Brutal Christian "Ex-Gay" and Reform School Exposed

When you are a Christofascist and find that American laws restrict your ability to inflict torture and torment on youths to "cure" them, what do you do?  You open up operations overseas where laws are less protective of minors, of course.  This type of move parallel's the efforts of Christofascists to export homophobia and anti-gay animus to Africa and countries like Russia since they are losing the culture wars here in America.  Thankfully, a new documentary, "Kidnapped for Christ" is exposing the horrors done in such offshore facilities which constitute nothing less than child abuse. Note the ties to hate groups and Republicans like Mitt Romney. The Raw Story has details.  Here are highlights:

“Kidnapped for Christ” is a new documentary that tells the story of teenagers sent to an evangelical Christian boarding school outside the U.S. where school personnel attempt to rid them of feelings of same sex attraction or other “ungodly” influences. 

“They mess your mind up,” said former student Deirdre Sugiuchi to Raw Story. “Prisoners have more freedom than we had.”

The “school” is Escuela Caribe, an evangelical Christian reform school that is run like a prison camp by an organization called New Horizons Youth Ministries.

Many of the students are the children of Christian parents who believe their sons and daughters’ nascent feelings of same sex attraction can be eliminated by the school’s program of Bible study, brutally hard work, exercise and physical punishment to break the students down.  

While only one student is known to have died at Escuela Caribe in a flash flood, Sugiuchi said that school officials pushed the students to the very brink of their physical endurance in order to make them more malleable and open to what she called a program of straightforward “brainwashing.”

LGBT students, however, were consistently singled out for abuse.  “That’s the thing,” she said, “the kids that were gay, most of the time they were picked on, and always kept on lower levels.”

Sugiuchi is currently working on a book, Unreformed, about her experience at Escuela Caribe. The film “Kidnapped for Christ” is premiering at the next Slamdance Film Festival, the rebel indie festival that now runs alongside the Sundance Film Festival in January. She hopes to raise awareness of these programs, which have deep ties to groups like Focus on the Family — who referred her parents to New Horizons Youth Ministries — and the Republican Party.

“If you follow the money, you’ll see that the Republicans are so, so in bed with these people,” she said. The Romney family contributes heavily to the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), an umbrella organization for evangelical reform schools like Escuela Caribe — which was briefly closed down, then reopened under the name Crosswinds — and their Mormon equivalents.  

I'm sorry, but the truth is that religion is most often a pernicious evil.  The world would be a better place without religion, especially conservative and fundamentalist denominations.  Raising a child in a fundamentalist household is nothing less than child abuse.