I'm A Bad Person And I Am Going To Hell

O.K. Not exactly "breaking news", I know.

But I learned something today that is actually kind of sad for the people involved and I shouldn't derive any pleasure, guilty or otherwise, from the knowledge.

But, I kinda do, just a little. Which is why I'm going to Hell. Well, the figurative, metaphorical Hell anyway because there is no real Heaven or Hell or God or little baby jebus.

But I digress. I'll have to give you some background info for you to understand my reaction.

The man was a typical early 20's male when I met him. Meaning he was a red blooded partying cooch hound. Until he met his wife to be (who was also a party monster if the story about her drinking till she puked at a Royals game and had to be pretty much carried out of the place is true). They fell in love and decided to get married.

Well, it seems that her partying was just a symptom of her sinful backsliding from the religion she was brought up in. I'm not even going to tell you which religion it is because really, the denomination isn't important. It is the way they behave and raise their children that is at the crux of the matter.

When they decide to get married, it becomes necessary for her to rediscover her faith, for him to convert to that faith, and for them to be brought back into the fold. Two stray sheep being welcomed back to the flock. She has two adorable little girls from a previous marriage and he adopts them as his own. What a beautiful story.

Then the sphincters begin their self-righteous puckering.

They get holier, and holier. At one point she blows a fucking gasket when she sees a picture in a family photo album (ours, not theirs) of him with a girl that he had seriously dated for several years before he ever met his wife. She goes ballistic. Apparently, all history prior to them meeting is to be erased. The girls he adopted were even given new birth certificates listing him as the father. As though he actually was.

That always struck me as a bit over the top.

So, The Church circles it's control wagons and they are at the church, or at a church members house, or a church member is at their house, all the fucking time. No family events like birthdays, anniversaries, holidays or anything else can be scheduled on a Sunday. That's God's Day. So everybody else needs to structure their lives around these chuckleheads.

The girls (they eventually had one of their own for 3 total) are absolutely smothered and isolated. The girls are not even allowed to go outside to play in their own fenced in back yard on a cul-de-sac unless someone is out there with them, watching them like a hawk so that they won't get their picture on a milk carton. In a small town restaurant, the girls cannot go pee by themselves for fear they could get molested in the bathroom. They can only watch G rated movies. If they are in my car or my house, I can't smoke. Apparently, their uber-restrictive environmental and dietary household rules extend to whatever household they happen to be in. No exceptions.

Things finally reach a point where, with a venomous written diatribe they suspend all contact with us because we are sinful, unholy, unhealthy and blah, blah, blah. I say good riddance. But my wife at the time was very close to the husband and this rift caused a severe strain on our marriage and made a significant contribution to our eventual divorce.

Funny thing. All that shit never seemed to bother them whenever they needed to borrow money or needed help moving. The first time they moved after getting married, I was the only fucker who showed up, in freezing rain, to help them move out of the filthy pig stye where she had been raising her kids. They didn't seem to mind my smoking then. Ungrateful fucks.

So that's the background.

Well, today I learn that their oldest daughter who is just 16 years old, is about 10 and a half weeks into total knockedupedness. She's preggers. In fact, rumor has it they might not even be going to church tomorrow (GASP!) because the Elders may have found out what's going on and they aren't ready to face the music.

Now, ya see, here is where I start to chuckle just a teeny tiny little bit and then feel all guilty about it.

I mean, clearly, she's having this baby. Abortion is certainly not an option. And with this particular church, the concept of family is very important so we can probably rule out adoption. She will either be a 17 year old single mother, or a prematurely married 17 year old wife, mother and high school student.

This is despite years of restrictive religious indoctrination, overflowing calendars of church related obligations, abstinence only "sex education", extra-curricular school activities, denied access to any form of pregnancy prevention tools such as birth control pills or condoms or even just factual information, volunteer work and all manner of time consuming, mind controlling tricks designed to prevent this very sort of thing from happening.

Despite all of this, she clearly found the time and the opportunity to do some forbidden exploring.

Which is pretty much my point.

Trying to isolate children from the truth, from facts and from the real world that we actually live in by pretending that just following God and obeying His Rules will keep you from harm or misfortune is doing an incredible disservice to your children.

Children deserve the unbiased, unabashed, cold, hard (yet age appropriate) truth. We need to prepare our children for the world by giving them the tools and the knowledge they need in order to succeed. Not some isolated, fabricated, fantasy world that leads them to believe that some supernatural being is watching over them and will protect them as long as they follow His Law and do His Will.

So, I derive a little bit of guilty pleasure from seeing them betrayed by their own bullshit. Yet I feel empathy for a 16 year old girl whose life has changed forever and isn't looking all that optimistic anymore.

Yeah, her family will love and support her. She won't be kicked to the curb. But she is going to have to endure years, if not a lifetime of shame, guilt, pity, derision, gossip, backbiting and general unpleasantness from the holier than thou community in which she lives.

Why?

Because she was raised wrong by people who filled her head with bullshit.

If she continues to allow these people to manipulate her, she could be a grandmother at 32.

A great grandmother at 48.

God does work miracles, doesn't He?