Man suicides after court ordered Christian drug program tried to ungay him

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Man suicides after court ordered Christian drug program tried to ungay him

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

http://deadstate.org/man-commits-suicide-after-court-ordered-christian-drug-treatment-program-tried-to-un-gay-him/

quote:

Recently the New York Times ran a series of articles highlighting the growing trend and dangers of arbitration over traditional litigation. In its final piece of the series it featured a story about Nicklaus Ellison. Ellison was in court facing charges of drunk driving after allegedly �breaking his probation �and crashing into four parked cars,� said Cheryl Spivey,his mother, to the NY Times. Facing jail time, the judge instead offered the young man a final option � enrolling in Teen Challenge, a drug-treatment program that encourages participants to become more �Christ-like.�

Ellison, an openly gay 20-year-old, was reported to have many had issues with complying with the program, and eventually left one afternoon and was tragically found the next morning dead from drugs and alcohol by a stranger he�d met the night before.

What troubled his family beyond his death was letter they found in his backpack to his sister saying that the program, in addition to curing his drug and alcohol problems had tried to make him �un-gay�

Suspicious and distraught by her son�s death and the letter found, his mother attempted to sue Teen Challenge looking for answers as to what could have happened to her son during his stay at the facility that was meant to treat his drug and alcohol addiction, not his sexuality. However, she was shut down by the organization and told a lawsuit was not possible because upon intake to the program, Ellison had signed an arbitration contract that agreed all matters and disputes pertaining to Teen Challenge must be settled through a Christian arbitration process that would be bound not by state or federal law, but by the Bible where �The Holy Scripture shall be the supreme authority�

Unable to legally take the organization to court, Ellison�s family had no recourse or way of ever knowing what happened to her son while in Teen Challenges care.

Today, there are a growing number of websites run by numerous Christian law firms that instruct Churches and Non-Profits how to utilize religious arbitration to �Keep their businesses out of courts� as one such site advertises:

Every year, thousands of lawsuits are filed in America against churches, schools, other non-profits, and related entities. These lawsuits range from injuries on church property to disagreements over employment, from accidents on youth group trips to cases of sexual abuse. Indeed, the recently publicized sexual abuse cases and multi-million dollar settlements within the Catholic Church should warn church leaders of the risk of such cases within their own churches.

The website then goes on to list the steps these organizations must take in order to avoid court interference and operate under their own moral codes.

�Our secular court system is darn good,� Bryce Thomas, former attorney turned Christian conciliator told the New York Times. �But it doesn�t get into deep moral issues like sin and reconciliation.�

Unfortunately for many within these religious communities and those being served by non-profits operating under contracts with arbitration agreements, they have no recourse for traditional litigation and it leaves them no access to their basic rights as citizens.

However, what the New York Times article glosses over is the fact that Ellison, an openly gay 20-year-old male, was sentenced by a secular court to Teen Challenge, an openly uber-Christian center for recovery. It was either that or jail. And it is this piece of Ellison�s story that should be of concern to those of us living in California with the largest prison population in the nation.

Unfortunately, in California there are currently only 161 free treatment centers operating, many of them funded by Christian and other religious charity organizations.

While of course most of the facilities are operating with good intentions from their various moral perspectives, the growing trend of faith-based arbitration creates the potential for many men and women in the judicial system to be handed down, with minimal oversight, from the justice system and into the quickly expanding superseding-wild-west dictates of a religious �tribunal� that potentially perceives religious indoctrination as important as recovery.

This may sound far fetched, but take for example the Salvation Army: for the last few decades as jails crowded in California, many drug offenders were released early and ordered upon parole to enroll in The Salvation Army�s 6- month in-patient rehabilitation program. The organization has operated for decades under a more militarized but nonetheless early model of Christian based arbitration.

The bottom line is that in a country where the concept of separation of church and state has gradually been reduced to a suggestion, religious arbitration grows in acceptance and holds up in cases reaching as far as the Supreme Court. Instead of being a nation founded on religious freedom, we are becoming a nation sentencing it�s citizens to religion.

I am a Christian and also a Lesbian but I know that lots of organizations that make a huge point of proclaiming their Christianity are not the kind that would tolerate me. My own church was talking about sin for instance and I know our church's stance on sin is not the list of 7 or 10 things you better not do or you'll go to hell kind of image that some traditions have. There is a wide wide wide gulf of thought on the issues of biblical authority and sin and reconciliation which in my understanding is not as true as of the law where there are behaviors that are clearly allowed and not allowed with only one common law tradition rather than churches where there are thousands of different theologies. As a Marxist, sin isn't just a personal thing but a corporate one, systemic, institutional racism is sin, magnified.

But beyond that, I often hear fear mongering from conservatives about Sharia law, isn't this basically the same thing? The Sharia law issue came up when Canada supposedly was allowing Muslim arbitration that used Sharia law in divorce cases and conservatives lost their loving minds.

I am very skeptical of binding arbitration clauses. They aren't fair. This man signed a contract because the alternative was jail and the person making the contract has all the power. Its not this image of two private citizens engaging in a mutually benficial agreement within a perfect liberal meritocracy, there are power disparities between people. There are material conditions that contracts occur within. And the arbitration are biased and also are incredibly expensive for the party that is suing. Add on to this what is likely to be a fundamentalist theology and you have a recipe for giving this program license to do whatever it wants.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2015 18:35

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 13:53

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

I don't see why they couldn't have allowed him to transfer to a secular drug program that isn't run by evangelicals.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 16:06

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

Dead Reckoning posted:

For these Christians, "don't be gay" is one of their values. It's not our place to dictate that.

Also, a lot of rehab centers, including this one, don't claim to provide medical treatment. They explicitly billed themselves as a "Christian discipleship ministry for people with life-controlling problems." As far as I can tell, Nicklaus was never in a patient relationship with anyone counseling him about his homosexuality.

I am in a position where I am both a Christian and a gay person who has experienced quite a bit of hostility when I was growing up from Fundamentalists. I didn't get to choose as a child to be hated or to be taught this hate for myself. I think it is absolutely our place to call out injustice where we see it. I don't think it i remotely okay to try to change people's sexual orientation no matter what the excuse is. Hate is not a family value and they have been granted a position to force it on people and I think it is a great wrong that we condone people saying to some marginalized groups that God doesn't love them.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2015 16:30

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

tsa posted:

Except the bible does actually justify certain kinds of bigotry. It's not like prosperity theology, the bible is pretty explicit about things like homosexuality and the role of women. To pretend like there's no biblical basis is ignorant.

quote:

Ephesians 6:5:Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

The bible is *used* to justify bigotry but the bible was written nearly two thousand years ago and Paul's letters were primarily about how to live in the time that it was written. It is applicable to us today to some extent but we have to keep in mind the progress we have made since then. There has been a long running conversation since the bible about morality. Its not like Jesus said anything about texting whilst driving either. Yes slavery is part of that but that is because slavery (and not the chattle slavery of the Americas) was ubiquitous practice at the time and the passage appears in the context of a letter about how to get along with people. Like the next few bits tell slave owners not to be cruel to their slaves, an expectation completely ignored by people using the passage someone quoted.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2015 19:14

Mandy Thompson: Dec 26, 2014; by zen death robot

Dead Reckoning posted:

Yeah, but if you say that police bigotry against furries is a problem because furries are one hundred times more likely to be arrested than non-furries, I don't think I should have to state that I agree with you before pointing out that it isn't true. That's just a lazy cop-out to insist that people agree with your premise before they're allowed to question your facts.

You, personally, are allowed to disagree with their beliefs, but it isn't the place of the state to tell them that they aren't allowed to hold or preach those beliefs.

It is when they are taking over part of the state's job. When people are sent there by courts, it for instance, absolutely should not be okay to force anti-gay conversions, something that there is universal consensus among psychiatrists is unethical, dangerous, and harmful.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2015 01:34

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