You know, in reading over this hit piece against the Church, a few things stand out. One is the fact that virtually the entire thing is an anecdotal series of claims from family members and their lawyers through the amplifier of a the reporter who wrote this article. There are very, very few unambiguous facts with which to grapple here. The family itself appears to be unusually dysfunctional across generational lines, and one wonders whether, regardless of whether or not the allegations are true in every particular, the aggrieved parties in this case are not milking the proverbial cow for all the milk they can get.
As an example, we have the following:
Because living in modern society while also obeying the church dictums is so hard to do—drinking and premarital sex are strongly discouraged, as are caffeine, violent music and movies, and an unbalanced diet—Mormon culture is necessarily insular. "They're trying to live so differently from the rest of the world, almost like the Amish," says Jessica, now a 26-year-old student at Idaho's Brigham Young University. That means, she says, the first move when it comes to child abuse isn't always to involve the cops. "The police are outsiders. They don't have the 'true gospel,' so they don't understand things like we do."
This is, as a matter of LDS philosophy and culture, hokum of the first rank. Now I'm beginning to become more than a little suspicious of the entire story. Not necessarily that the abuse occurred, but the ever more far fetched smears against Mormon culture and LDS people collectively, as the actions of one individual are transposed to an entire organization that is now understood to somehow have prevented the behaviors from occurring, or to have placed morally perfect people in positions of authority in the Church.
Actually, I see this, whatever else it may be, as an outgrowth of the culture of victimization and grievance in which when people stand on the top of wet ladders and then fall and break their heads, they can sue the maker of the ladder because a big sign was not pasted on the ladder saying "Do Not Stand On Top Rung" We have just been through a period in which cigarette companies have been sued for the disease and death caused by the free choice on numerous individuals to use their products, which they knew were dangerous when they began to use them. We have seen an attempt to sue gun makers as being somehow culpable for the uses to which their products are put by criminals at a later date. We are seeing fast food restaurants sued for selling food (to people to desire to eat it of their own free will) that may make cause obesity or other problems if over indulged in, and which every adult understands to be taken in moderation.
Now, in the same vein, a family clearly reminiscent of the best Jerry Springer or Maury Provich has had to offer and one of who's members was victimized by a Mormon Scoutmaster, goes after the Church itself. Yet, I have seen no rational or compelling arguement as yet leading me to believe that there is anything whatever "the Church" could to to prevent a person like this from taking advantage of a young boy if that person is clever, cunning, and determined enough to do it. Having other adults at the church building is no guarantee of anything. If I really want to drink, I'm going to do it. If you really want to have an affari with your husband's or wife's best friend, or your secretary, you're going to do it.
Really, by the logic being used here, the Church should be held accountable for damages for every adulterous affair and the resulting dissolution and destruction of the marriage simply for the fact of having married and sealed the couple in the first place. By the very act of involving itself in the Scouting program and calling Scoutmasters from among its own members, the Church becomes liable for the actions committed by individual members. In other words, by setting up the conditions in which abuse can occur (a Scouting program, a marriage, Father and Son camp outs etc.), the Church (or any organization), assumes liabilty for the actions of any discreet individuals within that mass, and the standard is that anything less than perfection (no bad apples in the barrel whatever), will result in the deep pockets being raided.
This is the "lawsuit lottery" of modern American legal culture. No matter what happens, and even if the perp is punished to the fullest extent of the law, you then begin a fishing expedition for a related deep pocket that you can, not only sue for monetary damages, but drag through the media mud for other personal reasons (as some of the above family members have done).
Notice this:
"
It was part of the Western machismo," says Anne Rinde, the mother. "He had it in his mind that all Western men were Mormons and he was going to be one, too. It's cowboy crap." It hardly mattered that Larry—the name Pitsor went by—initially wasn't a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "He told me he was," adds Anne, now 63 years old. "It turned out he wasn't, but he became one later. Larry was not the most honest of human beings."
I've been LDS all of my life, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and I have no living idea what he's talking about. But it gets better as it goes.
Odd family. Family violence, a cornucopia of mental problems, very serious lifestyle issues (Anne weighs a third again as much as a full grown African Lion), and moral and spiritual problems that seem deeply embedded in the family system. For example, if Kimi Kai was murdered by the Green River Killer, she was in all likelihood a prostitute, as these were Ridgway's sole targets (or, at least woman he believed were prostitutes, so we couldn't know for certain).
A lawsuit Robert recently filed against the Utah-based Mormon church in Washington federal court alleges that Joe violated him in an apartment room, a swimming pool, a steam bath at Sand Point Naval Air Station (the Scoutmaster was in the Navy), and a Motel 6 in Issaquah. That last locale was the setting for the most sadistic attack, according to the language of the suit: "[Joe] used physical violence against Rinde, sodomizing him and forcing Rinde to orally copulate [him]. [Joe] then took a wire coat hanger and forced it into Rinde's urethra causing him to hemorrhage and causing chronic and irreparable injury to his penis and urogenital system."
How could anything the Church--or any church--have done prevented this? How is the Church going to keep a 13 year old boy at home, safe and sound, and out of the clutches of a person such as this? Why are this child's parents not in court for being unfit; why didn't
they prevent the abuse from occurring? What was this child doing allowing himself to be violated again and again in this way? Was he afraid? Had he been threatened if he told? Probably. How was "the Mormon Church" to have prevented all of this? Where was the immediate family of this child while all this was occurring.? Well, as best I can tell, most of them were drunk in front of the TV watching Jackass while Anne downed her last bag of pork rinds. One daughter was walking the streets of King County Washington at sixteen years of age prior to this.
Notice also how the bottom feeders come to the surface:
Mark Honeywell, a lawyer at Seattle firm Gordon Thomas, which is working with Kosnoff on Robert's case, has 40 boxes of internal Scouts documents that show the organization was well aware of its allure to pedophiles. "There was a time in the '70s and '80s when they were kicking guys out for sex abuse at a rate of three a week," says Honeywell. (Spokesperson Shields wouldn't "confirm or deny" that statistic.) Court documents from this era show Mormon Scout leaders enticing children into homemade "sweat lodges," crawling into the sleeping bags of boys, and fondling children after supposedly hypnotizing them with the code phrase "aliza may daikonoshi."
As I pointed out above, the very existence of the BSA itself creates a liability. Eventually, in this atmosphere, the Boy Scouts are going to have to practice "defensive scouting" just as doctors must practice "defensive medicine". Soon, only the wealthy will be able to afford the dues; the rest being shunted into a slush fund against future litigation.
Jessica, who's seen the questionnaire, describes it as containing a lot of "risk-management" inquiries—"Did the abuse happen on church property? Did it happen during a church-sponsored activity?"—which made her feel as if the church was already preparing a defense against her claims that her stepfather was touching her at night and offering her money for sex.
This is interesting again for what it assumes: that in some manner, the Church (we're not on church property now, you will notice, but in a private residence) should be preventing a young girl's stepfather was touching her at night and is financially liable if it doesn't. As you see, we've retreated already from "church property" to "private property" and the Church is still liable for damages.
One winter day in 2005, Robert Rinde sat down to talk with Francis Manley, a psychologist at Two Rivers Psychiatric Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. He had been admitted to the institution three days prior after experiencing symptoms of dissociative identity disorder.
In his notes, Manley found the middle-aged man to be "quite bright" but "detached and watchful," writing that he wore an "unamused smile" throughout the interview. Robert complained that food and clothes turned up around his house that he couldn't remember purchasing. Other strange things were happening, as well. When he looked into a mirror, he saw "many different people" looking back, which Manley assumed to be a reference to his shattered personality. Manley presented a Rorschach test, and Robert looked into one inkblot to find "someone screaming, with their mouth wide open and their eyes wide."
Even more interesting still. The Rorschach inkblot test has been discredited for many years as pseudoscientific nonsense ( a leftover of Freudian psychodynamic theory). Interesting how so many people in this family sink deeper and deeper as time goes by.
In 1997, Robert got divorced. He told Dr. Manley his wife had left him for "someone better" and that he considered himself to be gay. He moved to Minnesota in 2002 to be near his mother, who was ill, and opened up his own business, Serendipity Books and Antiques. It was then that his life began to crumble, as chronicled in notes from various psychologists.
The plot thickens. Springer and Stern together couldn't top this.
One wrote that Robert was sexually abused by a friend in late 2002, triggering flashbacks of the attack in the motel.
Now, much later in life, he finds himself in similar circumstances, as a victim in a sexual attack. Is not a pattern beginning to form here?
It's not so uncommon for a person who went through sexual trauma to experience the worst aftereffects decades later. It's also not uncommon for the Mormon church to bungle the handling of such personal crises, at least according to Julie Lank, who blocked out years of abuse as a child by her Mormon truck-driver father in eastern Oregon. Lank, now 44 and living in Santa Fe, says it wasn't until shortly after she gave birth in 1990 that she began to remember the things done to her. "I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs, remembering that my father used to rape me," she says.
I'm sorry, but this is beginning to smack just a little to much of the now thoroughly discredited "repressed memory syndrome" that was all the rage from the late 80s through the mid 90s among social workers and certain psychotherapists which caused the destruction of the lives of numerous innocent individuals during the now infamous ritual Satanic sexual abuse craze during that period. This Oprahcology reeks of motives less than unambiguous, I'm afraid. Pure anecdote. We are, I assume, like Anita Hill, to believe her purely on the basis that she is female, was a child, and claims to have been the victim of that perennial monster of all monsters, the white male father.
Let Harmony, Scratch, Rollo, and the other usual suspects use this puff piece to impugn the Church if they so desire, but I see nothing here upon which to place much weight as it stands.