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by Anonymous User on 08:50 PM November 19th, 2004 EST (#1)
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Unfortunately one of it's promoters, Officer Jim Mantle of the St Ann's Missouri Police Department is still out promoting this kind of crud.
I'll spare the full details, except to say he had his officers launch a campaign of harassment against a pagan family in the neighborhood, made wild and false allegations through the media, and they behaved like jack-booted thugs. Unlike the folks in these stories, these folks were actually pagan (Wiccan in fact - quite different from Satanist, not that any distinction matters to fundimentalist), and they certainly had not harmed or endangered anyone.
He was aided by Deane Lane of KSDK-TV who ran several series of sensationalized stories on everything from "BBS pedophiles" to "witchcraft in your neighborhood" "satanic cults stealing children". No evidence, no cases, nothing -- but they spent 2 weeks on promos for them every commercial break for each. In the first story they maligned a friend of mine who ran a BBS in their pedophile story - even though there was none of this activity on his BBS, they plastered his name and the name of his BBS on the 6PM news as the headline. Zero accountability, she still has a job. As far as I know, Mantle still has a job. Though if Mantle had repeated his actions today, he would likely be facing federal civil rights charges and time in the slammer. At least a few laws have improved since then, but the behavior of those in many levels of government has not.
I know of one case in passing where social services attempted to take away a families kids because their mother was Wiccan. I know of a nurse whom was harassed on the job for the same reason. The late 80's and early 90's was a dark time for this.
In Overland Missouri they still have an unconstitutional law on the books which forbids the sale of any book which mentions anything about the occult to those under the age of 16.
To say that there is hysteria over religions is an understatement. There were several fundimentalist groups that put out pamphlets saying we sacrificed babies, had wild sex orgies, took kids into the woods and used their bodies as human altars and raped them... Not that even Satanist did these things, I know a few actual Satanist. We eventually got politicial enough to form an organization to lobby on our behalf, AMER, as it just wasn't a situation that could be tolerated silently.
About the same time was when the 21 kids were abducted in either Oregon or Washington by social services for "satanic ritual abuse", and none of that proved to be true, but it was on Donahue, Geraldo, and a few others. Stories appeared about a 'national epidemic of satanic ritual sexual abuse' with as much sensation as the media could generate, and even a made-for-tv movie about it.
Of course the fact that none of it ever happened was just omitted...
It's still a dangerous environment to be in an other than big 3 religion in the US and admit minors. Depending on where in the US you are at, and it's worse in smaller towns, it can be dangerous for adults as well. We used to hold a large yearly pagan convention here in St Louis, every year we had a bomb threat -- several years in a row we had bomb threats -- that brought in the FBI & dogs and all of that. Eventually the hotel stopped letting us lease the space because of the bomb threats, even though we had never caused a problem there. We decided to use a national park, and the parks service did everything they could to try to deny us a permit and we ended up having to file paperwork to take them to court over it before it was granted. They decided to use the state police to set up 'road-side harrassment' checkpoints on the two roads in during the gathering. That situation has improved, however, they only tried that BS the first year. Now we hold an annual event inside the city itself with nearly zero harassment - and law enforcement is only there to provide security for us.
The climate of hysteria is still there, but the volume knob has been turned down some. It doesn't stop judges from trying to use it as an excuse to deny custody though - I know of one case of that.
Yet there are about as many practicing pagans/wiccans in the US than there are practicing Jews. It's still the fastest growing religion in the US.
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