He lost his faith around the age of five, when a baby died in his arms in the course of a failed healing. While elders prayed, Hoyt was in charge of removing its mucus with a suction device. He was told that the child died because of his own lack of faith. Something snapped, and he remembers thinking: “How can this possibly be God’s work?” His apostasy set up lifelong conflicts with his parents and church elders.
In just one incident, when he was 12, Hoyt broke his ankle during a wrestling tryout. “I ended up shattering two bones in my foot,” he said. His parents approached the situation with the usual Followers remedies – rubbing the injury with “rancid olive oil” and having him swig on Kosher wine.
Intermittently, they would have him attempt to walk. Each time, “my body would just go into shock and I would pass out”.
“I would wake up to my step-dad, my uncles and the other elders of the church kicking me and beating me, calling me a fag, because I didn’t have enough faith to let God come in and heal me, while my mom and my aunts were sitting there watching. And that’s called faith healing.”
He had so much time off with the untreated fracture that his school demanded a medical certificate to cover the absence. Forced to take him to a doctor, his mother spent most of the consultation accusing the doctor of being a pedophile.
He was given a cast and medication but immediately upon returning home, the medication was flushed down the toilet, leaving him with no pain relief. His second walking cast was cut off by male relatives at home with a circular saw.
An Idaho Democrat lawmaker introduced a bill to allow gummint intervention to save the children -- you know, typical socialist overreach and nanny-state meddling. How did the Republican-controlled Legislature react to that?
Lee Heider, chairman of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, refused to hold a hearing. The Guardian reports:
Heider’s repeated response to these claims was a welter of contradictions and bluster.
After telling the Guardian that no bill was lodged (John Gannon confirmed that he did, as was reported in local media in February) and that he had been told by the attorney general and the Canyon County prosecuting attorney that the laws did not need to change (both men deny saying this), Heider took refuge in the US constitution.
“Republicans didn’t feel the need to change the laws. We believe in the first amendment to the constitution. I don’t think that states have a right to interfere in religions.”
When pressed on the fact that children are dying unnecessarily as a result of exemptions, Heider makes an odd comparison.
“Are we going to stop Methodists from reading the New Testament? Are we going to stop Catholics receiving the sacraments? That’s what these people believe in. They spoke to me and pointed to a tremendous number of examples where Christ healed people in the New Testament.”
RtO has long opposed the ammosexual practice of child sacrifice by firearms.
ReplyDeleteYet not a peep about more than 700,000 murders of convenience every year in the US.
Nope. I have my issues and child sacrifice is one of them.
ReplyDeleteNumber of RtO posts on 700,000 annual murders of convenience: Zeeeero.
ReplyDeleteNumber of RtO posts on child drownings, which outnumber deaths by gun: Zeeeero.
Grotesque abuse of language, as in the comment above: beyond counting.
The stench of hypocrisy is retch-worthy.
When the National Swimming Pool Association terrorizes Congress into legislating against swimming pool safety, and when violent swimming pool installers threaten health department inspectors, I'll write about it.
ReplyDeleteSo when the NRA, an organization with millions of members, exercises political influence with Congress, that amounts to "terrorizing" Congress.
ReplyDeleteRight, got it. Progs can apply whatever meaning they want to whatever word they want. For everyone else, that is grotesque abuse of language.
Oh, and goal post shifting. Another prog specialty.
You are, in your unearned preening moral superiority, all about child sacrifice. When it is pointed out that more children drown than are shot, you are all about poor, terrorized Congress.
The stench of hypocrisy is retch-worthy.
Poor pitiful quivering gun nuts. What are they afraid of?
ReplyDeleteEverything
Poor, pathetic, RtO.
ReplyDeleteShifting the goal posts rather than confronting your hypocrisy.
It is worth considering that if your hatred is so innumerate, divorced from reality, and so quickly snoped, then maybe, just maybe, your hatred is irrational.
Which would be just about right for a religious zealot.