This is good. Very good.
god fucking damn it, why did the church I was apart of never do ANY of these things. Sure, they believed me, but my brother was still there every Sunday. He was still there, fucking hell, and nobody ever really tried to take care of me.
And people wonder why I hate Christianity.
I would be really really surprised to learn of a church that dealt with sexual abuse and rape the right way. Our whole culture sucks at it, and Christianity is just 10 times worse, especially since a huge chunk of them want to cling to that culture (under the name of “traditional values”) as hard as they can.
I’m grateful to say, my synagogue did it right.
There was this guy who would have abused me if he could have — I was an adult at the time, and physically strong enough to fight hin off with no difficulty — and he’d been harassing me, demanding that I love him just because he was in love with me. As nothing had happened beyond verbal harassment, at first the synagogue told him to keep his distance from me.
But a few months later, during the Breaking of the Fast on Yom Kippur, he broke the rules and started harassing me again. This time, I almost lost it and nearly would have punched him if two friends hadn’t happened to be there to guide me out of the Social Hall and into the Sanctuary. There, I had a talk with the president of the board (we didn’t have a regular rabbi at the time), and I said that if my harasser didn’t leave, then I would have to since I didn’t want it to escalate to violence. So they asked him to leave and not come back for at least a year, and then only if he could demonstrate “a change in his psychology”. When that year was up, and it was clear he was unchanged, he was refused the right to return and I never saw him again.
I imagine that if he’d actually succeeded in physically attacking me, he would have been expelled much more quickly and permanently.
