who oppose that conduct, you have a little model of what our country will become, if it continues its present trajectory, by the time the current high school kids are running in the primaries.
Rather than this kind of thing being shamed OUT of existence, it is being spread all over the place.
The thing with the Catholic Church is that it has a Pope and a central authority. The Jews have no centralized Pope. An anomalous group like the Haredi in Brooklyn make their own pope and act as if they are the world. If a child rebels, that child is forced back into the mold. You don’t want to know how. If a mother tries to protect her child, the mother is cast out and punished hideously — you don’t want to know how. I do not know about what happens to a man who steps out of the mold — have never known any of those men personally.
AY, Id707,
“Bishops To Hold “Official Inquiry” Of Girl Scouts” is the title, so I wondered what is next, an official inquiry into virgins?
This is a PR disaster.
As for the bishops;
I thought both religious groups and political ones have a “protect our youth” program in competition with GS/BS programs. So doesn’t the Catholic church have one too?
As to priest pedophiles, one would hope that they would be weeded out during their training. But maybe the opposite is achieved. Part of the unwritten barriers?
AY,
Dredd has not had his coffee yet.
As to your assertion: Unfortunately the front page of the NYTimes has ar article that Orthodox Jews are fighting those amont themselves who would report such violations to the police.
Dredd,
Are we talks ng about the GSUSA the RCC or the SGK foundation……. I need clarification…..
Remember, being a pedophile is only illegal if you’re not a catholic priest….
What, do they need some bad publicity or something?