You may wonder what this topic has to do with the Red State site?  I was in a Palm Beach County courtroom on Friday and was able to hear the most incredible story of love and courage and I thought that I would share it with you.  In case you didn’t hear this story and don’t about it, I warn you that it is  an horrific, disgusting account of the most brutal attack that ever taken place in this country.  It left me wondering whether we have finally slipped over the dark edge into a world of chaos.

The attack took place in a govenment run housing project.  A 17 year old knocked on the door of a woman who had just gotten home with her 12 year old son after a day of working delivering telephone books.  The 17 year old had a gun.  He forced his way into the apartment and then opened the door for nine other gang members who after ripping the phones from the walls proceeded to rape and torture this poor woman for over two and a half hours.  The end finally coming after the woman was forced to engage her 12 year old son in sexual acts.

I have tried to describe this as delicately as possible because the actual events were so horrifying that any normal reaction should be “stop I don’t want to hear that.”  Only I sat there, in the courtroom with tears streaming down my face as I listened to this poor woman.  She spoke of such terror and such unspeakable violations of her home, of her body, of her child.  I thanked God for my own life and prayed that He grant her mercy in hers.

It was reported in the news, of course, never a mention that these teens were black youths, all from a disintegrated remnant of a family, not that that excuses barbaric behavior.  Instead, it was reported as if this is what we can expect in society today, that this is just another bunch of kids getting into trouble, that we somehow must understand that it’s just part of our culture.  WELL I DON’T UNDERSTAND!  I DON’T ACCEPT THAT IT IS EXPECTED!  I DON’T CHALK IT UP TO POOR KIDS GETTING INTO TROUBLE!

This was as disgraceful as anything that happened in Rwanda and it happened five mile from one of the richest towns in our country.  The message is not that we must understand these poor children or see them as cultural victims.  The message is that we have lost our children, at least a certain group of our children.  There shall be no mercy for them except that our Supreme Court in its lack of wisdom has found that death is not proper punishment for capital crimes where the victim survives.  Have we lost our backbone?  Has the rod that we placed in the socially experimented closet now come back to strike us? 

 If we are relegated to talk then we must speak with force.  Our schools have unfortunately have rendered talk impotent.  When you talk to your children about music and entertainment tell them that messages that subjugate women into objects are anti-christian, anti-american and just simply immoral.  Instead of awarding with grammies and rewarding with obscene dollars we should be chastising and ostracizing these cultural parasites.  Yet, with each dollar the entertainment industry generates another cultural value is compromised until finally we ask ourselves,  ”so what is torture anyway?  Is it pouring water in the mouth of a terrorist?  What about pouring ammonia inside a woman to burn away the DNA evidence?

God help us!  How low can we sink?