By Norman B. LeClair
As a cockeyed optimist I have long been of the opinion that the corrupting and pernicious practice of lying to children should be elevated to the seriousness of a crime and dealt with accordingly. Without a doubt lying to a child is the most loathsome and insidious, the most corrosive and damaging form of child abuse any adult could ever indulge in. Yet everyone turns a blind eye to this most egregious form of criminal behavior. We put people away for the rape of a child’s body but do nothing to those who rape the child’s mind.
The news editor and writer H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) said, “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” We do indeed admire, respect, reward, honor and even revere those who do the inculcating and the brainwashing. Even our terminology is dishonest and cockamamie. The term “brain polluting” should be used rather than brainwashing, for the simple reason that when one thinks of washing one also thinks of cleansing. Lying to a child neither washes nor cleanses, it profanes and ultimately destroys an otherwise healthy and productive mind. They have a name for this unrecognized and unacknowledged crime. It’s called menticide. . . “the killing of the mind.”
Let us judge and adjudicate all those who engage in this sinister and bloodless crime as the dastardly criminals they truly are, for there is nothing lower on the food chain than the human parasite, those who prey on, who feed on and lie to the most vulnerable of our number.
Saint Francis Xavier is reported to have said, “Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.” But of course. By then the damage done is indelible and no amount of re-learning or re-programming can repair the devastation inflicted on the putty-like minds of the innocent. And who, sadly enough, do we find aiding and abetting in this ritualized “killing of the mind” but the well-meaning, totally clueless parents. No mother or father would ever agree to let a bunch of unscrupulous charlatans in scrubs and a surgical mask perform a lobotomy on their child, but these very same parents think nothing of giving a bunch of unscrupulous charlatans in white collars and black dresses full and total access to their child’s brain during the most crucial and formative years of life.
They drop the fruit of their loins off at church-run nurseries, daycare centers and pre-schools where the brain polluting begins concurrently with the first diaper change.
It was Pope Paul IV who uttered something quite profound when he said, “The people want to be deceived, therefore, let them be deceived.” Say what you will about those mind molesting monsters of the ministry, they are good at what they do–and because of their uncompromising extremism, their unlimited wealth and unrestricted access to power they are indeed masters of the lie.
But isn’t it ironic and a little more than curious that the very people who talk so much about morality and sin are the very ones so devoid of morality and so practiced at sin?
The American poet, essayist and novelist Oliver Wendall Holmes Sr. (1809-1894) made the observation: “Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.” In this poor old country of ours where these lethal lies are endorsed, validated, financed and protected by government fiat, the future looks rather grim and every day more Orwellian. The liars, the frauds, the hypocrites, the parasites, the spinners of yarns and the men of zeal have all but dismantled the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state. It was that wall, after all, that gave this country its potential, its promise of greatness, its unrivaled uniqueness, its status as nulli secundus (second to none).
But this is not the time and these are not the days to beat our breasts and dwell on “what might have been.” These are the days for returning the ship of state to the course charted by Jefferson, Paine, Madison and all their Deist compatriots. These are the days for taking names and kicking arse. These are the days to roll up our sleeves, to haul in the bricks and mortar, to mix the mud, pick up the trowel and level, to build the leads, pull the line taut, to erect the scaffolding and start building the wall anew. A wall that is higher, thicker, longer and stronger so that every child in the land can get an education instead of an indoctrination and be able to recognize and appreciate the fact that there is a world of difference between knowledge and authority, between solid evidence and the arbitrary assertions of faith, between truth and the contradictory litany of scripture, between proof and the mindless trumpeting of dogma, between a life philosophy based on reality, reason, evidence and facts and one based on the chimerical, on emotions, feelings, wishful thinking and beguiling flights of fancy.
These are the days to say to the president and all those lackeys of the Lord in Washington responsible for our suicidal plunge into the cesspool of theocratic rule that with you or without you the wall will be rebuilt. If you’re with us, pick up a trowel. If you’re not, get out of the road. We don’t have time for small talk, for nuzzling nates, mincing words or bussing backsides. There’s some serious work to be done. There’s a wall that needs a-building.
Norman B. LeClair is a Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation living in Florida.
