News from Nutville

So have you heard about the teenage girl in Ohio who ran away from home? She made some new friends on Facebook and then ran off to Florida to be with them, in the process announcing that she never wanted to be with her family again, accusing them of plotting to kill her, and rejecting her religious upbringing.

Lots of conservative news sites have picked up this story – they’re upset! What do they want? The FBI to come in and reunite this girl with her family and church? New laws to protect children from Internet predators? Well… no. They want to keep her separated from her family.

See, she’s a Muslim, and the Facebook friends are Christian pastors.

Here’s a description of what’s gone on from the Orlando Sentinel. It’s kind of hard tell what’s really going on… but a lot of it rests upon the girl’s assertion that if she goes back to Ohio, her parents will murder her for converting to Christianity. However, investigations suggest that this claim – given how westernized her family (her parents are from Sri Lanka) is – are far-fetched. (Though they do conveniently play into the paranoia of some American conservatives, who would have you believe that American Muslims are on some kind of spree of killing their daughters.)

She’s in foster care now. I hope this gets sorted out, for her sake. Perhaps her tale is true, as unlikely as that seems. And it’s possible she was fleeing some other kind of family abuse. Or, perhaps it’s just particularly dramatic teenage rebellion.

But what I find so interesting is that there’s a chorus of support for her running away from the same people who otherwise assume that children are utterly subject to their parents’ beliefs – that anything that might make those children question what their parents teach them, or cause them to rethink membership in the popular middle eastern resurrection cult that most of them belong to, must be stamped out.

Apparently this doesn’t rest on some principles about the importance of family or the authority of parents, though, because if those parents belong to another religion, separating from their children is a good idea.

(And I am sure that the equation is different if, say, a gay teenager is fleeing a family trying to force him or her into abusive reparative therapy.)

Christianity has a long and rather ugly history in this regard – for example, the forced conversion of Jews in Europe throughout history, and the baptisms of Jewish infants (who were then abducted from their parents). So it’s not such a stretch to get to luring Muslim teens away from their families, if that’s indeed what happened.

One thing you can bet – this isn’t about a teenager from Ohio anymore. I hope someone, somewhere is looking out for her; I doubt very much the excitable bloggers and loony-right news organizations cranking out stories about her are.