A Growing Discussion

Evidently word of the upcoming parole hearing is spreading. Blog traffic directed me to a website where the hearing, and some other aspects of the case, are being discussed. Of course, I checked it out, as there was an immense amount of traffic coming from this single forum thread.

Some of what I saw there was amazingly encouraging. People realizing that justice had not been served. People seeing and recognized that FBC's response to the survivors was inadequate. There are some attempting to coordinate an effort to make their opinions known regarding David's parole. It's great to see a community basically rally behind its children.

Some of what was posted wasn't the least bit encouraging. Any time something like this has such a huge effect on a community, there are always going to be people who take the other side. Logically, I understand that. Based on my experiences, I'll never come to grips with it though. I know what happened to me. I know that I came from a good family, with parents who did their best to raise me in a loving, encouraging, environment. I know that I was betrayed by a monster.

One poster in particular seems very quick to blame parents and victims for what happened. Of course, he never comes out and says how he feels, but it's very obvious from his generic, copy and pasted from Google legal analysis, that he doesn't feel that David did anything wrong. He obviously blames the victims more than David, and feels they are just as much to blame for what he sees as "sin", not as abuse.

I obviously have a few choice words that I'd love to put on here, but won't. Until you've experienced something like this first hand, you can't understand it. I wouldn't expect this pompous asshole to want to understand the victims' point of view either. It's very easy for him to hide behind his pseudo-intellectual, outsiders analysis of this situation. Guess what? Some of us don't have the luxury of being able to step back and take an outsiders view of what happened. Notice that I use the word "outsider", not neutral, because it's very obvious that this person is no more neutral than I am.

I've had to delete a few comments from the blog since the traffic picked up, and I have no doubts that it's the same person posting them here. I'm all for discussion, even here, and would love to see more comments. What I won't tolerate is anything even loosely implying that the victims in this situation share even an ounce of the blame for what happened to them. We were all betrayed by a master manipulator who used faith, religion, and a position of power for sexual gratification. And most importantly, most of use were twelve years old when the abuse started.

If you'd like to see the discussion, visit http://goo.gl/Ddhw9