How many lawyers fought for Adrianna?
Shame on us
Shame on us all.
Adrianna Waller
Reply
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Charles Fredrick Warner Fights For His Life
…but who fights for Adrianna?
For the last 3 years I have written about the utter–and I do mean utter lack of legal protection afforded the children of this country.
The massive outcry over the fates of convicted rapists and murders (of children), Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner speak volumes about this terrible sin of omission.
Every major news outlet in this country has had a banner headline about these cases. Most focus on the convicts fighting for their rights.
Only one or two mention the brutal crimes these men committed against children.
Lockett tortured and murdered a teen.
Warner raped, savaged, and murdered a baby.
The way we defend the rights of child rapists and murderers matters.
The way we ignore their victims matters more.
Justice for Clayton D. Lockett?
Most states don’t apply the death penalty to average joes.
Nope.
It usually takes doing something pretty rough to warrant a death sentence.
And yet the barrage of articles peppering the Internet seem to focus on the horror of a botched execution rather than the nightmarish crime it represents:
A teenage girl was abducted, brutally raped and murdered by a group of men. The last hours of her life had to have been hell.
But now, more than a decade later she is all but forgotten as we examine the death of one of her tormentors?
Why not put it to a simple test. Ask yourself this: whose death story would you prefer to endure–Lockett’s or Stephanie Michelle Nieman’s?
Methinks the Bryan Singer doth protest too much
I got the jist of the accusations against Bry Singer and others by a man who claims they abused him as a teen.
Now I just marvel at the adjectives–Singer and the others use words like “vicious” when they decry what appears to be merely a legitimate and properly filed strain on the democratically appointed federal justice system.
“Vicious” is a word best reserved for egregious crimes like the abuse of children, not a rather bloodless and well-governed law suit.
Singer and the other defendants in this case remind me of a real-and-true child abuser I know. His go-to response to allegations of abuse?
He starts swearing and threatening. And never, never discusses whether he had the motive and opportunity to abuse his alleged victims.
Vicious?
Vicious is when you rob and defraud a child of their trust and childhood.
Anything else is just a question of the law and money.
The law…
And money.
No Justice for Amy
How can anyone quantify a childhood lost to sexual assault and exploitation?
That is the question I ask myself when I read about the recent decision by SCOTUS to limit damages payable to victims of child pornography.
Not only is there no justice in this country for the children victimized by these atrocities, there is also no legitimate attempt to provide financial compensation.
We do not want the burden?
We do not want the judicial red tape?
We are not asking the correct questions of ourselves and our federal government.
The question is simple and devastating–how much is the life of a child worth in this country?
And how do you put a price on justice?
Once again it is clear in America–Justice here is not blind to anything much except the rights of our most vulnerable citizens: our children.
A Letter to Cersei
I did not watch the depiction of your “fictional” rape, I hold that these depictions hurt real victims of rape and incest. And make no mistake–the real victims are all around us.
So forgive me if I address you as “real.” You are real to me because friends and relatives of mine are the victims of both rape and incest. Most shared their stories because I shared mine–
My daughters were molested by a person they considered a brother. By adoption, by a terribly misplaced trust he was…their brother.
And he abused this trust.
The lurid depiction of rape and incest for the purpose of making money, selling ad space, and entertainment is not ok. Never ok.
And if you were real this is what I would tell you–
Love protects.
Love covers and defends.
Love never violates trust.
And love demands justice, truth, and protection for the survivors of incest.
If you were real I would tell you call the police. Go to a doctor. Call me. I will be there through this nightmare of broken trust.
No one should view rape as entertainment. Ever. And what a terrible measurement of us, all of us, that we would tune in for your “fictional” rape and tune out to all those around us who are haunted by the grief and loneliness and pain caused by these real crimes in our so-broken world.
Easter is a Doorway
I read an article this morning about a little boy in Massachusetts who was gone for months before he was reported missing.
His body was found this week.
Stories about five year old murder victims whose whole lives were defined by abuse, neglect, and pain do not go with our Sunday best, our Easter celebration. These are hell stories.
These would remain hell stories without Jesus.
What Jesus does with the stories of lost children is what matters.
He takes the pain of broken lives.
He restores the impossible–life for death, peace for pain, love for hate.
The cost too high to calculate: he pays it.
So it doesn’t have to feel like Easter to me. I can face the loneliness of my own story–
Fostering the broken
Adopting the rebellious
Taking on the identity of the crimes committed against those I love.
No easy answers.
Just Jesus, alive, for me.
The Darkest Days
Jesus gave them plenty of warning–he said he was going to die. He warned of betrayal and grief. He told them things they did not want to hear.
Even so, the space between the last supper and the resurrection was almost unbearable.
Almost because he took the unbearable part.
Just short of unbearable.
That is the promise of Christian life–it might get pretty awful, but it will never be as awful as the atonement.
The grief of the disciples seems so dark. So painful. And their brokenness was pretty broken.
But
It is finished
And Sunday is one Son-rise away.
A Metaphor for You
You were the one
To tell me all the others did it too
With a percentage
A statistic
Because it is the way you roll
50% percent, eh?
Half of all you knew.
I took the statistic to the source
Never got an answer.
Not surprised…
Inclined to believe they, like you
Would tell the students
And hell, eat your broccoli as well
As the water rises around us
To the end.
Divorcing Facebook
In all fairness to Facebook, I was a failure from the beginning.
I never posted a grumpy cat meme. I posted Bible verses. I wrote about child advocacy.
I was no fun.
So the decision to exit stage right was overdue. I stayed for the people I knew I would miss. And I left for my family’s safety.
Several times this morning I found myself fashioning vestigial posts about ghrelin, Alice Monro, and a beautiful rainstorm.
Notice I am still blogging, so I am hardly cured.
But it is a start.
I believe in the power of prayer. With or without the artifice of social media to prove that I am real.
I want to be real–
A tree that merely grows quietly in the forest. Making little noise at all.
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