Sad story
This story I found in the book "Earthbound: Pagan Homesteading", by Raven Kaldera, is absolutely why I am a "closet" Pagan, and why it unnerved me so much to find SRS "investigating me" that time with my son...
(EDIT: THIS IS NOT MY STORY! I HAVE HAD OVER 100 HITS ON THIS STORY TODAY, THANKS TO LINKS FROM OTHER PEOPLE, BUT SOME ARE THINKING THIS IS MY STORY. IT IS A STORY FOUND IN THE ABOVE MENTIONED BOOK.)
"This story starts in April of 1998. We took in another family of pagan refugees, as we are often wont to do. They were a family of five; two parents, and three boys between the ages of seven and thirteen. Their landlord had lost his mortgage and the bank had given them a week to get out of the house; we offered to take them in if they could pack quickly. We were in the process of renovating our guest cottage; we figured after a week of sleeping on a futon in the living room, we could have them all in there on beds with their own private semi-house, which would last until they found an apartment, which we hoped would be soon.
May Eve dawned, and I kept all the kids busy - my own daughter as well as their three - helping me work in the garden. We got rather dirty planting seeds. Meanwhile, my wife was helping their parents pack and driving our truck back and forth with boxes. Our house was full of their boxes, to be sorted later. Then a car pulled up and a woman got out, accompanied by a policeman.
She was from the Department of Social Services, and she had a hot pink pantsuit and heels and big hair, held up into a huge fluff by an impossible amount of hairspray. The blackflies went for her head like a buzzing cloud, as if they were angered spirits of our land sensing a harmful intruder. She informed me that she needed to see the facilities that these children would be moving into, and not sure what else to do, I showed her. Apparently one of the boys had talked at school about their impending move here to our farm, and word had gone around. She looked around our place with a pinched look on her face and then left.
The next day was May Day, and we were holding a Beltane festival. In the middle of the arriving guests, the social worker came back, with another social worker and two cops. She had a warrant and was taking the boys away. Their parents begged and pleaded, but to no avail. Beltane pagans in bright clothing stood by and watched, agonized. On her way out, she intimated to me that she was getting ready to serve papers on my own daughter, too.
I slid into action, called my ex in California, and we had a powwow session and hired a lawyer who was experienced in dealing with DSS to protect my child. Three days later, the parents went to court to plead for their children, and were denied. They did bring home the affidavits, though, and we learned what we had been accused of.
The social worker claimed that we had no stove in the house, since obviously our big cast-iron wood cookstove, Esmeralda, wasn’t really a stove; no one in their right minds would really try to cook on that, would they? She claimed that the brooder full of chicks in the pantry was an illegal health hazard. I called the town animal inspector, who laughed and said he had a brooder full of turkey poults in his own pantry; of course it was all right. She claimed the house was messy; well, she was right on that one, whose house wouldn’t be a mess on moving day? Some claims were outright lies; that we had no electricity or lights, that my daughter was not in school (she was homeschooled, which is legal) and so on.
The worst, though, was the final claim: that we were being investigated by the police on suspicions of animal sacrifice. Apparently the fact that we were pagans and kept livestock meant, of course, that we were sacrificing animals. After all, what else do people like us do with chickens and goats? Of course, when you’re in a small town, the police aren’t faceless enemies. They’re your neighbors, and you know them. We were a bit nonplussed that we were being investigated and hadn’t heard about it, so my wife trotted on down to the police station and showed the paper to the Chief.
As it turned out, he was pretty nonplussed, too; if there was an investigation going on, he hadn’t heard about it either. In other words, another lie. He wrote us a nice letter saying that we were law-abiding citizens and had never been under investigation by him for anything. It left us pretty chagrined, though. “Animal sacrifice!” we joked. “Did they have to go with that old saw? Couldn’t they have thought of something more original?”
In the end, there was one good thing - we successfully blocked any attempt to take our daughter away - but many more things that still leave us with a heavy heart. It took three years and moving to another state for our friends to get their children back. We had no luck in convincing the legal system that their social workers had lied; terms like “inappropriate religious practices” continued to be thrown around. According to our lawyer, we were not the first pagan family in the state to be accosted by DSS for our beliefs. The string of illogic is still very convincing to them: Pagan equals Satanic cult member equals child molester. I went online to the two email groups I was involved with at the time - the pagan homeschoolers and the (all faiths) homesteading list, and asked if any of them had ever had these difficulties. To my shock, I found that one in three of the pagans on the homeschooling list had been investigated, and some had lost their children, and investigations had happened to fully half of the homesteaders.
So the case is clear. Since we are rural and pagan, we are doubly at risk for losing our children. “At least we have freedom of religion in this country,” my friends tell me. “They can’t burn us or shoot us for being pagans.” No, they can’t. But they can take our children away from us, and never give them back."
The United States has nothing to do with "Freedom of Religion", it's more like "Freedom of Christianity"... Do you think they would take up an offering to send the Pagans somewhere that Paganism (which, by the way, is recognized by the Armed Forces as a religion) is free?
(EDIT: THIS IS NOT MY STORY! I HAVE HAD OVER 100 HITS ON THIS STORY TODAY, THANKS TO LINKS FROM OTHER PEOPLE, BUT SOME ARE THINKING THIS IS MY STORY. IT IS A STORY FOUND IN THE ABOVE MENTIONED BOOK.)
"This story starts in April of 1998. We took in another family of pagan refugees, as we are often wont to do. They were a family of five; two parents, and three boys between the ages of seven and thirteen. Their landlord had lost his mortgage and the bank had given them a week to get out of the house; we offered to take them in if they could pack quickly. We were in the process of renovating our guest cottage; we figured after a week of sleeping on a futon in the living room, we could have them all in there on beds with their own private semi-house, which would last until they found an apartment, which we hoped would be soon.
May Eve dawned, and I kept all the kids busy - my own daughter as well as their three - helping me work in the garden. We got rather dirty planting seeds. Meanwhile, my wife was helping their parents pack and driving our truck back and forth with boxes. Our house was full of their boxes, to be sorted later. Then a car pulled up and a woman got out, accompanied by a policeman.
She was from the Department of Social Services, and she had a hot pink pantsuit and heels and big hair, held up into a huge fluff by an impossible amount of hairspray. The blackflies went for her head like a buzzing cloud, as if they were angered spirits of our land sensing a harmful intruder. She informed me that she needed to see the facilities that these children would be moving into, and not sure what else to do, I showed her. Apparently one of the boys had talked at school about their impending move here to our farm, and word had gone around. She looked around our place with a pinched look on her face and then left.
The next day was May Day, and we were holding a Beltane festival. In the middle of the arriving guests, the social worker came back, with another social worker and two cops. She had a warrant and was taking the boys away. Their parents begged and pleaded, but to no avail. Beltane pagans in bright clothing stood by and watched, agonized. On her way out, she intimated to me that she was getting ready to serve papers on my own daughter, too.
I slid into action, called my ex in California, and we had a powwow session and hired a lawyer who was experienced in dealing with DSS to protect my child. Three days later, the parents went to court to plead for their children, and were denied. They did bring home the affidavits, though, and we learned what we had been accused of.
The social worker claimed that we had no stove in the house, since obviously our big cast-iron wood cookstove, Esmeralda, wasn’t really a stove; no one in their right minds would really try to cook on that, would they? She claimed that the brooder full of chicks in the pantry was an illegal health hazard. I called the town animal inspector, who laughed and said he had a brooder full of turkey poults in his own pantry; of course it was all right. She claimed the house was messy; well, she was right on that one, whose house wouldn’t be a mess on moving day? Some claims were outright lies; that we had no electricity or lights, that my daughter was not in school (she was homeschooled, which is legal) and so on.
The worst, though, was the final claim: that we were being investigated by the police on suspicions of animal sacrifice. Apparently the fact that we were pagans and kept livestock meant, of course, that we were sacrificing animals. After all, what else do people like us do with chickens and goats? Of course, when you’re in a small town, the police aren’t faceless enemies. They’re your neighbors, and you know them. We were a bit nonplussed that we were being investigated and hadn’t heard about it, so my wife trotted on down to the police station and showed the paper to the Chief.
As it turned out, he was pretty nonplussed, too; if there was an investigation going on, he hadn’t heard about it either. In other words, another lie. He wrote us a nice letter saying that we were law-abiding citizens and had never been under investigation by him for anything. It left us pretty chagrined, though. “Animal sacrifice!” we joked. “Did they have to go with that old saw? Couldn’t they have thought of something more original?”
In the end, there was one good thing - we successfully blocked any attempt to take our daughter away - but many more things that still leave us with a heavy heart. It took three years and moving to another state for our friends to get their children back. We had no luck in convincing the legal system that their social workers had lied; terms like “inappropriate religious practices” continued to be thrown around. According to our lawyer, we were not the first pagan family in the state to be accosted by DSS for our beliefs. The string of illogic is still very convincing to them: Pagan equals Satanic cult member equals child molester. I went online to the two email groups I was involved with at the time - the pagan homeschoolers and the (all faiths) homesteading list, and asked if any of them had ever had these difficulties. To my shock, I found that one in three of the pagans on the homeschooling list had been investigated, and some had lost their children, and investigations had happened to fully half of the homesteaders.
So the case is clear. Since we are rural and pagan, we are doubly at risk for losing our children. “At least we have freedom of religion in this country,” my friends tell me. “They can’t burn us or shoot us for being pagans.” No, they can’t. But they can take our children away from us, and never give them back."
The United States has nothing to do with "Freedom of Religion", it's more like "Freedom of Christianity"... Do you think they would take up an offering to send the Pagans somewhere that Paganism (which, by the way, is recognized by the Armed Forces as a religion) is free?
posted by Amethyst Rising at 6:55 PM
16 Comments:
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Okay, I understand why you were under investigation (the allegations that you might be involved in animal sacrifice - stupid as they were), but what of the other family? That can't be why their children were taken. They had just arrived at your home. There's more to this story. Apparently they were already under investigation?
Umm.. Ok, this is not my story... I found it in a book (link is provided)
The family who's kids were taken away were the ones under investigation, just because they were moving in with this other family after being evicted... And you sound like you agree that the woman telling the story should be investigated... is it the Paganism? The wood stove? The homeschooling? What do you not agree with?
That sounded rude... I didn't mean it to be!
Um, no, just wondering why a move would put CSS on alert - it doesn't work that way in our part of the woods - someone usually alerts authorities - I just wondered why the original family was under investigation. I am a skeptic. The story seems very contrived to me.
The local school called SRS on me once, because my son had a bruise on his head, and another time because he had a couple of cavities they thought I was too poor to have taken care of by my self... Around here, not being rich makes a difference...I'm sure that if one of the sons was telling people they were moving out there, and maybe exaggerating the stories about the house, and animals, and maybe even that woodstove, it might have registered on someone's radar... I know that around here, someone finding out they were Pagans would have warranted a visit...
Thanks for sharing that story, Amethyst! Too scary, those poor families. I work in juvenile dependency sometimes (and have to fight the "baby snatchers" all the time) it is amazing how the majority (esp. Christians) impose their values and beliefs on everyone else and how this can destroy families! This happens with Native American families a lot, too.
Er, okay. In any case, you might want to check my blog or at least my profile, lest you think I'm just some weirdo out to make trouble.
I have had DHS called on me before. And I was a work at home mother. Ofcourse I am also a Pagan.
I think its really silly that you "must" have electricity, that you "must" have a stove, that you "must" have a refridgorator. Parents of children lived without these items for hundreds of years
A. Lazarus - I know you're not trying to cause trouble... I also know that child services is different in every state, and in Kansas, and other very conservative states, things like this do happen...
Dragonfly - I agree... Why does it matter "how" as long as the kids are warm, fed, and schooled?
We don't have freedoms any more. We have tolerances. If a certain number of people decide they don't want to tolerate you for whatever reason, you're in for a real fight for survival. It is America in the 21st century and a fact that we are going to have to rise up against one day. Otherwise, the noose will just get tighter and tighter.
i got a new one for you to add. A neighbors truck windows were shot out recently. Someone told the police they thought my son did it. when asked why it had nothing to do with my son being a bad kid or being in trouble or anything you would expect to hear. There reason was "Well his mother is a witch so he obviously has no morals. At least not the kind "normal" people have.
Yeah, I'll show that b*tch normal, where is my book of shadows
What is up with the "no one but Christians have morals" bit?!? I know lots of "upstanding christians" that are doing drugs, having affairs, abusing thier children... And yet they are considered to be better than me because I am a Pagan?!
I so understand the BOS thing... That "Harm None" is a lot harder than it sounds...LOL
Focus, girl!
Focus.
I have lived all over the country (literally about 9 states) and I live in the most tolerant place in the country now, Bellingham, WA.
I am so grateful for that when I hear stories like this. This place considers you a bit weird if you don't have a "Blessed be!" or "Tree Hugging Dirt Worshipper" bumpersticker, buy green power from the power company, and shop at the local co-op.
Mind you, the cost of living is crazy, but worth it.
Those people had to be under investigation beforehand, though, for the worker to show up on moving day since officially the address wouldn't have changed yet.
Which is not to say being pagan isn't enought o get you under investigation anyway in some parts of the country.
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