To: IFAS@BERKSHIRE.NET

Greetings, Freedom Writer Editor.

I just read the December issue of Freedom Writer -- specifically the
"Letters" forum -- and was surprised to read a comment by R. McCabe
about "Killer Prayers" and Focus on the Family.  His complaint was the
lumping of FoF in with the Religious Reich and the Christian lunatic
fringe which dominates American society as opposed to grouping FoF in
with what he calls "other legitimate Christian organizations."

His complaint is rubbish.  From Feb 1988 to Feb 1989 I worked for a
company called Telcom Technologies in Pomona, California, designing,
developing, and installing Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs.)  One of
the sites Telcom went into with an ECD-6000 was the Focus on the Family
facility right next door.

It was my great displeasure to be exposed to FoF at its most intimate
levels utterly berift of religious blinders to save me from what was
the single most disgusting display of Christianity I have yet to
experience.  To describe my exposure to the truth about what goes on
inside of FoF I must cover just a bit of the technology involved in
their telephone operations.  That way I hope to convince readers that
I was there and that what I say is true.

At the time, the FoF business brought into their facility T1 spans
which came into channel banks for their 1-800 numbers.  Most of these
were routed by an ECD-6000 onto PCM highways while other analog loop-
start lines from the Central Office were put onto line cards which
were then put onto PCM highways.  On the back of the 14-inch card slot
chassis there were flat ribbon cables which routed the PCM data
(digitized voice) to a digitial switch chip then back onto the PCM
bus.

It so happened that testing of the ACD prior to installation failed to
locate a cabeling problem on the PCM highway backplane.  Because of
this the ECD-6000 was installed and running, routing the telephonic
faithfull to the first available agent from a pool of around 70 agents,
with a bizarre functional problem.  When two calls were up on PCM
channels which exist side-by-side on the backplane, all four parties of
the two calls would suddenly be conferenced.  Because of this problem
I spent a long time inside of the FoF facilities gathering log
information and examining the raw data describing the actions of the
ACD.  Among the fault isolation methodologies employed was bringing
sepected PCM highways onto a conferencing chip one-by-one and listening
to each, trying to determine what the problem was.

Let me tell you, my lack of belief in Christianity and religion was
firmly vindicated and underscored after a week of listening to callers
and listening to the sales pitch.  I came to the realization that Focus
on the Family is a charasmatic cult; a business; that it represented
everything that is wrong about Christianity and American socity which
allows these high-tech boiler-room operations to continue to operate
-- with tax exemptions to boot!

What FoF does is sell non-existant diseases to the gullible through
radio, audio and video tapes, and books.  Then they turn around and
sell the faithfully fearful fictional cures.  I got to listen to several
callers, one day, exclaim how frightened they are that their teenage
sons and daughters are listening to Rock and Roll and how they (the
caller) had just listened to the radio program describing how Satan
influences children through Rock and Roll.  Agents taking these people's
calls follow scrips which are posted on their cubicle walls (many of
these cubicles were made into shrines, covered with pictures of white
men nailed to crosses.)  Step 1 was to verify the callers credit card
number and billing address if the caller was already in the FoF database
or to establish new credit card information if they were not.  Then the
agent would identify a list of tapes and books which offered "cures"
for what the caller is frightened of, giving "suggested donation"
amounts for each.  If the caller wasn't interested in buying anything
but just wanted to talk over her fears, the agents gave non-toll-free
numbers to call and hung up.

The degree of hypocricy and catering to all that's negative in humanity
was truely repulsive.  During testing and modification phases at night
I would examine the libraries inside of FoF and was disgusted at the
hatred and bigotry expressed within so many books.  The fear and hatred
of homosexuals occupied one manager's mind so much that his library
was dedicated almost exclusively to homosexuality and the belief that
there is some large cabal of evil demons dedicated to "tearing asunder
the family unit."  Several of the books were horribly graphic in their
depiction of activities stereotypeing homosexuals.  Most of these books
claimed that homosexuals actively "recruit" children and are responsible
for nearly all rape, ponography, and all other crimes.  One book claimed
that women could not be gay; that it was a "disease" that only
"affects" males.

R. McCabe wants to pretend that Focus on the Family isn't like all the
others.  Nonsense!  He probably doesn't know (or would like to pretend
to forget) that FoF leadership was wracked by sexual and financial
scandals in the late 1980's and that FoF lost its tax exemption status
on many of their publications, eventually fleeing California for
Colorado (where someone had donated to FoF a great deal of property.
Here in Pomona in fact, someone, donated a tennis court which still
stands even after the cult moved out.  Now people in Colorado have
bumper stickers which read, "Focus on your own damn family!" and I have
recieved a lot of e-mail from Coloradians complaining about how us
Californians have been exporting all our prize lunatics to Colorado.)

Everyone wants to believe that their pet religious organizations are
some how different than all the rest, ignoreing the public exposures and
justifying-away all the negatives.  (I constantly hear Christians try
to justify their hatred of homosexuals as the "will of God."  Or even
better, with "hateing the sin of homosexuality, not the sinner -- which
is exactly equal to hateing the sin of black skin but not the Negro.)
Though they point toward the Jesse Helms and the David Dukes of America
and demand they're not "Trve Christians," so many seem incapable of (or
unwilling to) take a good look at their own pet organizations and see
the hurtful truth looking back at them.

There is a large majority of "legitimate Christian organizations" in
America and I, a devout atheist, routinely donate to their causes (my
favorate is the Salvation Army.)  But Focus on the Family just aint
no such critter.