Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
I Grew Up In The Children Of God, A Doomsday Cult. Here’s How I Finally Got Out.
218 views
Skip to first unread message
Greg Carr
May 6, 2021, 3:27:09 AM5/6/21
to
I Grew Up In The Children Of God, A Doomsday Cult. Here’s How I Finally Got Out.
Our leader believed the world would burn when the Great Apocalypse arrived.
By Flor Edwards, Guest Writer
Flor Edwards, third from left, and with seven of her siblings in the rural Thai province of Udon Thani. (1987)
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
Flor Edwards, third from left, and with seven of her siblings in the rural Thai province of Udon Thani. (1987)
Growing up in ― and leaving ― a cult is something from which a person never fully recovers.
My parents met in Spain shortly after they both had joined the Children of God cult in 1978. Mom said she joined because Father David, the charismatic leader of the religious doomsday cult, offered the youth of her generation a purpose in life and a way to serve God without joining a church. One day, when my mother was in Sweden and on her way to buy a ticket to Tunisia in search of some new adventure, she met a man sitting on a street corner strumming a guitar. He told her about Jesus and Father David and living with a group of other followers. The man invited her over for dinner; she joined the Children of God that night.
My dad, although also adventurous, was more known for his sense of daring achievement and insatiable curiosity. Dad, a geology student at the top of his class at the University of California, Davis, quit his studies just weeks before graduating. He followed his five older siblings in joining the Children of God, which had swept through California in the late ’70s, and moved to Spain soon after.
Father David lived in hiding and never revealed his face because he was running from the law due to some of his teachings regarding sexual freedom and child discipline. He passed on his visions and edicts to his 12,000 devotees spread out across the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.
Father David believed he needed a large army to prepare the world for the Great Apocalypse, which he claimed would come in 1993. In 1985, he ordered all of his followers to flee Western nations because he thought the West would be the first to burn in the fires of hell.
Father David believed he needed a large army to prepare the world for the Great Apocalypse, which he claimed would come in 1993. In 1985, he ordered all of his followers to flee Western nations and head for developing countries in the East because he thought the West would be the first to burn in the fires of hell. I spent most of my childhood in Thailand, never knowing what was outside the walls of the compound I shared with my family and 30 other members of the Children of God.
By the time I was 12, I could count 24 places I had lived on three continents. In Phuket, Thailand, the gate separating our yard from the dirt road outside was boarded with wood. In the afternoon, when the sun softened its rays, the children were allowed to go outside for one hour as long as we stayed within the perimeters of the walls. When no one was looking, I would press my nose against the metal bars of the gate. I would stare through a tiny crack in the wall where I saw a slow-moving rickshaw, or a shimmering snake, or a mother carrying a child on her back while balancing a bucket on her head.
The children’s wake-up call was at 7 a.m. each day, and our room had to be immaculate by 7:30. We gathered ourselves into neat rows and stood at attention. We filed down the stairs and through the hall just like little soldiers. As we marched, I often heard sounds coming from the narrow, screen-covered windows at the top of the walls. They were the sounds of women moaning, beds creaking and men breathing heavily. We were told the adults, who we were required to call “Uncle” and “Aunty” even if they weren’t related to us, were participating in “God’s love,” and they were encouraged to do so continuously.
It seems like Father David didn’t know he was starting a cult. As a young pastor, he’d been ostracized from the Christian Missionary Alliance after he invited barefoot Native Americans into his Arizona parish and offered them salvation. Father David had wrestled with the constant conflict between his sexual desires and his commitment to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a well-known preacher who spoke to crowds of thousands across the U.S. With the Children of God, he found a way to marry the two.
When the world didn’t end in 1993 as he had predicted, Father David claimed to receive another prophecy that told him it was time to move his followers back to the West. My family of 13 relocated to Illinois and joined a home with 30 other members in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn.
The first difference I noticed about life in America was that the only protection we had from the outside world was a chain-link fence that reached to my waist. The second thing I noticed was how plentiful the food was. When we woke up on our first morning in the U.S., we found a bowl of sweet, thick-skinned oranges on the dining room table. We were allowed to eat even if it wasn’t mealtime ― even if we weren’t hungry ― something I’d never experienced before.
Edwards in Phuket, Thailand, taking a photo to illustrate homeschooling (1989).
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
Edwards in Phuket, Thailand, taking a photo to illustrate homeschooling (1989).
On the morning of Feb. 15, 1995, we gathered in the living room of our compound for the annual birthday celebration of Father David. We were told there would be a special announcement after breakfast. A light snow had begun to fall. I noticed that some of the adults had been acting a bit differently ― both pensive and somber ― over the previous few days. There was a strange sensation of electricity buzzing in the air.
Then the words I never expected to hear echoed through the living room: “Our beloved Father in the Lord has gone to be with Jesus.”
There was a moment of silence so sharp I could almost hear the fresh snow flakes settling on the sidewalk outside. The adults immediately broke into tears.
Uncle Tim, the home leader, said we’d discuss details of how the family would move forward without Father David by utilizing The Charter, a new book of rules that had been issued by Mama Maria, Father David’s wife.
According to The Charter, adults could now live wherever they chose and with whom they wished ― as long as they lived with three other consenting adults, tithed 10 percent of their income to the leadership, continued to witness to non-believers, and stayed updated with the cult by reading monthly mailings sent out by Mama Maria. Because of their newfound freedom, some of the adults opened communication with their families and relatives after years of absence.
My dad found a small, three-bedroom house with cheap rent a few blocks from where we had initially settled. Another couple, Steven and Mary, joined us in our new home. Our parents told my siblings and me that they still wanted to be part of the Children of God and that they intended to follow The Charter. “Our goals might be different now without Father David’s guidance,” Mom said, but she still seemed excited to be following his mission.
We continued to try to keep the daily routine we’d followed when we lived communally in the Children of God’s compound. There were 11 kids in our family, plus Steven and Mary’s three children, and Mom divided up the chores amongst everyone. The women in the family took care of the children while Dad, my older brother and Uncle Steven were responsible for getting the money we needed for food and utilities by selling goods at local swap meets. After spending two very difficult years in Chicago trying to make ends meet with no savings, stable jobs or traditional education to lean on, my family moved to California to live near my dad’s sister. Steven and Mary went to live with relatives in the Philippines.
The author (first row, second from right) and several of her siblings witnessing to Thai locals (1987).
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
The author (first row, second from right) and several of her siblings witnessing to Thai locals (1987).
Subscribe to Must Reads
The internet's best stories, and interviews with their authors.
add...@email.com
Dad enrolled me, as well as my sisters Tamar and Mary Ann, in a home-schooling supplemental course called HOPES: Home Opportunity Program for Educational Success. I was 15 years old and had never attended any kind of true schooling program. It was my first step toward a future outside of the Children of God ― something I desperately wanted ― and I was thrilled. It wasn’t long before Tamar, Mary Ann and I decided we wanted to go to public school. More than that, we wanted normal lives. We weren’t exactly sure what that meant but we knew it meant starting over and leaving behind everything we’d known from the moment we were born. So, after the slow disintegration of the cult following Father David’s death, and with no real structure or guidance left in place beyond the mailings of Mama Maria, Mom and Dad decided we would leave the Children of God.
Aside from starting school, which I whole-heartedly took to almost immediately despite finding it incredibly strange due to its sheer newness, I began reading books and magazines and watching movies and TV ― things that had been forbidden while I was growing up in the Children of God. One day, I stopped at the library on my way home from school and picked up an issue of Seventeen Magazine. Flipping through it in my bedroom, I found a feature titled, “Did You Grow Up in a Cult? Take this Quiz and Find Out Now.”
After taking the quiz in what must have been record time, I came to a line that read, “If you have answered ‘yes’ to three or more of these five questions, you may have grown up in a cult.” I had answered yes to all five.
For a moment my world tumbled out of orbit. I knew my upbringing had been unorthodox ― to say the least ― but I had never realized exactly how different my experiences had been compared to those of other kids. As unbelievable as it may seem, it took a silly quiz in a magazine to make me begin to understand what I had been through and who I was because of it. I just kept repeating, “Oh my God! I grew up in a cult. OH MY GOD! I GREW UP IN A CULT!”
An avalanche of thoughts overwhelmed me as I began, for the very first time, to try to unravel the knots of my past. I had never chosen to join the Children of God ― it was a life I was born into and then forced to endure for 15 years. I was a victim and I suddenly saw my parents in a completely new light. At the same time, I knew they were also victims, both of Father David and of the mainstream world they were trying to escape by joining the Children of God. So, who could I blame? Father David was dead. My parents were struggling to make it in a world with which they had a complicated relationship. As hard as I tried, I found I just couldn’t be mad at them.
After taking the magazine quiz, I came to a line that read, ‘If you have answered ‘yes’ to three or more of these five questions, you may have grown up in a cult.’ I had answered yes to all five.
I knew there was no way to go back and change things in the past, but I was here, alive and finally free. For now, all I could do was cope with the present ― the unbearable now. I realized for me, the worst part about growing up in or joining a cult was actually leaving the cult. When the safety net that the leader carefully wove to manipulate the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of its members was ripped out ― or willingly cut ― it was a long, slow and harsh descent into reality.
As more time passed without the leadership of Father David to anchor the Children of God, more and more members left the church and went to live near their families while taking up the difficult task of attempting to adjust to life in the real world. Others sent their children out into the world while they continued to remain in the Children of God. Stories of kids who had left the cult and died by suicide shortly began to surface. I felt lucky to have the support and love of my parents and siblings ― and to not have been abused, as I knew some of the second-generation members of the cult had been. My family had its share of unique struggles because of our past, but we were together and we began to cope ― and even heal ― in our own ways.
The Children of God slowly disbanded. It still exists under the name The Family International, but it claims to be an independent group of missionaries with a few members scattered in various countries doing what is called “charity work” ― supposedly helping at orphanages, distributing food to those in need and helping with disaster relief.
The author at a reading of her memoir, 'Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times.' (2018)
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
The author at a reading of her memoir, ‘Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times.’ (2018)
Having been denied an education for most of my life, my schooling became my top priority as I continued to try to process what I had been through ― the life I had led up until that point. When I was 17, I enrolled in Mt. San Antonio College, a community college nestled in the foothills of Mt. Baldy, even though I had grown up never knowing that colleges even existed.
No one in my family ever returned of the Children of God and none of us have any kind of contact with the community. Some of my siblings went on to pursue their degrees, some are working, while others succumbed to the path of addiction like many children who grew up in the Children of God did. My father earned his masters in mathematics and became a tenured professor while my mother battled and healed from an advanced stage of cancer.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain what it’s like to try to adjust to “normal” life after being raised in such abnormal circumstances. I know my childhood is something I can never get back, so instead of focusing on the past, I have spent every day since I left the Children of God choosing to focus on my future. Now, 20 years after finding freedom, I continue to be passionate about education and I am currently pursuing a second graduate degree to become a college professor. Eventually, I want to work with disadvantaged students in colleges and universities in hopes of helping them to find their own voices and think independently. After spending so much time as a prisoner of someone else’s way of seeing the world, I can think of nothing more important.
Flor Edwards is an author and lives in Los Angeles. Her memoir, Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times, was published in 2018. Visit her website here.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/children-of-god-cult_n_5bfee4a3e4b0e254c926f325
4. Joaquin Phoenix
The renegade thesp, along with his late brother River and their other siblings, were raised by his parents in the Children of God cult, originally founded by David Berg, in Puerto Rico, then moved around South America.
His parents soon became disillusioned by the cult's dangerous practices, which allegedly involved child molestation, changed their last name from "Bottom" to "Phoenix," and broke away back to the US in the late '70s. Before getting their children into acting, the Phoenix parents made their kids perform on the streets for money (fun!).
http://reelreviews.com/shorttakes/phoenix.htm#:~:text=River%20Phoenix%27s%20autopsy%20showed%20deadly%20levels%20of%20cocaine,ingestion.%20River%20Phoenix%20was%20just%2023%20years%20old. River Phoenix died of a massive drug overdose at age 23. Many children brought up in the Children Of God end up with addiction problems or outright suicide themselves.
Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan Spent Their Early Years in a Religious Cult. Then it Became Infamous.
Here's what you need to know about the Children of God.
By Gabrielle Bruney
Oct 5, 2019
The Best Horror Films About Cults
by Esquire US
Play VideoCLICK TO UNMUTE
Joker star Joaquin Phoenix had an unconventional early childhood, living in Venezuela, Florida, and eventually Hollywood with his peripatetic parents and siblings Summer, Liberty, Rain, and late fellow actor River. But until Phoenix was around three years old in 1977, the family were followers of the Children of God, a cult helmed by a rogue preacher called David Berg that would later become notorious amid allegations of child sexual abuse. And he’s not the only celebrity who spent some of their early years in the group—Rose McGowan also spent part of her childhood in the cult. Here’s what you need to know.
related stories
'Wild Wild County' Isn't Just About a Sex Cult
Joaquin Phoenix on the Joker: You Start to Go Mad
This Is How Cults Work, Not Religions
Who are the Children of God?
In 1968, preacher David Brandt Berg founded a group initially called Teens for Christ, which at first consisted of young runaways and hippies. This church would evolve into the Children of God, which at one point counted 15,000 members around the world.
The church believed in group living and zealous proselytizing, and soon grew to include hundreds of communes. Members of these communities could be isolated, as they didn’t work—people who held real-world jobs were called “systemites”—or send their children to school.
Berg’s church melded worship of Jesus Christ with ’60s-era free love, and preached a fairly standard cult leader prophecy—the apocalypse was coming, and soon. This doomsday predication encouraged his followers to live hand-to-mouth rather than making long-term plans; ex-members later told The Guardian of begging for alms and subsisting off of donated food.
Happy family atmosphere provided by religious groups such as this Toronto gathering of the Children ...
Members of the Children of God dance in Toronto in 1972.
BORIS SPREMOGETTY IMAGES
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
What are the allegations against the group?
The cult earned notoriety for its sexual practices, which included what Berg dubbed “flirty fishing,” and which found him ordering female followers to have sex with men in order to bring them into the cult. In 1979, he reported that “flirty fishers” had added 19,000 members to the group’s ranks. "It was religious prostitution," one of Berg's daughters told Timeline in 2017.
Joaquin Phoenix told Vanity Fair that the introduction of the "flirty fishing" policy drove his parents to leave the group. "They got some letter, or however it came, some suggestion of that," he said, "and they were like, 'Fuck this, we’re outta here.’"
His mother, Heart Phoenix, told the magazine that "it took several years to get over our pain and loneliness" after leaving the group. Rose McGowan’s family also escaped the cult during her childhood.
La secte des 'Enfants de Dieu' en 1974
Members of the group sit down to a communal meal in 1974 California.
MICHEL GINFRAYGETTY IMAGES
Some in the cult reportedly extended its sexual policies to children, allegedly permitting and even encouraging child sex abuse. Berg himself was accused of sexual abusing young girls, including his daughters and granddaughters. "It definitely wasn’t a safe place to grow up, especially if you were a girl," one former member told The Guardian in 2017. "Close friends of mine growing up were abused and raped."
In 1993, a former member of the group named Ricky Dupuy appeared on Larry King Live, and told the host that he’d been ordered by the group to rape a 10-year-old. Dupuy, like other ex-members of the group, later committed suicide.
David Berg died in 1994, and at the time of his death he was under investigation from both Interpol and the FBI. His wife, Karen Zerby, inherited leadership. But the cult landed in the headlines again in 2005 after their son, Ricky Rodriguez, killed himself and another former member of the group.
Rodriguez was well-known in the cult—his childhood had been recounted in a parenting manual spread among the members. The New York Times, after reviewing pages of the book sent by former followers, reported that in it, "the toddler Ricky is described or else pictured as watching intercourse and orgies, fondling his nanny's breasts and having his genitals fondled."
Rodriguez left the cult in adulthood, and his wife told The Times that he wanted his mother “prosecuted for child abuse.” He also supported other women’s accounts that Berg had sexually abused his own daughters and granddaughters.
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
Germany North Rhine-Westphalia Essen - Children of God, a religiuous sect - 31.12.1980
Children of God followers worship in 1980 Germany.
ULLSTEIN BILDGETTY IMAGES
At the age of 29, Rodriguez invited one of his former nannies—a woman who appeared in the book documenting his alleged abuse—and stabbed her to death before killing himself. His wife gave reporters a video he recorded the night before the murder-suicide. "He said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and beatings," wrote The Times of the footage.
A spokeswoman for the group recently told the BBC that, "although the Family International has apologized on a number of occasions to former members for any hurt, real or perceived, that they may have suffered during their time in our membership, we do not give credence to tales of institutionalized abuse."
What is the status of the group now?
In 2004, the church again changed its name to the Family International. In the years following Berg’s death, the group relaxed many of its demands of its followers in an apparent attempt to boost declining membership. Followers are now allowed to live in private homes and work outside of the cult. In 2009, the leadership announced that they no longer believed the apocalypse to be imminent. The church still exists, and though its website says that the group underwent a “reorganization in 2010 as an online community,” it claims to have 1,700 members.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a29374581/children-of-god-cult-joaquin-phoenix-rose-mcgowan/
The Family International
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
For Ohioan parachurch organization, see Teens for Christ.
Not to be confused with Family, The Fellowship (Christian organization), or The Family (Australian New Age group).
The Family International
Abbreviation TFI
Type Christian cult
Leader Karen Zerby (1994–present)
Founder David Berg
Branched from The Family
Other name(s) Teens for Christ
The Children of God
The Family of Love
The Family
Official website thefamilyinternational.org
The Family International (TFI) is a cult[1][2] that was founded in Huntington Beach, California, US in 1968. It was originally named Teens for Christ and it later gained notoriety as The Children of God (COG). It was later renamed and reorganized as The Family of Love, which was eventually shortened to The Family. It is currently named The Family International.
Contents
1 Overview
2 History
2.1 The Children of God (1968–1977)
2.2 The Family of Love (1978–1981)
2.3 The Family (1982–1994)
2.4 The Family (1995–2003)
2.5 The Family International (2004–present)
2.6 Recent teachings
2.6.1 Spirit Helpers
2.6.2 The Keys of the Kingdom
2.6.3 Loving Jesus
3 Issues
4 Reception
5 Notable members (past and present)
5.1 Raised in the COG as children, but left it later in their lives
6 Media featuring the group
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
9.1 Academic
9.2 Journalistic and popular
10 External links
Overview
TFI initially spread a message of salvation, apocalypticism, spiritual "revolution and happiness" and distrust of the outside world, which the members called The System. In 1976,[3] it began a method of evangelism called Flirty Fishing that used sex to "show God's love and mercy" and win converts, resulting in controversy.[4] TFI's founder and prophetic leader, David Berg (who was first called "Moses David" in the Texas press), gave himself the titles of "King", "The Last Endtime Prophet", "Moses", and "David".
He communicated with his followers via "Mo Letters"—letters of instruction and counsel on myriad spiritual and practical subjects—until his death in late 1994.[5] After his death, his widow Karen Zerby became the leader of TFI, taking the titles of "Queen" and "Prophetess". She married Steve Kelly (also known as Peter Amsterdam), an assistant of Berg's whom Berg had handpicked as her "consort". Kelly took the title of "King Peter" and became the face of TFI, speaking in public more often than either David Berg or Karen Zerby. There have been multiple allegations of child sexual abuse made by past members.[6][7]
History
The Children of God (1968–1977)
Members of The Children of God (COG) founded communes, first called colonies (now referred to as homes), in various cities. They would proselytize in the streets and distribute pamphlets. Leaders within COG were referred to as The Chain.
The founder of the movement, David Brandt Berg (1919–1994), was a former Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor.[8]
Berg communicated with his followers by writing letters. He published nearly 3,000 letters over a period of 24 years, referred to as the Mo Letters.[9] In a letter written in January 1972, Berg stated that he was God's prophet for the contemporary world, attempting to further solidify his spiritual authority within the group. Berg's letters also contained public acknowledgement of his own failings and weaknesses.[10][verification needed]
By 1972, COG had 130 communities around the world.[11]
The Children of God was abolished in February 1978. Berg reorganized the movement amid reports of serious misconduct and financial mismanagement, The Chain's abuse of authority, and disagreements within it about the continued use of Flirty Fishing. The group was also accused of sexually abusing and raping minors within the organization, with considerable evidence to support this claim. One-eighth of the total membership left the movement. Those who remained became part of a reorganized movement called the Family of Love, and later, The Family. The majority of the group's beliefs remained the same.[12]
The Family of Love (1978–1981)
A form of love bombing, Flirty Fishing encouraged female members to enter sexual relationships with potential converts
The Family of Love era was characterized by international expansion.
In 1976, before the dissolution of The Children of God,[3] David Berg had introduced a new proselytizing method called Flirty Fishing (or FFing), which encouraged female members to "show God's love" through sexual relationships with potential converts. Flirty Fishing was practiced by members of Berg's inner circle starting in 1973, and was introduced to the general membership in 1976 and became common practice within the group. In some areas flirty fishers used escort agencies to meet potential converts. According to TFI "over 100,000 received God's gift of salvation through Jesus, and some chose to live the life of a disciple and missionary" as a result of Flirty Fishing.[12] Researcher Bill Bainbridge obtained data from TFI suggesting that, from 1974 until 1987, members had sexual contact with 223,989 people while practicing Flirty Fishing.[13]
The Family (1982–1994)
In March 1989, TF issued a statement that, in "early 1985", an urgent memorandum had been sent to all members "reminding them that any such activities [adult–child sexual contact] are strictly forbidden within our group" (emphasis in original), and such activities were grounds for immediate excommunication from the group.[14] In January 2005, Claire Borowik, a spokesperson for TFI, stated:
Due to the fact that our current zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual interaction between adults and underage minors was not in our literature published before 1986, we came to the realization that during a transitional stage of our movement, from 1978 until 1986, there were cases when some minors were subject to sexually inappropriate advances ... This was corrected officially in 1986, when any contact between an adult and minor (any person under 21 years of age) was declared an excommunicable offense.[15]
The Family (1995–2003)
After Berg's death in October 1994, Karen Zerby (known in the group as Mama Maria, Queen Maria, Maria David, or Maria Fontaine), assumed leadership of the group.
In February 1995, the group introduced the Love Charter,[16] which defined the rights and responsibilities of Charter Members and Homes. The Charter also included the Fundamental Family Rules, a summary of rules and guidelines from past TF publications which were still in effect.
In the 1994–95 British court case, the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Alan Ward ruled that the group, including some of its top leaders, had in the past engaged in abusive sexual practices involving minors and had also used severe corporal punishment and sequestration of minors.[17] He found that by 1995 TF had abandoned these practices and concluded that they were a safe environment for children. Nevertheless, he did require that the group cease all corporal punishment of children in the United Kingdom and denounce any of Berg's writings that were "responsible for children in TF having been subjected to sexually inappropriate behaviour".[18]
The Family International (2004–present)
The Love Charter is The Family's set governing document that entails each member's rights, responsibilities and requirements, while the Missionary Member Statutes and Fellow Member Statutes were written for the governance of TFI's Missionary member and Fellow Member circles, respectively. FD Homes were reviewed every six months against a published set of criteria. The Love Charter increased the number of single family homes as well as homes that relied on jobs such as self-employment.[19]
Recent teachings
TFI's recent teachings are based on beliefs which they term the "new [spiritual] weapons". TFI members believe that they are soldiers in the spiritual war of good versus evil for the souls and hearts of men.
Spirit Helpers
These include angels, departed humans, other religious and mythical figures, and even celebrities; for example the goddess Aphrodite, the Snowman, Merlin, the Sphinx, Elvis,[20] Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn,[21] Richard Nixon, and Winston Churchill.
The Keys of the Kingdom
TFI believes that the Biblical passage "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven",[22] refers to an increasing amount of spiritual authority that was given to Peter and the early disciples. According to TFI beliefs, this passage refers to keys that were hidden and unused in the centuries that followed, but were again revealed through Karen Zerby as more power to pray and obtain miracles. TFI members call on the various Keys of the Kingdom for extra effect during prayer. The Keys, like most TFI beliefs, were published in magazines that looked like comic-books in order to make them teachable to children.[23] These beliefs are still generally held and practiced, even after the "reboot" documents of 2010.
Loving Jesus
This is a term TFI members use to describe their intimate, sexual relationship with Jesus. TFI describes its "Loving Jesus" teaching as a radical form of bridal theology.[24] They believe the church of followers is Christ's bride, called to love and serve him with wifely fervor. But they take bridal theology further, encouraging members to imagine Jesus is joining them during sexual intercourse and masturbation. Male members are cautioned to visualize themselves as women, in order to avoid a homosexual relationship with Jesus. Many TFI publications, and spirit messages claimed to be from Jesus himself, elaborate this intimate, sexual relation they believe Jesus desires and needs. TFI imagines itself as his special "bride" in graphic poetry, guided visualizations, artwork,[25] and songs.[26] Some TFI literature is not brought into conservative countries for fear it may be classified at customs as pornography.[27] The literature outlining this view of Jesus and his desire for a sexual relationship with believers was edited for younger teens,[28] then further edited for children.[29]
Issues
Second-generation adults (known as "SGAs") are adults born or reared in TFI.
Anti-TFI sentiment has been publicly expressed by some who have left the group; examples include sisters Celeste Jones, Kristina Jones, and Juliana Buhring, who wrote a book[30] on their lives in TFI.[31]
TFI members are expected to respect legal and civil authorities where they live. Members have typically cooperated with appointed authorities, even during the police and social-service raids of their communities in the early 1990s.[32]
Reception
The group has been criticized by the press and the anti-cult movement. In 1971, an organization called FREECOG was founded by concerned parents and others, including deprogrammer Ted Patrick, to "free" members of the COG from their involvement in the group. Academics were divided[citation needed], with some[who?] categorizing TFI as a "new religious movement", and others, such as Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi[33] and John Huxley,[34] labeling the group a "cult".
Notable members (past and present)
Jeremy Spencer, blues slide guitarist and a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, which he left in 1971 when he joined TFI.[35]
Raised in the COG as children, but left it later in their lives
Christopher Owens: musician, of San Francisco indie band Girls, was brought up in TFI by his parents.[36][37]
Celeste Jones and Kristina Jones: co-authors, along with Juliana Buhring, of Not Without My Sister, an autobiography detailing extensive abuse they suffered in COG.[38] This book is used by the organization RAINN as a reference for child sexual abuse victims.
Juliana Buhring: first woman to bicycle around the world[39] and co-author of Not Without My Sister.
Rose McGowan: film actress, described her TFI childhood in interviews with Howard Stern,[40] People magazine[41] and later in her book "Brave".
River Phoenix, Joaquin Phoenix, Rain Phoenix, and Summer Phoenix: actors, were members of the group (with their sister Liberty Phoenix) from 1972 to 1978. River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in 1993, told Details magazine in November 1991 that "they're ruining people's lives."[42]
Susan Justice: American pop rock singer-songwriter and guitarist, known best for her debut self-recorded album, The Subway Recordings.
Tina Dupuy: American journalist and syndicated columnist.
Ricky Rodriguez: subject of the suppressed manual advocating adult-child sexual contact, committed a murder-suicide in 2005, killing one of the women who raised and allegedly sexually abused him, then himself.[6]
Lauren Hough: author,[43] brought up in TFI.
Flor Edwards, author, [44] who was raised inside the cult before her parents moved out.
Dawn Watson: Brazilian, victim of sexual abuse while living in a TFI community.[7]
Taylor Stevens, author, [45]brought up in the cult from age 12 until she left in her twenties with her two children.
Media featuring the group
The Jesus Trip (1971), a documentary by Denis Tuohy that has interviews with Children of God members.
Children of God (1994), a 63-minute Channel 4 documentary by John Smithson; detailing the Padilla family and the abuse of their three underage daughters and the death of another.
Children of God: Lost and Found, a 75-minute documentary by Noah Thomson, featured at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival[46]
Cult Killer: The Rick Rodriguez Story (53-minute UK documentary with transcript)[47]
In the first episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, "Born Again Christians", Louis visits a Texas TFI family.
Buzzcocks mentions the group (as "Children Of God") in their song, "Orgasm Addict".
RedLetterMedia featured the Family International video "S.O.S." on an episode of "Best of the Worst."[48]
Mentioned in Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru documentary at 52 minutes of the film as an organization where children are forced to have sex from the age of six.[49]
The Parcast Podcast Cults: Episodes 11 & 12.[50]
Citizen Rose: A five part documentary series shown on the E! Channel. The first episode premiered on January 30, 2018. The series follows actress Rose McGowan who was born into the cult.
The Last Podcast on the Left did a four part series on the cult: Episodes 248-251
The Dan Cummins podcast Timesuck covered the cult in episode 104, "The Children of God Sex Cult."
A&E's Cults and Extreme Belief, episode 3 (2018) is about the Children of God.[51]
See also
Comet Kohoutek was viewed by David Berg as a prophetic sign of imminent disaster.
Jim Palosaari co-formed the Jesus People Army, left it before the group joined the Children of God, and tried to convince Linda Meissner not to join it.
Love bombing describes a manipulative style of recruiting.
Panton Hill, Victoria, the location of one of the communes, where a large government raid occurred and many children were removed by social services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_International
Our leader believed the world would burn when the Great Apocalypse arrived.
By Flor Edwards, Guest Writer
Flor Edwards, third from left, and with seven of her siblings in the rural Thai province of Udon Thani. (1987)
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
Flor Edwards, third from left, and with seven of her siblings in the rural Thai province of Udon Thani. (1987)
Growing up in ― and leaving ― a cult is something from which a person never fully recovers.
My parents met in Spain shortly after they both had joined the Children of God cult in 1978. Mom said she joined because Father David, the charismatic leader of the religious doomsday cult, offered the youth of her generation a purpose in life and a way to serve God without joining a church. One day, when my mother was in Sweden and on her way to buy a ticket to Tunisia in search of some new adventure, she met a man sitting on a street corner strumming a guitar. He told her about Jesus and Father David and living with a group of other followers. The man invited her over for dinner; she joined the Children of God that night.
My dad, although also adventurous, was more known for his sense of daring achievement and insatiable curiosity. Dad, a geology student at the top of his class at the University of California, Davis, quit his studies just weeks before graduating. He followed his five older siblings in joining the Children of God, which had swept through California in the late ’70s, and moved to Spain soon after.
Father David lived in hiding and never revealed his face because he was running from the law due to some of his teachings regarding sexual freedom and child discipline. He passed on his visions and edicts to his 12,000 devotees spread out across the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.
Father David believed he needed a large army to prepare the world for the Great Apocalypse, which he claimed would come in 1993. In 1985, he ordered all of his followers to flee Western nations because he thought the West would be the first to burn in the fires of hell.
Father David believed he needed a large army to prepare the world for the Great Apocalypse, which he claimed would come in 1993. In 1985, he ordered all of his followers to flee Western nations and head for developing countries in the East because he thought the West would be the first to burn in the fires of hell. I spent most of my childhood in Thailand, never knowing what was outside the walls of the compound I shared with my family and 30 other members of the Children of God.
By the time I was 12, I could count 24 places I had lived on three continents. In Phuket, Thailand, the gate separating our yard from the dirt road outside was boarded with wood. In the afternoon, when the sun softened its rays, the children were allowed to go outside for one hour as long as we stayed within the perimeters of the walls. When no one was looking, I would press my nose against the metal bars of the gate. I would stare through a tiny crack in the wall where I saw a slow-moving rickshaw, or a shimmering snake, or a mother carrying a child on her back while balancing a bucket on her head.
The children’s wake-up call was at 7 a.m. each day, and our room had to be immaculate by 7:30. We gathered ourselves into neat rows and stood at attention. We filed down the stairs and through the hall just like little soldiers. As we marched, I often heard sounds coming from the narrow, screen-covered windows at the top of the walls. They were the sounds of women moaning, beds creaking and men breathing heavily. We were told the adults, who we were required to call “Uncle” and “Aunty” even if they weren’t related to us, were participating in “God’s love,” and they were encouraged to do so continuously.
It seems like Father David didn’t know he was starting a cult. As a young pastor, he’d been ostracized from the Christian Missionary Alliance after he invited barefoot Native Americans into his Arizona parish and offered them salvation. Father David had wrestled with the constant conflict between his sexual desires and his commitment to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a well-known preacher who spoke to crowds of thousands across the U.S. With the Children of God, he found a way to marry the two.
When the world didn’t end in 1993 as he had predicted, Father David claimed to receive another prophecy that told him it was time to move his followers back to the West. My family of 13 relocated to Illinois and joined a home with 30 other members in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn.
The first difference I noticed about life in America was that the only protection we had from the outside world was a chain-link fence that reached to my waist. The second thing I noticed was how plentiful the food was. When we woke up on our first morning in the U.S., we found a bowl of sweet, thick-skinned oranges on the dining room table. We were allowed to eat even if it wasn’t mealtime ― even if we weren’t hungry ― something I’d never experienced before.
Edwards in Phuket, Thailand, taking a photo to illustrate homeschooling (1989).
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
Edwards in Phuket, Thailand, taking a photo to illustrate homeschooling (1989).
On the morning of Feb. 15, 1995, we gathered in the living room of our compound for the annual birthday celebration of Father David. We were told there would be a special announcement after breakfast. A light snow had begun to fall. I noticed that some of the adults had been acting a bit differently ― both pensive and somber ― over the previous few days. There was a strange sensation of electricity buzzing in the air.
Then the words I never expected to hear echoed through the living room: “Our beloved Father in the Lord has gone to be with Jesus.”
There was a moment of silence so sharp I could almost hear the fresh snow flakes settling on the sidewalk outside. The adults immediately broke into tears.
Uncle Tim, the home leader, said we’d discuss details of how the family would move forward without Father David by utilizing The Charter, a new book of rules that had been issued by Mama Maria, Father David’s wife.
According to The Charter, adults could now live wherever they chose and with whom they wished ― as long as they lived with three other consenting adults, tithed 10 percent of their income to the leadership, continued to witness to non-believers, and stayed updated with the cult by reading monthly mailings sent out by Mama Maria. Because of their newfound freedom, some of the adults opened communication with their families and relatives after years of absence.
My dad found a small, three-bedroom house with cheap rent a few blocks from where we had initially settled. Another couple, Steven and Mary, joined us in our new home. Our parents told my siblings and me that they still wanted to be part of the Children of God and that they intended to follow The Charter. “Our goals might be different now without Father David’s guidance,” Mom said, but she still seemed excited to be following his mission.
We continued to try to keep the daily routine we’d followed when we lived communally in the Children of God’s compound. There were 11 kids in our family, plus Steven and Mary’s three children, and Mom divided up the chores amongst everyone. The women in the family took care of the children while Dad, my older brother and Uncle Steven were responsible for getting the money we needed for food and utilities by selling goods at local swap meets. After spending two very difficult years in Chicago trying to make ends meet with no savings, stable jobs or traditional education to lean on, my family moved to California to live near my dad’s sister. Steven and Mary went to live with relatives in the Philippines.
The author (first row, second from right) and several of her siblings witnessing to Thai locals (1987).
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
The author (first row, second from right) and several of her siblings witnessing to Thai locals (1987).
Subscribe to Must Reads
The internet's best stories, and interviews with their authors.
add...@email.com
Dad enrolled me, as well as my sisters Tamar and Mary Ann, in a home-schooling supplemental course called HOPES: Home Opportunity Program for Educational Success. I was 15 years old and had never attended any kind of true schooling program. It was my first step toward a future outside of the Children of God ― something I desperately wanted ― and I was thrilled. It wasn’t long before Tamar, Mary Ann and I decided we wanted to go to public school. More than that, we wanted normal lives. We weren’t exactly sure what that meant but we knew it meant starting over and leaving behind everything we’d known from the moment we were born. So, after the slow disintegration of the cult following Father David’s death, and with no real structure or guidance left in place beyond the mailings of Mama Maria, Mom and Dad decided we would leave the Children of God.
Aside from starting school, which I whole-heartedly took to almost immediately despite finding it incredibly strange due to its sheer newness, I began reading books and magazines and watching movies and TV ― things that had been forbidden while I was growing up in the Children of God. One day, I stopped at the library on my way home from school and picked up an issue of Seventeen Magazine. Flipping through it in my bedroom, I found a feature titled, “Did You Grow Up in a Cult? Take this Quiz and Find Out Now.”
After taking the quiz in what must have been record time, I came to a line that read, “If you have answered ‘yes’ to three or more of these five questions, you may have grown up in a cult.” I had answered yes to all five.
For a moment my world tumbled out of orbit. I knew my upbringing had been unorthodox ― to say the least ― but I had never realized exactly how different my experiences had been compared to those of other kids. As unbelievable as it may seem, it took a silly quiz in a magazine to make me begin to understand what I had been through and who I was because of it. I just kept repeating, “Oh my God! I grew up in a cult. OH MY GOD! I GREW UP IN A CULT!”
An avalanche of thoughts overwhelmed me as I began, for the very first time, to try to unravel the knots of my past. I had never chosen to join the Children of God ― it was a life I was born into and then forced to endure for 15 years. I was a victim and I suddenly saw my parents in a completely new light. At the same time, I knew they were also victims, both of Father David and of the mainstream world they were trying to escape by joining the Children of God. So, who could I blame? Father David was dead. My parents were struggling to make it in a world with which they had a complicated relationship. As hard as I tried, I found I just couldn’t be mad at them.
After taking the magazine quiz, I came to a line that read, ‘If you have answered ‘yes’ to three or more of these five questions, you may have grown up in a cult.’ I had answered yes to all five.
I knew there was no way to go back and change things in the past, but I was here, alive and finally free. For now, all I could do was cope with the present ― the unbearable now. I realized for me, the worst part about growing up in or joining a cult was actually leaving the cult. When the safety net that the leader carefully wove to manipulate the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of its members was ripped out ― or willingly cut ― it was a long, slow and harsh descent into reality.
As more time passed without the leadership of Father David to anchor the Children of God, more and more members left the church and went to live near their families while taking up the difficult task of attempting to adjust to life in the real world. Others sent their children out into the world while they continued to remain in the Children of God. Stories of kids who had left the cult and died by suicide shortly began to surface. I felt lucky to have the support and love of my parents and siblings ― and to not have been abused, as I knew some of the second-generation members of the cult had been. My family had its share of unique struggles because of our past, but we were together and we began to cope ― and even heal ― in our own ways.
The Children of God slowly disbanded. It still exists under the name The Family International, but it claims to be an independent group of missionaries with a few members scattered in various countries doing what is called “charity work” ― supposedly helping at orphanages, distributing food to those in need and helping with disaster relief.
The author at a reading of her memoir, 'Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times.' (2018)
COURTESY OF FLOR EDWARDS
The author at a reading of her memoir, ‘Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times.’ (2018)
Having been denied an education for most of my life, my schooling became my top priority as I continued to try to process what I had been through ― the life I had led up until that point. When I was 17, I enrolled in Mt. San Antonio College, a community college nestled in the foothills of Mt. Baldy, even though I had grown up never knowing that colleges even existed.
No one in my family ever returned of the Children of God and none of us have any kind of contact with the community. Some of my siblings went on to pursue their degrees, some are working, while others succumbed to the path of addiction like many children who grew up in the Children of God did. My father earned his masters in mathematics and became a tenured professor while my mother battled and healed from an advanced stage of cancer.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain what it’s like to try to adjust to “normal” life after being raised in such abnormal circumstances. I know my childhood is something I can never get back, so instead of focusing on the past, I have spent every day since I left the Children of God choosing to focus on my future. Now, 20 years after finding freedom, I continue to be passionate about education and I am currently pursuing a second graduate degree to become a college professor. Eventually, I want to work with disadvantaged students in colleges and universities in hopes of helping them to find their own voices and think independently. After spending so much time as a prisoner of someone else’s way of seeing the world, I can think of nothing more important.
Flor Edwards is an author and lives in Los Angeles. Her memoir, Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times, was published in 2018. Visit her website here.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/children-of-god-cult_n_5bfee4a3e4b0e254c926f325
4. Joaquin Phoenix
The renegade thesp, along with his late brother River and their other siblings, were raised by his parents in the Children of God cult, originally founded by David Berg, in Puerto Rico, then moved around South America.
His parents soon became disillusioned by the cult's dangerous practices, which allegedly involved child molestation, changed their last name from "Bottom" to "Phoenix," and broke away back to the US in the late '70s. Before getting their children into acting, the Phoenix parents made their kids perform on the streets for money (fun!).
http://reelreviews.com/shorttakes/phoenix.htm#:~:text=River%20Phoenix%27s%20autopsy%20showed%20deadly%20levels%20of%20cocaine,ingestion.%20River%20Phoenix%20was%20just%2023%20years%20old. River Phoenix died of a massive drug overdose at age 23. Many children brought up in the Children Of God end up with addiction problems or outright suicide themselves.
Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan Spent Their Early Years in a Religious Cult. Then it Became Infamous.
Here's what you need to know about the Children of God.
By Gabrielle Bruney
Oct 5, 2019
The Best Horror Films About Cults
by Esquire US
Play VideoCLICK TO UNMUTE
Joker star Joaquin Phoenix had an unconventional early childhood, living in Venezuela, Florida, and eventually Hollywood with his peripatetic parents and siblings Summer, Liberty, Rain, and late fellow actor River. But until Phoenix was around three years old in 1977, the family were followers of the Children of God, a cult helmed by a rogue preacher called David Berg that would later become notorious amid allegations of child sexual abuse. And he’s not the only celebrity who spent some of their early years in the group—Rose McGowan also spent part of her childhood in the cult. Here’s what you need to know.
related stories
'Wild Wild County' Isn't Just About a Sex Cult
Joaquin Phoenix on the Joker: You Start to Go Mad
This Is How Cults Work, Not Religions
Who are the Children of God?
In 1968, preacher David Brandt Berg founded a group initially called Teens for Christ, which at first consisted of young runaways and hippies. This church would evolve into the Children of God, which at one point counted 15,000 members around the world.
The church believed in group living and zealous proselytizing, and soon grew to include hundreds of communes. Members of these communities could be isolated, as they didn’t work—people who held real-world jobs were called “systemites”—or send their children to school.
Berg’s church melded worship of Jesus Christ with ’60s-era free love, and preached a fairly standard cult leader prophecy—the apocalypse was coming, and soon. This doomsday predication encouraged his followers to live hand-to-mouth rather than making long-term plans; ex-members later told The Guardian of begging for alms and subsisting off of donated food.
Happy family atmosphere provided by religious groups such as this Toronto gathering of the Children ...
Members of the Children of God dance in Toronto in 1972.
BORIS SPREMOGETTY IMAGES
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
What are the allegations against the group?
The cult earned notoriety for its sexual practices, which included what Berg dubbed “flirty fishing,” and which found him ordering female followers to have sex with men in order to bring them into the cult. In 1979, he reported that “flirty fishers” had added 19,000 members to the group’s ranks. "It was religious prostitution," one of Berg's daughters told Timeline in 2017.
Joaquin Phoenix told Vanity Fair that the introduction of the "flirty fishing" policy drove his parents to leave the group. "They got some letter, or however it came, some suggestion of that," he said, "and they were like, 'Fuck this, we’re outta here.’"
His mother, Heart Phoenix, told the magazine that "it took several years to get over our pain and loneliness" after leaving the group. Rose McGowan’s family also escaped the cult during her childhood.
La secte des 'Enfants de Dieu' en 1974
Members of the group sit down to a communal meal in 1974 California.
MICHEL GINFRAYGETTY IMAGES
Some in the cult reportedly extended its sexual policies to children, allegedly permitting and even encouraging child sex abuse. Berg himself was accused of sexual abusing young girls, including his daughters and granddaughters. "It definitely wasn’t a safe place to grow up, especially if you were a girl," one former member told The Guardian in 2017. "Close friends of mine growing up were abused and raped."
In 1993, a former member of the group named Ricky Dupuy appeared on Larry King Live, and told the host that he’d been ordered by the group to rape a 10-year-old. Dupuy, like other ex-members of the group, later committed suicide.
David Berg died in 1994, and at the time of his death he was under investigation from both Interpol and the FBI. His wife, Karen Zerby, inherited leadership. But the cult landed in the headlines again in 2005 after their son, Ricky Rodriguez, killed himself and another former member of the group.
Rodriguez was well-known in the cult—his childhood had been recounted in a parenting manual spread among the members. The New York Times, after reviewing pages of the book sent by former followers, reported that in it, "the toddler Ricky is described or else pictured as watching intercourse and orgies, fondling his nanny's breasts and having his genitals fondled."
Rodriguez left the cult in adulthood, and his wife told The Times that he wanted his mother “prosecuted for child abuse.” He also supported other women’s accounts that Berg had sexually abused his own daughters and granddaughters.
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
Germany North Rhine-Westphalia Essen - Children of God, a religiuous sect - 31.12.1980
Children of God followers worship in 1980 Germany.
ULLSTEIN BILDGETTY IMAGES
At the age of 29, Rodriguez invited one of his former nannies—a woman who appeared in the book documenting his alleged abuse—and stabbed her to death before killing himself. His wife gave reporters a video he recorded the night before the murder-suicide. "He said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and beatings," wrote The Times of the footage.
A spokeswoman for the group recently told the BBC that, "although the Family International has apologized on a number of occasions to former members for any hurt, real or perceived, that they may have suffered during their time in our membership, we do not give credence to tales of institutionalized abuse."
What is the status of the group now?
In 2004, the church again changed its name to the Family International. In the years following Berg’s death, the group relaxed many of its demands of its followers in an apparent attempt to boost declining membership. Followers are now allowed to live in private homes and work outside of the cult. In 2009, the leadership announced that they no longer believed the apocalypse to be imminent. The church still exists, and though its website says that the group underwent a “reorganization in 2010 as an online community,” it claims to have 1,700 members.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a29374581/children-of-god-cult-joaquin-phoenix-rose-mcgowan/
The Family International
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
For Ohioan parachurch organization, see Teens for Christ.
Not to be confused with Family, The Fellowship (Christian organization), or The Family (Australian New Age group).
The Family International
Abbreviation TFI
Type Christian cult
Leader Karen Zerby (1994–present)
Founder David Berg
Branched from The Family
Other name(s) Teens for Christ
The Children of God
The Family of Love
The Family
Official website thefamilyinternational.org
The Family International (TFI) is a cult[1][2] that was founded in Huntington Beach, California, US in 1968. It was originally named Teens for Christ and it later gained notoriety as The Children of God (COG). It was later renamed and reorganized as The Family of Love, which was eventually shortened to The Family. It is currently named The Family International.
Contents
1 Overview
2 History
2.1 The Children of God (1968–1977)
2.2 The Family of Love (1978–1981)
2.3 The Family (1982–1994)
2.4 The Family (1995–2003)
2.5 The Family International (2004–present)
2.6 Recent teachings
2.6.1 Spirit Helpers
2.6.2 The Keys of the Kingdom
2.6.3 Loving Jesus
3 Issues
4 Reception
5 Notable members (past and present)
5.1 Raised in the COG as children, but left it later in their lives
6 Media featuring the group
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
9.1 Academic
9.2 Journalistic and popular
10 External links
Overview
TFI initially spread a message of salvation, apocalypticism, spiritual "revolution and happiness" and distrust of the outside world, which the members called The System. In 1976,[3] it began a method of evangelism called Flirty Fishing that used sex to "show God's love and mercy" and win converts, resulting in controversy.[4] TFI's founder and prophetic leader, David Berg (who was first called "Moses David" in the Texas press), gave himself the titles of "King", "The Last Endtime Prophet", "Moses", and "David".
He communicated with his followers via "Mo Letters"—letters of instruction and counsel on myriad spiritual and practical subjects—until his death in late 1994.[5] After his death, his widow Karen Zerby became the leader of TFI, taking the titles of "Queen" and "Prophetess". She married Steve Kelly (also known as Peter Amsterdam), an assistant of Berg's whom Berg had handpicked as her "consort". Kelly took the title of "King Peter" and became the face of TFI, speaking in public more often than either David Berg or Karen Zerby. There have been multiple allegations of child sexual abuse made by past members.[6][7]
History
The Children of God (1968–1977)
Members of The Children of God (COG) founded communes, first called colonies (now referred to as homes), in various cities. They would proselytize in the streets and distribute pamphlets. Leaders within COG were referred to as The Chain.
The founder of the movement, David Brandt Berg (1919–1994), was a former Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor.[8]
Berg communicated with his followers by writing letters. He published nearly 3,000 letters over a period of 24 years, referred to as the Mo Letters.[9] In a letter written in January 1972, Berg stated that he was God's prophet for the contemporary world, attempting to further solidify his spiritual authority within the group. Berg's letters also contained public acknowledgement of his own failings and weaknesses.[10][verification needed]
By 1972, COG had 130 communities around the world.[11]
The Children of God was abolished in February 1978. Berg reorganized the movement amid reports of serious misconduct and financial mismanagement, The Chain's abuse of authority, and disagreements within it about the continued use of Flirty Fishing. The group was also accused of sexually abusing and raping minors within the organization, with considerable evidence to support this claim. One-eighth of the total membership left the movement. Those who remained became part of a reorganized movement called the Family of Love, and later, The Family. The majority of the group's beliefs remained the same.[12]
The Family of Love (1978–1981)
A form of love bombing, Flirty Fishing encouraged female members to enter sexual relationships with potential converts
The Family of Love era was characterized by international expansion.
In 1976, before the dissolution of The Children of God,[3] David Berg had introduced a new proselytizing method called Flirty Fishing (or FFing), which encouraged female members to "show God's love" through sexual relationships with potential converts. Flirty Fishing was practiced by members of Berg's inner circle starting in 1973, and was introduced to the general membership in 1976 and became common practice within the group. In some areas flirty fishers used escort agencies to meet potential converts. According to TFI "over 100,000 received God's gift of salvation through Jesus, and some chose to live the life of a disciple and missionary" as a result of Flirty Fishing.[12] Researcher Bill Bainbridge obtained data from TFI suggesting that, from 1974 until 1987, members had sexual contact with 223,989 people while practicing Flirty Fishing.[13]
The Family (1982–1994)
In March 1989, TF issued a statement that, in "early 1985", an urgent memorandum had been sent to all members "reminding them that any such activities [adult–child sexual contact] are strictly forbidden within our group" (emphasis in original), and such activities were grounds for immediate excommunication from the group.[14] In January 2005, Claire Borowik, a spokesperson for TFI, stated:
Due to the fact that our current zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual interaction between adults and underage minors was not in our literature published before 1986, we came to the realization that during a transitional stage of our movement, from 1978 until 1986, there were cases when some minors were subject to sexually inappropriate advances ... This was corrected officially in 1986, when any contact between an adult and minor (any person under 21 years of age) was declared an excommunicable offense.[15]
The Family (1995–2003)
After Berg's death in October 1994, Karen Zerby (known in the group as Mama Maria, Queen Maria, Maria David, or Maria Fontaine), assumed leadership of the group.
In February 1995, the group introduced the Love Charter,[16] which defined the rights and responsibilities of Charter Members and Homes. The Charter also included the Fundamental Family Rules, a summary of rules and guidelines from past TF publications which were still in effect.
In the 1994–95 British court case, the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Alan Ward ruled that the group, including some of its top leaders, had in the past engaged in abusive sexual practices involving minors and had also used severe corporal punishment and sequestration of minors.[17] He found that by 1995 TF had abandoned these practices and concluded that they were a safe environment for children. Nevertheless, he did require that the group cease all corporal punishment of children in the United Kingdom and denounce any of Berg's writings that were "responsible for children in TF having been subjected to sexually inappropriate behaviour".[18]
The Family International (2004–present)
The Love Charter is The Family's set governing document that entails each member's rights, responsibilities and requirements, while the Missionary Member Statutes and Fellow Member Statutes were written for the governance of TFI's Missionary member and Fellow Member circles, respectively. FD Homes were reviewed every six months against a published set of criteria. The Love Charter increased the number of single family homes as well as homes that relied on jobs such as self-employment.[19]
Recent teachings
TFI's recent teachings are based on beliefs which they term the "new [spiritual] weapons". TFI members believe that they are soldiers in the spiritual war of good versus evil for the souls and hearts of men.
Spirit Helpers
These include angels, departed humans, other religious and mythical figures, and even celebrities; for example the goddess Aphrodite, the Snowman, Merlin, the Sphinx, Elvis,[20] Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn,[21] Richard Nixon, and Winston Churchill.
The Keys of the Kingdom
TFI believes that the Biblical passage "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven",[22] refers to an increasing amount of spiritual authority that was given to Peter and the early disciples. According to TFI beliefs, this passage refers to keys that were hidden and unused in the centuries that followed, but were again revealed through Karen Zerby as more power to pray and obtain miracles. TFI members call on the various Keys of the Kingdom for extra effect during prayer. The Keys, like most TFI beliefs, were published in magazines that looked like comic-books in order to make them teachable to children.[23] These beliefs are still generally held and practiced, even after the "reboot" documents of 2010.
Loving Jesus
This is a term TFI members use to describe their intimate, sexual relationship with Jesus. TFI describes its "Loving Jesus" teaching as a radical form of bridal theology.[24] They believe the church of followers is Christ's bride, called to love and serve him with wifely fervor. But they take bridal theology further, encouraging members to imagine Jesus is joining them during sexual intercourse and masturbation. Male members are cautioned to visualize themselves as women, in order to avoid a homosexual relationship with Jesus. Many TFI publications, and spirit messages claimed to be from Jesus himself, elaborate this intimate, sexual relation they believe Jesus desires and needs. TFI imagines itself as his special "bride" in graphic poetry, guided visualizations, artwork,[25] and songs.[26] Some TFI literature is not brought into conservative countries for fear it may be classified at customs as pornography.[27] The literature outlining this view of Jesus and his desire for a sexual relationship with believers was edited for younger teens,[28] then further edited for children.[29]
Issues
Second-generation adults (known as "SGAs") are adults born or reared in TFI.
Anti-TFI sentiment has been publicly expressed by some who have left the group; examples include sisters Celeste Jones, Kristina Jones, and Juliana Buhring, who wrote a book[30] on their lives in TFI.[31]
TFI members are expected to respect legal and civil authorities where they live. Members have typically cooperated with appointed authorities, even during the police and social-service raids of their communities in the early 1990s.[32]
Reception
The group has been criticized by the press and the anti-cult movement. In 1971, an organization called FREECOG was founded by concerned parents and others, including deprogrammer Ted Patrick, to "free" members of the COG from their involvement in the group. Academics were divided[citation needed], with some[who?] categorizing TFI as a "new religious movement", and others, such as Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi[33] and John Huxley,[34] labeling the group a "cult".
Notable members (past and present)
Jeremy Spencer, blues slide guitarist and a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, which he left in 1971 when he joined TFI.[35]
Raised in the COG as children, but left it later in their lives
Christopher Owens: musician, of San Francisco indie band Girls, was brought up in TFI by his parents.[36][37]
Celeste Jones and Kristina Jones: co-authors, along with Juliana Buhring, of Not Without My Sister, an autobiography detailing extensive abuse they suffered in COG.[38] This book is used by the organization RAINN as a reference for child sexual abuse victims.
Juliana Buhring: first woman to bicycle around the world[39] and co-author of Not Without My Sister.
Rose McGowan: film actress, described her TFI childhood in interviews with Howard Stern,[40] People magazine[41] and later in her book "Brave".
River Phoenix, Joaquin Phoenix, Rain Phoenix, and Summer Phoenix: actors, were members of the group (with their sister Liberty Phoenix) from 1972 to 1978. River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in 1993, told Details magazine in November 1991 that "they're ruining people's lives."[42]
Susan Justice: American pop rock singer-songwriter and guitarist, known best for her debut self-recorded album, The Subway Recordings.
Tina Dupuy: American journalist and syndicated columnist.
Ricky Rodriguez: subject of the suppressed manual advocating adult-child sexual contact, committed a murder-suicide in 2005, killing one of the women who raised and allegedly sexually abused him, then himself.[6]
Lauren Hough: author,[43] brought up in TFI.
Flor Edwards, author, [44] who was raised inside the cult before her parents moved out.
Dawn Watson: Brazilian, victim of sexual abuse while living in a TFI community.[7]
Taylor Stevens, author, [45]brought up in the cult from age 12 until she left in her twenties with her two children.
Media featuring the group
The Jesus Trip (1971), a documentary by Denis Tuohy that has interviews with Children of God members.
Children of God (1994), a 63-minute Channel 4 documentary by John Smithson; detailing the Padilla family and the abuse of their three underage daughters and the death of another.
Children of God: Lost and Found, a 75-minute documentary by Noah Thomson, featured at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival[46]
Cult Killer: The Rick Rodriguez Story (53-minute UK documentary with transcript)[47]
In the first episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, "Born Again Christians", Louis visits a Texas TFI family.
Buzzcocks mentions the group (as "Children Of God") in their song, "Orgasm Addict".
RedLetterMedia featured the Family International video "S.O.S." on an episode of "Best of the Worst."[48]
Mentioned in Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru documentary at 52 minutes of the film as an organization where children are forced to have sex from the age of six.[49]
The Parcast Podcast Cults: Episodes 11 & 12.[50]
Citizen Rose: A five part documentary series shown on the E! Channel. The first episode premiered on January 30, 2018. The series follows actress Rose McGowan who was born into the cult.
The Last Podcast on the Left did a four part series on the cult: Episodes 248-251
The Dan Cummins podcast Timesuck covered the cult in episode 104, "The Children of God Sex Cult."
A&E's Cults and Extreme Belief, episode 3 (2018) is about the Children of God.[51]
See also
Comet Kohoutek was viewed by David Berg as a prophetic sign of imminent disaster.
Jim Palosaari co-formed the Jesus People Army, left it before the group joined the Children of God, and tried to convince Linda Meissner not to join it.
Love bombing describes a manipulative style of recruiting.
Panton Hill, Victoria, the location of one of the communes, where a large government raid occurred and many children were removed by social services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_International
Loose Cannon
May 8, 2021, 4:22:04 PM5/8/21
to
On Thu, 6 May 2021 00:27:06 -0700 (PDT), Greg Carr
<gregca...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I Grew Up In The Children Of God, A Doomsday Cult. Here’s How I Finally Got Out.
Thanks for confirming what we already knew; you've been an asshole
<gregca...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I Grew Up In The Children Of God, A Doomsday Cult. Here’s How I Finally Got Out.
since the day you were born. Your momma was an asshole, your many
daddies were assholes, and you're the #1 asshole.
Greg Carr
May 9, 2021, 5:17:25 AM5/9/21
to
new.scot...@met.police. Metropolitan Police Service New Scotland Yard Broadway London SW1H 0BG. Tel: 020 7230 1212. Fax: 020 7230 4276.Contact these guys about his online support for Arab terrorists, rapists and pedophiles. His hatred and loathing and lies about Jews, Blacks, Asians and his fat wife.
Nazis are notorious queers like Ernst Rohm and yourself Gordon Radavich.
ab...@uk.tiscali.com
,
ab...@tiscali.com is where you can report his lies and stupid off topic posts and general inane racism and pro pedophili and rape.
https://www.gov.uk/report-immigration-crime contact these ppl to get Gordon Radavich deported back to rural backwater Serbia.
Contact the Member at their Westminster address.
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
Phone: 020 7219 4711
Email: kevin.f...@parliament.uk This person is responsible for immigration and deportations so contact him to get the vile Gordon Radavich deported from whence he came. Unlike in Canada and the USA that post isn't a Cabinet Post which is odd.
By Johann Hari, Guest Writer
The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists
10/21/2008 06:16 pm ET Updated May 25, 2011
The news that Jorg Haider - the Austrian fascist leader - spent his final few hours in a gay bar with a hot blond has shocked some people. It hasn’t shocked me. This is a taboo topic for a gay left-wing man like me to touch, but there has always been a weird, disproportionate overlap between homosexuality and fascism. Take a deep breath; here goes.
Some 10,000 gay people were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps. Many more were humiliated, jailed, deported, ethnically cleansed, or castrated. One gay survivor of the camps, LD Classen von Neudegg, has written about his experiences. A snapshot: “Three men had tried to escape one night. They were captured, and when they returned they had the word ‘homo’ scrawled across their clothing. They were placed on a block and whipped. Then they were forced to beat a drum and cheer, ‘Hurrah! We’re back! Hurrah!’ Then they were hanged.” This is one of the milder events documented in his book.
So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous. Yet when the British National Party - our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots - announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism didn’t blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at least - a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.
Just look at our own continent over the past decade. Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn ran on blatantly racist anti-immigrant platform, describing Islam as “a cancer” and “the biggest threat to Western civilisation today.” Yet with two little fluffy dogs and a Mamma complex, he was openly, flamboyantly gay. When accused by a political opponent of hating Arabs, he replied, “How can I hate Arabs? I sucked one off last night.”
Jorg Haider blasted Austria’s cosy post-Nazi politics to rubble in 2000 when his neo-fascist ‘Freedom Party’ won a quarter of the vote and joined the country’s government as a coalition partner. Several facts always cropped up in the international press coverage: his square jaw, his muscled torso, his SS-supporting father, his rabid anti-Semitism, his hatred of immigrants, his description of Auschwitz and Dachau as “punishment centres”. A few newspapers mentioned that he is always surrounded by fit, fanatical young men. A handful went further and pointed out that several of these young men are openly gay. Then one left-wing German paper broke the story everybody else was hinting at. They alleged Haider is gay.
Rumours of an Indian waiter with “intimate details” of Haider’s body broke into the press. The Freedom Party’s general manager Gerald Miscka quickly quit, amid accusations that he was Haider’s lover. Haider’s close gay friend Walter Kohler - who has been photographed showing off a holstered pistol while Haider chuckled - declared his opposition to outing politicians. Haider - who was married and has two children - kept quiet while his functionaries denied the rumours. The revelation that he died after leaving a gay bar suggests these rumours were true.
On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren’t many sights you’d miss. France’s leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany’s leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”
And it wouldn’t be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as “evil”, and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, “The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive.”
But scratch to homophobic surface and there’s a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his ‘affair’ with Nick Griffin. “Griffin sought out intimate relations with me,” openly-gay Webster explained, “in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me.” Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it’s all too plausible. Homosexuality is “extremely prevalent” in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement’s organisers were gay, he claims.
Gerry Gable, editor of the anti-fascist magazine ‘Searchlight’, explains, “I have looked at Britain’s Nazi groups for decades and this homophobic hypocrisy has been there all the time. I cannot think of any organisation on the extreme right that hasn’t attacked people on the grounds of their sexual preference and at the same time contained many gay officers and activists.”
Griffins’ alleged gay affair would stand in a long British fascist tradition. The leader of the skinhead movement all through the 1970s was a crazed, muscled thug called Nicky Crane. He was the icon of a reactionary backlash against immigrants, feminism and the ‘hippy’ lifetsyle of the 1960s. His movement’s emphasis on conformity to a shaven, dehumanised norm resembled classical fascist movements; Crane soon became a campaigner and leading figure in the National Front. Oh, and he was gay. Before he died of AIDS in the mid-1980s, Crane came out and admitted he had starred in many gay porn videos. Just before he died in 1986, he was allowed to steward a Gay Pride march in London, even though he still said he was “proud to be a fascist.”
The rubber-soled friction between gay fascists and progressive British gay people sparked into anger in 1985 when the Gay Skinhead Movement organised a disco at London’s Gay Centre. Several lesbians in particular objected to the “invasion” of the centre. They felt that the cult of “real men” and hypermasculine thugs was stirring up the most base feelings “in the very place, the gay movement, where you would least expect them.”
And this Gaystapo has an icon to revere, an alternative Fuhrer to worship: the lost gay fascist leader Ernst Rohm. Along with Adolf Hitler, Rohm was the founding father of Nazism. Born to conservative Bavarian civil servants in 1887, Ernst Rohm’s life began - in his view - in the “heroic” trenches of the First World War. Like so many of the generation who formed the Nazi Party, he was nurtured by and obsessed with the homoerotic myth of the trenches - heroic, beautiful boys prepared to die for their brothers and their country.
He emerged from the war with a bullet-scarred face and a reverence for war. As he put it in his autobiography, “Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order.” After being disbanded, he tried half-heartedly to get a foothold in civilian life, but he saw it as alien, bourgeois, boring. He had no political beliefs, only prejudices - particularly hatred of Jews. Historian Joachim Fest describes Rohm’s generation of alienated, demobbed young men humiliated by defeat as “agents of a permanent revolution without any revolutionary idea of the future, only a wish to eternalize the values of the trenches.”
It was Rohm who first spotted the potential of a soap-box ranter called Adolf Hitler. He saw him as the demagogue he needed to mobilize support for his plan to overthrow democracy and establish a “soldier’s state” where the army ruled untrammelled. He introduced the young fascist to local politicians and military leaders; they knew him for many years as “Rohm’s boy.” Gay historian Frank Rector notes, “Hitler was, to a substantial extent, Rohm’s protégé.” Rohm integrated Hitler into his underground movement to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
Rohm’s blatant, out homosexuality seems bizarre now, given the gay genocide that was to follow. He talked openly about his fondness for gay bars and Turkish baths, and was known for his virility. He believed that gay people were superior to straights, and saw homosexuality as a key principle of his proposed Brave New Fascist Order. As historian Louis Snyder explains, Rohm “projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behaviour pattern of high repute... He flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted his cronies do the same. He believed straight people weren’t as adept at bullying and aggression as homosexuals, so homosexuality was given a high premium in the SA.” They promoted an aggressive, hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning “hysterical women of both sexes”, in reference to feminine gay men.
This belief in the superiority of homosexuality had a strong German tradition that grew up at the turn of the twentieth century around Adolf Brand, publisher of the country’s first gay magazine. You could call it ‘Queer as Volk’: they preached that gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented an elite, warrior caste that should rule. They venerated the ancient warrior cults of Sparta, Thebes and Athens.
Rohm often referred to the ancient Greek tradition of sending gay solider couples into battle, because they were believed to be the most ferocious fighters. The famous pass of Thermopylae, for example was held by 300 soldiers - who consisted of 150 gay couples. In its early years, the SA - Hitler and Rohm’s underground army - was seen as predominantly gay. Rohm assigned prominent posts to his lovers, making Edmund Heines his deputy and Karl Ernst the SA commander in Berlin. The organisation would sometimes meet in gay bars. The gay art historian Christian Isermayer said in an interview, “I got to know people in the SA. They used to throw riotous parties even in 1933... I once attended one. It was quite well-behaved but thoroughly gay. But then, in those days, the SA was ultra-gay.”
On June 30th 1934, Rohm was awoken in a Berlin hotel by Hitler himself. He sprang to his feet and saluted, calling, “Heil Mein Fuhrer!” Hitler said simply, “You are under arrest,” and with that he left the room, giving orders for Rohm to be taken to Standelheim prison. He was shot that night. Rohm was the most high-profile kill in the massacre known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’.
Rohm had been suspected by Hitler of disloyalty, but his murder began a massive crackdown on gay people. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, described homosexuality as “a symptom of degeneracy that could destroy our race. We must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates.”
German historian Lothar Machtan argues that Hitler had Rohm - and almost all of the large number of gay figures within the SA - killed to silence speculation about his own homosexual experiences. His ‘evidence’ for Hitler being gay is shaky and has been questioned by many historians, although some of his findings are at least suggestive. A close friend of Hitler’s during his teenager years, August Kubizek, alleged a “romantic” affair between them. Hans Mend, a despatch rider who served alongside Hitler in the First World War, claimed to have seen Hitler having sex with a man. Hitler was certainly very close to several gay men, and never seems to have had a normal sexual relationship with a woman, not even his wife, Eva Braun.
Rudolph Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler’s private thoughts on homosexuality. “It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the breeding pool the very men the Volk most needs.” This idea - that homosexuality is ‘contagious’ and, implicitly, tempting - is revealing.
Rohm is venerated on the Homo-Nazi sites that have bred on the internet like germs in a wound. They have names like Gays Against Semitism (with the charming acronym GAS), and the Aryan Resistance Corps (ARC). Their Rohmite philosophy is simple: while white men are superior to other races, gay men are “the masters of the Master Race”. They alone are endowed with the “capacity for pure male bonding” and the “superior intellect” that is needed for “a fascist revolution.” The ARC even organises holiday “get-togethers” for its members where “you can relax amongst the company of our fellow white brothers.”
So it’s fairly easy to establish that gay people are not inoculated from fascism. They have often been at its heart. This begs the bigger question: why? How did gay people - so often victims of oppression and hate - become integral to the most hateful and evil political movement of all? Is it just an extreme form of self-harm, the political equivalent to the gay kids who slash their own arms to ribbons out of self-hate?
Gay pornographer and film-maker Bruce LaBruce has one explanation. He claims that “all gay porn today is implictly fascist. Fascism is in our bones, because it’s all about glorifying white male supremacy and fetishizing domination, cruelty, power and monstrous authority figures.” He has tried to explore the relationship between homosexuality and fascism in his movies, beginning with ‘No Skin Off My Ass’ in 1991. In his disturbing 1999 film “Skin Flick’, a bourgeois gay couple - one black, one white - are sexually terrorised by a gang of gay skinheads who beat off to ‘Mein Kampf’ and beat up ‘femmes’. He implies that bourgeois gay norms quickly break down to reveal a fascist lurking underneath; the movie ends with the black character being raped in front of his half-aroused white lover, as the racist gang chant, “Fuck the monkey.”
I decided to track down some gay fascists and ask them directly. Wyatt Powers, director of the ARC, says, “I always knew in my heart racist and gay were both morally right. I don’t see any conflict between them. It’s only the Jew-owned gay press that tries to convince us that racialism is the same thing as homophobia. You can be an extreme nationalist and gay without any contradiction at all.”
One comment board on a gay racist website goes even further into racist lunacy. One gay man from Ohio says, “Even if you are gay and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE, BOTTOM LINE! Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of worthless races such as the Africans or Mexicans popping out literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this fucked up shit they are doing. They are raping our country.” It’s true that racism and homophobia do not necessarily overlap - but as Rabbi Bernard Melchman explains, “Homophobia and anti-Semitism are so often part of the same disease.” Racists are usually homophobic. Even after reading all their web rantings, I didn’t feel any closer to understanding why so many gay men ally themselves with people who will almost always turn on them in the end, just as the Nazis did.
Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has a sensitive and intriguing explanation. “There are many reasons for this kind of thing,” he says. “Some of them are in denial. They are going for hyper-masculinity, the most extreme possible way of being a man. It’s a way of ostentatiously rejecting the perceived effeminacy of the homosexual ‘Other’. These troubled men have a simple belief in their minds: ‘Straight men are tough. Queers are weak. Therefore if I’m tough I can’t be queer.’ It’s a desperate way of proving their manhood.”
‘Searchlight’ magazine - the bible of the British anti-fascist movement, with moles in every major far-right organisation - offers an alternative explanation. “Generally condemned by a society that continues to be largely hostile to gays, some men may find refuge and a new power status in the far right,” one of their writers has explained. “Through adherence to the politics espoused by fascist groups, a new identity emerges - one where they aren’t outcasts, because they are White Men, superior to everyone else. They render the gay part of their identity invisible - or reject the socially less acceptable parts, like being feminine - while vaunting what they see as superior.”
But there’s another important question: will fascist movements inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler’s main reason for killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it possible to have a gay fascist who wasn’t acting against his own interests? Fascism is often defined as “a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups.” It’s true that this hierarchy could benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But given the prevalence of homophobia, isn’t that - even for people who don’t see fascism as inherently evil - a terrible risk to take? Won’t a culture that turns viciously on one minority get around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be the lesson of Ernst Rohm’s pitiful, squalid little life.
The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially nutty work of revisionist history called ‘The Pink Swastika’, the ‘historian’ Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the camps as merely “gay-on-gay violence.” A typical website commenting on the book claims absurdly, “The Pink Swastika shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there even was against homosexuals themselves.”
Yet we can’t allow these madmen to prevent a period of serious self-reflection from the gay movement. If Bruce LaBruce is right, many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive. Do some gay people really still need to learn that fascists will not bring on a Fabulous Solution for gay people, but a Final Solution for us all?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-strange-strange-story_b_136697
Thomas Michael Marks is a known Pedophile and Nazi.
The 54 year old Roseville, Minnesota White Nationalist
organizer has been arrested in an undercover Child-sex sting in
August, 1997. Marks answered an internet ad for a company in
Yuma, Arizona offering enticements of ”the young at heart.”
This is a known code phrase for those interested in sex with
children. The placed Ad was part of an undercover operation and
Marks was arrested after flying into Yuma and meeting with his
“sex-tour liaison” at a motel. According to court documents
Marks was interested in overnight stays with pre-teen girls and
booked a three day stay with several 8-year old girls. After
raiding his residence federal agents discovered child
pornography downloaded to his computer. Marks was a teacher
before getting arrested in the Child-sex sting.
Francis Joseph "Frank" Collin (born November 3, 1944 in
Chicago, Illinois) Midwest coordinator with the National
Socialist White People's Party. After being ousted for being
part Jewish (which he denied), Collin founded in 1970, the
National Socialist Party of America.[1] In the late 1970s, its
plan to march in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie,
Illinois was challenged, but the ACLU defended its freedom of
speech and assembly in a case that reached the United States
Supreme Court. The court in National Socialist Party of America
v. Village of Skokie (1979), a major First Amendment decision,
ruled that the party had a right to march and to display a
swastika, despite local opposition. Collin was convicted and
sentenced in 1979 for child molestation.
Germany opens files on Chile sect run by Nazi pedophile‘For
many years… German diplomats looked the other way,’ concedes
foreign minister regarding abusive group Colonia Dignidad
http://www.timesofisrael.com/germany-opens-files-on-chile-sect-
run-by-nazi-pedophile/
Kevin Alfred Strom (born August 17, 1956) is an American White
nationalist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier, White separatist and
associate editor of National Vanguard. Strom resigned from
National Vanguard in July 2006,[1] but rejoined in 2012.
In 2008 Strom pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography
and was sentenced to 23 months in prison, of which he served
four months. He has posted as Topaz on USENET from time to time over the years spreading his lies and hatreds towards his cultural and intellectual betters the Jews.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nazis are pedophiles hang them.
August Kreis III: Sentenced to 50 Years For Child Molestation
Back in June 2008 we ran a story concerning neo-Nazi parents (one of whom we continue to refer to as "Nazi Mom") who had attended the first Aryan Guard march in Calgary. This particular couple, now divorced, hit the news when Child and Family Services removed the children from their home after "Nazi Mom" had sent her daughter to school with racist iconography scrawled in marker all over her daughter's arms. Despite attempting to regain custody, "Nazi Mom" never did regain her parental rights.
At the time the news hit the msm, the usual suspects jumped in to support "Nazi Mom" and "Nazi Dad." The most prominent included Paul Fromm and members of the Aryan Guard itself, but they also received some international support:
August Kreis III, the leader of the Aryan Nations, told the Winnipeg Free Press his organization is prepared to mobilize whatever resources are necessary -- including financial and legal -- to ensure the decision isn't allowed to stand. He said the case is unlike anything he's ever heard of and fears it will set a dangerous precedent across North America.
"We're all family people. If they can do this in Canada, how long until they are doing it down here?" Mr. Kreis said in an interview from his home in South Carolina.
....
"The Canadians need to know we support this fight, that they are not alone. We're all over, and there are a lot of Canadians who feel the same way we do and are fed up with all this multiculturalism."
Mr. Kreis said he wouldn't advise his followers to turn their children into so-called "billboards" -- such as what is alleged to have happened in Winnipeg -- but added that's hardly grounds to have children removed from a home.
Mr. Kreis questions why similar seizures haven't been made of children being raised by homosexual or lesbian parents.
Ah, they are, "all family people" eh? Big supporters of the 14 words, no doubt.
"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
It is such a relief that family men such as August Kreis are looking out for the welfare of "white" families and their children. Kreis himself was a family man having sired many children himself.
And just how well protected were the "white" children under Kreis' care?
Former Aryan Nations Leader Gets 50 Years For Child Rape
August Byron Kreis III, a one-time pre-eminent racist leader with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations, will spend the rest of his life in prison for child molestation.
The 61-year-old Kreis -- who lost both legs to diabetes and is now wheel-chair bound -- was sentenced Thursday to 50 years in prison after being found guilty by a jury in Lexington, S.C., of one count of criminal sexual conduct involving a child and two counts of committing lewd acts on a child.
The charges were related to repeated sexual abuse of two girls between the ages of 10 and 14 by the man who at one-time declared he was the hand-picked leader of the Aryan Nations, chosen to succeed the late Richard G. Butler.
But child rape conviction aside, Kreis wasn't about to let the opportunity to get the message out pass:
During the three-day trial, Kreis held up a sign to the jury, “Vote for Donald Trump.” That prompted his defense attorney to ask for a mistrial, but the judge rejected the attempt to derail the trial.
At sentencing Thursday afternoon, Kreis was back with an anti-Semitic rant and another plug for the Republican presidential candidate who is leading most current polls.
“I will always hate the Jew,” Kreis said in the courtroom. “This government is run by an evil group of people, and, please, ‘Vote for Trump!’”
An endorsement that we think even the Donald would refuse.
We think.
http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2015/11/august-kreis-iii-sentenced-to-50-years.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KKK "Grand Dragon" molested his granddaughter
http://tinyurl.com/ou674td
Leading US neo-Nazi jailed for child porn possession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Alfred_Strom
More on neo-nazis and child porn
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7469180.stm
neo-Nazi leader shot dead by his 10 year old son whom he abused
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jeff_Hall
Frank Collin, leader of the National Socialist Party of America: pedophile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Collin
"Aryan Nations" leader, convicted of theft, is also a pedophile
http://tinyurl.com/q2qm743
Fugitive Nazis who built a paedophile paradise in the sun
http://tinyurl.com/p8sungc
neo-Nazi attacks women with hammer, gets 248-year sentence
http://tinyurl.com/pcblep5
http://tinyurl.com/oa55jxz
Notorious German Neo-Nazi Tino Brandt Charged With Child Abuse
Nazis were "sexually aroused by necrophilia, bestiality and sadism"
http://tinyurl.com/kppjbuc
White supremacist beat a five year old to death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_W._Ryan
British neo-Nazis torture, murder 17 month old boy
http://tinyurl.com/nlddf8
British neo-Nazi sentenced to life for raping a two year old girl
http://tinyurl.com/o3obact
Child porn found on computer of neo-Nazi Holocaust Museum shooter
http://tinyurl.com/nqvkoba
White supremacists rob and murder a family, including an 8 year old girl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevie_Kehoe
British KKK "leader" is a convicted child molester
http://tinyurl.com/pcdav6g
http://www.bernardomahoney.com/forthcb/ootdie/articles/wiw.shtml
http://tinyurl.com/opmajuf
Hungarian neo-Nazis murder four year old boy
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article3835961.ece
BNP paedophile convicted
http://libcom.org/news/bnp-murderer-paedophile-convicted-22062012
And ANOTHER BNP paedophile convicted!
http://libcom.org/news/bnp-paedophile-jailed-13012006
White supremacist tortured and sexually assaulted teen stepdaughters
http://tinyurl.com/pucouny
Nigel Hesmondalgh, British neo-Nazi: jailed for possessing a series
of degrading photos and videos of children.
https://malatesta32.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/edl-sex-offenders-list/
Shaun Jones, British neo-Nazi: jailed for raping a 12 year old girl
https://malatesta32.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/updated-edl-nonce-list/
http://tinyurl.com/qxefndm
Kane Hutchinson, British neo-Nazi: jailed for abusing young boys
http://tinyurl.com/oc3zm2w
John Broomfield, British neo-Nazi: jailed for child abuse images
http://tinyurl.com/pxfq6ux
https://liveraf.wordpress.com/tag/john-broomfield/
Mervyn Jones, British neo-Nazi: 17 years for "sustained and prolific sex crimes"
http://tinyurl.com/q838xlf
http://tinyurl.com/oa87ea8
Darren Francis, British neo-Nazi: multiple sex offences, illegal drugs
http://lancasteruaf.blogspot.co.il/2010/07/bnp-paedophile-every-parents-worst.html
James Mullen, British neo-Nazi, repeatedly kicked his pregnant girlfriend
in the stomach, attacked others, incl. a 10-year-old girl
http://tinyurl.com/pth57ou
Wayne McCurry, British neo-Nazi, convicted of attacking two 14-year-old girls
More on this sick nazoid animal: http://tinyurl.com/penov2z
Eliot Jones, British neo-Nazi, sentenced for blackmail and child abuse
Yes, business as usual with the nazoid sickos.
More in: http://tinyurl.com/p89ypar
Jeff Marsh, British neo-Nazi "leader", jailed for attacking a woman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuals_United
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicky_Crane Nicky Crane formed Blood and Honour a terrorist nazi group banned in many countries including Canada, USA and Spain. He spent 5 years in prison for violent crimes before dying of AIDS before his 40th birthday 18 months after coming out about his queerdom on TV.
You have such a empty, vacant life you read newsgroups about subjects that happen in places 5,000 miles away from you that you have no connection with. Oh wait you have no connection with anything nithling.
Gordon Radavitch is FAGGOT FAGGOT FAGGOT like Jake Virtanen. Homosexuals out of team sports homosexuals out of the locker rooms. Quit beating off thinking of the high school qb or the team captain. Until this year no player in the big 6 team sports in Canada/USA was ever openly homosexual while a player. Jake Virtannen needs to go he is a borderline 4th liner who is not a team player or good in the room.
You pissed because you can't rape Croats and Kosovians anymore? The court at the Hague should investigate you for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia you are the right age for that.
Have another wretched, poverty stricken mediocre day Gordon Radavich you child raping ,child porn watching moronic dip.
Up your nose with a rubber hose.
Gordon Radavich is a second world Serbian dole boy. He is a chronic liar with no friends. His wife is an adulterous fat disgusting pig. Lots of felchers in London, England to ream your diseased ass' Gordon Radavich.
Loose Cannon aka Gordon Radavich [rado...@tiscali.co.uk] He uses various other nicks as well such as NEMO and Susan Cohen.
Radavich is so stupid he spelled his name wrong on his email addy. The email is valid. Feel free to contact his ISP about his anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-Asian posts to USENET and his general stupidity and off-topic posts to various ngs.
Population of earth: 7,442,000,000,000
Number of people superior to Gordon: 7,441,999,999,999"
"Police have arrested a Serbian national following a lengthy
investigation into anti-Semitic activities. Gordon Radavich, 51, a
satellite system installer, was arrested at his home in Albert Bridge
Road, Battersea, and charged with various offences under the Public
Order Act (1986) and Computer Misuse Act (1990). Several computers
and a number of foreign passports were removed from the premises for
forensic examination. After a preliminary hearing before Wandsworth
magistrates yesterday he was remanded in custody until 16th August."
Hope Brexit gets your child raping ass deported back to Serbia and away from the First World.
What a pathetic life you lead.
Glad Earl J Weber the Louisiana pedophile is dead Gordon Radavich lauded him on USENET. Neither of them ever had a child or did it with a even an average woman. Weber never saw a woman over 10 naked that's how fat catholics do it the poorest state in America. Both were/are chronic liars and totally racist against Blacks and dumber than the slime from a snail. Both lost the war they were involved in.
0 new messages