There are corresponding feminine masochist manifestations. We on the left tend to like them a lot more, because they often lead to political action we sympathize with, ahd even see as heroic.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Kevin Robert Dean wrote:
> July 5, 2001
>
> Christian School Questioned Over Discipline for Wayward
>
> By RICK BRAGG
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/05/national/05SCHO.html
>
> Tom Gannam for The New York Times
> The Heartland Christian Academy near Newark, Mo., uses old-time religion and
> and old-fashioned discipline. Five staff members have been charged with
> child abuse after students were punished in manure pits.
>
> Expanded Coverage
> In Depth: Education
>
> Join a Discussion on School Discipline
>
> Christopher Berkey for The New York Times
> "When I die, I'll either go to heaven or hell, and I won't go to heaven if I
> am abusing kids," said Charles Sharpe, founder of the Heartland school.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> EWARK, Mo., July 4 - Charles Sharpe made millions in the insurance business,
> then decided to use his wealth to make the world a better place, one child
> at a time.
>
> Called by God, he said, he established a nondenominational Christian school
> for troubled children and teenagers who had passed through juvenile courts,
> foster care and broken homes.
>
> "I always thought that doing good, you wouldn't offend people," said the
> 73-year-old Mr. Sharpe, whose Heartland Christian Academy in rural
> northeastern Missouri uses old-time religion and old-fashioned discipline to
> try to save the lives and souls of its students. The teachers do not spare
> the rod - here, it is a paddle - and they expect children to pray.
>
> But now, five staff members at the school have been charged with multiple
> counts of felony child abuse. They are accused of taking discipline too far,
> forcing students to stand in pits of cow manure at a dairy near the school
> as punishment for misbehavior.
>
> Eleven students, ages 13 to 17, were taken to concrete basins at a dairy
> farm and ordered into the cow manure as punishment for such infractions as
> fighting, being disrespectful to their instructors, not paying attention in
> class and having a bad attitude, said Sheriff David Parrish of Lewis County.
>
> Workers at the dairy, which is owned by Mr. Sharpe, said they saw children
> standing in manure in depths ranging from their ankles to their chests, and
> saw another student smeared with the manure from head to toe, Sheriff
> Parrish said.
>
> Last week, the five staff members were arrested, charged and released on
> bond, and the 11 children were removed from the school and taken into state
> custody.
>
> "All we want, now, is what's right for the kids," said Sheriff Parrish, who
> said he feared that the students might become sick from infections from
> bacteria in the manure.
>
> Mr. Sharpe, who said he had stopped the manure punishment more than six
> weeks before the arrests, said that the charges of child abuse were false
> and that the witnesses' descriptions were exaggerated or dead wrong.
>
> He said the punishment in the manure was abandoned because it was bad public
> relations, not because he considered it illegal or abusive, or a health
> risk.
>
> "When I die, I'll either go to heaven or hell, and I won't go to heaven if I
> am abusing kids," said Mr. Sharpe, a politically influential backer of
> organized school prayer and conservative lawmakers, and a longtime friend of
> John Ashcroft, the United States attorney general and former senator from
> Missouri.
>
> Mr. Sharpe said the students were sent to work in the manure, not stand in
> it. They used shovels to move manure from one place to another, as
> punishment, he said. They never were forced to stand in deep manure, or to
> stand, period, he said. They worked, he said, mucking out sections of the
> basins.
>
> There is no apparent outcry from parents.
>
> Of the 11 students who were removed from the school by the State Division of
> Family Services, eight have been returned to the school by their parents or
> legal guardians, and another is expected to come back to the school any day,
> Mr. Sharpe said.
>
> That would not have happened, he said, if the charges were valid.
>
> "I've shoveled manure my whole life, and I'm still having some shoveled on
> me," said Mr. Sharpe, who was born in rural Missouri and reared on a farm
> before going on to riches as the founder of the Ozark National Life
> Insurance Company in Kansas City, Mo.
>
> The students did work in manure that was at times thigh-deep, some staff
> members said. The boy who was seen smeared with the manure from head to toe
> had fallen down, and was soon hosed off, a spokesman for Mr. Sharpe said.
>
> Sheriff Parrish said some of the students told him they had been forced to
> stay in the manure for as long as an hour and a half. Mr. Sharpe said the
> longest time of the punishment was 30 minutes.
>
> It is, Mr. Sharpe conceded, a dirty job and that is why it was used as
> punishment.
>
> The main manure basin is a powerful-smelling dump of drying and thick,
> congealing excrement. But its smell is not so powerful as the separating
> pool where the manure runs into a lagoon. The students worked both places.
>
> Workers said they used machines to handle the manure from the dairy farm's
> 7,000 cows, which produce 28,000 pounds of manure a day. They said that
> sometimes afterbirth from calving was put in the manure pits.
>
> It was workers at the dairy who notified county authorities of the
> punishment by calling a child abuse hotline. "I've had beating my whole
> life, and I don't think that's right," said a worker who spoke on the
> condition of anonymity. "But put them in the pit? That's horrible."
>
> Mr. Sharpe said the real abuse was the way the children lived in the world
> outside this complex of brick houses and concrete and metal buildings here
> in thousands of acres of corn, pasture and rolling hills.
>
> Inside the school, which has 227 students, about half of them considered
> troubled children or teenagers from around the country, they find a haven
> from abuse, neglect, drugs, school shootings, pregnancy and hopelessness, he
> said.
>
> No student here, Mr. Sharpe said, goes to school afraid of guns. "They live
> better than any time in their lives here," he said.
>
> But county officials said the punishment could not be viewed as anything
> except abuse. "It is my professional opinion that these actions were abusive
> in nature, for any youth," said Michael Waddle, chief juvenile officer of
> the Second Circuit Court, which includes Lewis County. "And it's our job to
> make sure all the kids in this state are safe."
>
> Mr. Sharpe is fighting back with a lawsuit.
>
> The Heartland Academy Community Church and CNS International Ministries,
> both headed by Mr. Sharpe, filed a lawsuit on Monday in Federal District
> Court for the Eastern District of Missouri against Lewis County, as well as
> Sheriff Parrish, Deputy Sheriff Patricia McAfee and Mr. Waddle.
>
> The lawsuit contends that the county and its investigators have conducted a
> "systematic, persistent and continuous campaign of harassment" against the
> faculty, staff and community at Heartland, by unlawfully removing the
> students from the school and interrogating them.
>
> The suit says Mr. Waddle and Mr. Parrish spoke with the parents and
> guardians of some of the 11 students and told them that Heartland was
> engaging in abuse and neglect and encouraged them to remove their children
> from the school.
>
> The suit claims that the arrests and charges caused the students, their
> families and the faculty and staff at Heartland to suffer from "humiliation,
> mental anguish, inconvenience."
>
> County officials have called Heartland a "cult" and "little Waco," the
> lawsuit says.
>
> "The most frustrating part of this entire episode is that these baseless
> charges threaten to overwhelm the enormous good we've done at Heartland, the
> dozens of lives we've turned around, the many families we've helped heal,"
> Mr. Sharpe said. "We do work within the limits of the pertinent laws, but we
> do not intend to run things the way the state does. That system already has
> failed these kids."
>
> Elijah Reese drove more than 400 miles from Memphis to pick up his son
> Coradell Baggett after he received a call from Mr. Waddle, in which he heard
> about the treatment his 14-year-old son had received.
>
> "He's back here with me because they weren't treating him right," Mr. Reese
> said. "That's inhumane treatment. That's stuff you do to prisoners of war,
> not kids."
>
> But Douglas Gardner, whose son Douglas Gardner Jr. was one of the students
> punished in the manure pits, immediately returned his son to the school. Mr.
> Gardner said he thought the school had made his son a better person.
>
> "Heartland's made a 100 percent turnaround in his school work, attitude,
> morale," Mr. Gardner said. "They're doing a fantastic job, and the county is
> doing something they shouldn't be doing."
>
> The Heartland complex is in two counties, with the main buildings in Shelby
> County and the dairy farm in Lewis County. The Heartland complex is Shelby
> County's biggest employer, and people's attitudes about the place seem to
> range from gratitude and admiration for the way the school tries to help
> people to disinterest or suspicion. Most people here said they minded their
> own business.
>
> Mr. Sharpe said the arrests of his five staff workers left him "outraged."
>
> "For the first time in my life," he said, "I'm a little disillusioned about
> what America has become."
>
> A hearing on the charges is set for later this month. A spokesman for Mr.
> Sharpe said he did not expect the charges to stand.
>
> "A group of little men thinks they can stop God?" Mr. Sharpe said. "No."
>
> ooooooooo
> Kevin Dean
> Buffalo, NY
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