Does Love Really Hurt?
November 2, 2009 by Alien Trucker
Thing is, while the world goes to hell around us day by day, what with 2 illegal wars going on and more being planned, homelessness rising and unemployment soaring, the government meddling in our daily lives, I have been hung up worrying about a completely different issue this week. An issue of violence that seems to be bigger in times of trouble than times of prosperity. An issue that kills many each year and damages more survivors lives than it should. I am talking about spousal abuse and domestic violence. Kinda pisses me off that this is even an issue but it seems to never go away. It looms greatly in my mind this week as a woman I have been very close to for years is in a dilemma about what to do but is unsure to take the steps necessary to ensure her safety.
In the past month she has had her life threatened, been called names and made to feel very inferior. This may seem mild and with the history she has had with her domestic partner it is. He has hospitalized her before, beaten her youngest son and whenever he gets out of jail from his latest DWI or public drunkeness charges he starts in again immediately. Why she puts up with it I’ll never know, but I have a few theories.
I have known this woman since we were kids. Like me she was raised by a fundamental Christian preacher. Like me she heard the mantra of “If this was the old testament times, I could have stoned you to death for disobeying”. Like me she faced frequent beatings for rules broken or just because her parents imagined she needed one. Unlike me the rules and regulations were stricter because she was a girl. Her dad always told her that he was whipping her because he loved her.
Although she didn’t wear a Burka she wore the fundie Christian equivalent…you know…the long skirts and hair up on the head. She was isolated from the real world by being always restricted to the house unless she was with her parents. School in the early ’70’s was horrible. Imagine being the only girl in the class not wearing jeans or mini skirts with nylon stockings. Not allowed to date away from her dads view she ran from the abuse…into the arms of a wannabe preacher her age as soon as she turned 18. Flying from dads frying pan into her new husbands fire she continued to think that her new husbands abuse was from a loving heart. She endured his derision for about 12 years and I was extremely happy when she broke her religious tradition and divorced him. My joy quickly turned sour when I heard she moved to her dad’s house for refuge.
She had no other choice it seems considering she had never been allowed to continue her education or ever work. Her skills were nil on both the work and social end of the real world. Her dad even took the wheels of of her car to keep her from becoming a woman. This for a young mother of 4 who was in her young 30’s. Over the Thanksgiving holidays that year she finally rebelled and broke the lock on his shed and put the tires back on her car. Her father caught her and started beating her with a belt…in front of her kids. When one of the boys wrote about the situation in his “What I Did For Thanksgiving” essay, the teacher had some intervention by the state and she was offered a subdisized apartment of her own, job training services…and a job as a receptionist to help her get on her feet. She was happy for a while.
Then she met some scumbag who was a pious fuck that she could relate to. A controlling freak with a mean streak backed up by his interpretation of some scripture. Told her kids, and her, that he was only beating them because he loved them. Same old shit, third dispenser of it. She grew frustrated early but stayed on. Gawd would never understand if she left two men. That would somehow be a sin against not only gawd but the church and her daddy. After some years this husband left her.
By this time most of her kids were grown and out of the house. The youngest was all she had left at home and she seemed to glow with a new sense of independence She was happy a lot and her life went pretty good. There was a part of her that wanted…no…needed a companion to be beside her in her walk of life. But she desperately wanted to live life differently than she had so far. The first three men who had run her life had left a bad taste for religious men and sought someone different. She found him.
Another “winner” came from the jailhouse where she met him to her home to live. A multiple offender of anything that can be linked to common alcohol crimes. Assaults, spousal abuse, public nuisance and DWI. And just enough church background to impress her that she could be with him and still make it to Heaven when she goes.
Now, a few years later her family has abandoned her. Her parents have written her off. Her kids have given up in frustration because she puts up with his abuse. Talking to her the other day I encouraged her to leave before he kills her. He did however start out last month threatening to. She refused. I think it is best for me to stay out of it now and I fear that I will soon lose my old friend. If he doesn’t actually kill her there will be the schism that occurred when I suggested break the cycle…of being a victim of horrible men.
I read the story of the Muslim man in Arizona who ran his daughter over with the car for becoming too worldly. I read a bunch of anti Muslim crap after that horrible incident. Then I wondered why no one speaks out about American Christians who do this same thing to their daughters. I mean…it is the same thing just a different messiah or prophet behind the abusive beliefs.
Like I said earlier in this post, my friend and I were raised by preachers in the same organization. We both were taught the same way. Abuse of children and wives is love. Beating someone to keep them on the straight and narrow is acceptable to…no…required by gawd to ensure a man’s place on the right hand of Jesus. I promised myself when I was very little that I would never be that way when I grew up.
I kept that promise. I broke the cycle that was handed to me. I have always been against violence and because I know what it feels like to be beaten with no way out I would never be able to treat anyone thet way. No hitting has always been the creedo I have lived by. I don’t hit and I don’t allow myself to be hit. I am one of few from that repressive religious group I grew up in that has broken the cycle.
I wish she could. I try not to judge her but have become very frustrated. Why would anyone value an eternity with a gawd that expects that kind of treatment of women and children? Why is heaven with these men so freakin important if you hate the life they handed to you on earth? You really want to be treated like shit for eternity? That would suck.
Hundreds of thousands of women and children are injured or killed each year by domestic violence. It seems unfair to me that a national emergency is announced when so few (in comparison) lives have been lost to this Swine Flu thing while no one says much about the epidemic of abuse. With or without gawd’s approval.
Fucking weird world that we live in when folks believe they can’t be loved without pain.
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Thank you for this post. I’m glad someone has spoken out. I couldn’t agree more.
I have never understood the connection between fundamentalism and violence. It seems to me, not being a fundamentalist, that a strong religious belief and violence would be mutually exclusive. While there are many examples of where this is true, there are also many examples of where this is false.
Violence in the name of religion is still violence and is still wrong.
I’m glad you spoke out about this. Maybe an abused woman will read your post and say “That’s me!” And….get some help. I have a friend of mine that gets the verbal abuse from her husband continually and she puts up with it all the time. What a life, walking on eggshells. I think she stays in the relationship because she thinks she can make it right. It will never happen. I don’t understand why a woman would put up with verbal abuse.
never have seen fundamentalism and violence mutually exclusive from each other. on the contrary, they seem to go hand in hand. can’t have one without the other. most folks have a difficult time wrapping their minds around an abused person staying with the abuser. it is most often women but a growing minority of men are being abused in similar ways in our culture. i don’t have it figured out either because i distanced myself from all of that fundie nonsense years ago. i realize that it is not just fundie christians and muslims who abuse their spouses and children but hey, they are the dominant force on the planet right now. or claim to be.
I wonder how likely it is that a man so lacking in self-esteem that he feels he has to beat on/verbally abuse/control someone, is also very susceptible to believing in the fundamentalist Christian/Muslim alibi that man is the only one wholly ordained to wear pants in this fambly, by god!-?
As Max Blumenthal likes to point out, James Dobson made it big when he wrote a book on child-rearing that told parents to not only spank, but spank hard enough for real terror be triggered in the child, then, the parent is supposed to cradle the child in their arms for comfort. Nice sado/masochist training right there, huh?
You know, there is a certain amount of terrorist built into religion – at least the Christian religion. How often have you hear the term “wrath of god”? Right? God rules by terror. Do what he says or you will be struck down. It is a simple extension to the “wrath of husband against wife”.
Picture yourself as a god so powerful that creating an entire universe is a side project. Now, do you see any benefit in scaring the utterly defenseless creatures you’ve placed on a ball of rock? How long would you need them to sing your praises before you break your incomprehensible jaw from yawning? Why not just push the reset button (big bang), and then kick ol’ evolution in the can to get it rolling, and sayonara, suckers!
Actually, how many of these zoos would you build before you stopped in your tracks and figgered out that your existence is even less worthwhile than the imbeciles you planted on that blue ball eons ago, and threw yourself into the biggest, baddest black hole/neutron star binary system you ever created?
…and then you shot out of the black hole’s singularity, and ended up back where you started, thus driving you into a black hole of hatred and madness and unquenchable death, so you decided to make everybody and everything just totally fucking miserable, thus Revs. Hagee and Robertson are absolutely right, and the bible is in fact the honest to God truth, and, and, oh, I have such a headache.
Yes, people will suffer almost any abuse for their slice of the pie in the sky. The beauty of the system is that Heaven seems to have no other description beyond “a better place”. Ask your true believer what Heaven really looks like to them, then observe the stuttering, embarassed response.
Take away the silly superstition of an afterlife and religion folds up like a cheap beach chair. Unfortunately, due to human nature’s desire to be part of a club, we’ll just muddle along spiritually and intellectually backward) until the go-forth-and-multiple mentality crushes the planet.