This goes back to something I was talking about last night re: politics and our current politicians. They believe that respect IS fear, and it shows especially in how their children are raised.

We are talking about that, and the Pearls are involved so ALLLL the fucking triggers https://twitter.com/CZEdwards/status/1304145182007480320

I'm serious. Go find a kitten, go utilize your networking so you can go find a hug when this is over. This is the universe telling you it's time to nope out. I've gotten a bunch of new followers over the past few days, so just...you might want to skip this.

I grew up on the fringes of VERY hard core evangelical culture. We were not full blown god awful Quiverful but we were close to jumping off the bridge. Most of what saved us was actually the foster kids that ran through the group home. Mom and Dad had to take parenting classes--

--and they actually listened and stopped hitting me and my younger brother. Prior to that moment, which I remember very clearly, everything was fair game. We bought hairbrushes and wooden spoons VERY frequently, because my mother broke them on my ass a lot.

We'd even look at the bruises together later like it was some kind of weird bonding moment. Deep Purple wasn't a band at our house, it was a descriptive term for what Mom did yesterday.

But the thing is that once they understood that this was wrong, it stopped.

But, it shouldn't have. Because my parents had made the choice to homeschool both of us and that meant we got fed a steady diet of this shit.

Hopefully most of you lived upstanding lives with wonderfully well adjusted parents and you did not get immediate cold chills as those authors and titles gave your CPTSD a solid boost with both barrels.

Those of you who weren't so lucky, I'm sorry.

So I grew up with a LOT of not so great stuff. We were never in one place long enough to go to a purity ball but Daddy gave me a promise ring. I didn't understand my own anatomy until I was 18 and snuck Tim LaHaye's sex book out of the church bookstore.

Now, Ken Ham's batch of hot stupid up there just invaded my science books (He's the idiot with the stupid fake ark in Kentuckey who thinks Dino vs. Giant gladiator battles were a thing) but the MacDonald's patriarchal smug lace doily Victorian attitude was more of a problem.

See, they ran Homeschooling Today, which back in the 90s was the main way for HS moms to figure out where to buy tools. We homeschooled, which is why my science and history books contained images of people riding on T-rexs and arguments that Leviathan were actually Mosasaurs.

But the real bad thing up there is that book with the happy looking tow-headed boy staring up at his daddy in worshipful awe. That's just the fantasy of every white male, ain't it?

Yeah that book ruined more lives than Bernie Madoff.

That piece of fucking garbage is called To Train up a Child, written by Debi and Michael Pearl. It was full of little gems like this:

These quotes are all by Libby Anne of the amazing blog Love, Joy and Feminism on Patheos. I really recommend it. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/tag/to-train-up-a-child

I'm adding one more quote from that godawful book because it is most likely responsible for the deaths of three children, and God only knows how many kids who came close to it.

I've talked before about the death of Lydia Schatz. This was a seven year old girl her parents adopted from Ethopia in a fit of evangelical zeal. They beat her to death for mispronouncing a word. And I don't mean they hit her until they gave her a concussion or hit a wall.

Her so-called parents followed the Pears' instructions and beat their adopted kid until she went into rhabdomyolysis, and then renal failure as the proteins from her muscles breaking down clogged her kidneys.

And all of this is rooted in the belief that fear equals respect. The conservative and evangelical community has not, to my knowledge, advanced past this error in belief. What you or I consider to be a normal respectful relationship is not what they want. They want to be feared.

They want to be feared by their children. They want to be feared by anyone they don't consider a peer, but ESPECIALLY by POC or LGBT folk, immigrants, liberals. Because the only concept of respect they have is fear.

Obviously it can be unlearned with effort. My parents fumbled through it, I'm fumbling through it because God knows how much I picked up through osmosis. But the people who paid for Debi and Michael Pearl's mountain man adventures are the age group currently voted into office.

The Pearls, and teachings that compliment theirs (Babywise is another one that jumps to mind immediately) have been the secret sauce for evangelicals since the 80s, at least, and they're the source for a lot of the seemingly mystifying stuff we see on display in Washington today.

Maybe (God, I hope) people like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell never used the Pearls' abusive nonsense, but I can state with confidence that somebody in their circles probably did. And those attitudes definitely have infected the entire culture.

And even when you wake up and start realizing hey, this is all really fucked up, you still have to process out of it. And you have to do it without a rational sense of normal. The phrase "My normal meter is fucked up" is STILL applicable.

I still to this day am telling stories about my childhood that I think are cute and funny only for my audience to react with dead fucking silence or like I just screwed a tentacle alien.

And the core problem in our society right now is that the people who are literally running the show in America are the people who HAVEN'T understood the difference between respect and fear. They haven't faced the demons, or the fact that to a lot of people they ARE the demon.

And that this negative perception is entirely and completely earned and accurate. Somebody told them that "Hey, you know, this is wrong so maybe stop doing it," and they reacted like we suggested boiling their children instead of beating them.

And I can rant for hours on this subject, so I probably need to stop, so I'm gonna wrap it up with this: if there is one thing that we need to normalize, it is admitting when you're fucking wrong, and changing based on that admission.

We react to this admission with this kind of self-preservation gut instinct where we reject everything and we double down on whatever the stupid thing is. We do that because to admit that we are wrong is to also admit that we wasted our time and our lives on an error.

It's essentially a psycological sunk-cost fallacy. We don't want to admit that we've spent our time and our reputation--both more valuable than money--on what is essentially violence and harm. We don't want to take a hit to our egos like that.

We don't understand how pervasive this trap is, and how that is the key tool in the box for every conman, revival preacher and two-cent politician in the country. Jonestown happened, in part, because of a sunk cost fallacy in the minds of Jones's followers.

And we see that with the majority of Trump's followers. They can't admit that he's wrong because that means admitting they've got blood on their hands. And they can't do that. There are psychological barriers to doing that.

So if we want to make sure our current circumstances never happen again, we have to make copping to error less of a threat. My parents stopped a lot of things, partially because the majority of their personal and professional circles supported changing, and stopping bad behavior.

And there's a lot we will never be able to change. We can't give someone back the time and money they spent following the Pearls' awful books. We can't fix the damage decades of abuse have done to adults whose parents used these methods.

But we can recognize that this is not some weird thing done by survivalists in the mountains who are back to the land and don't have running water. It's being done by people who have internet connections, and their supportive neighbors have been voted into office.

And also, because it needs to be said every time they come up, Fuck the Pearls.