Family Last

Winnie Cooper - Math Genius (though I never really noticed)

Originally Posted 7/15/09


I just had one of the best nights ever. My wife had a huge spa and game party at our house with all her female friends. My sister in law attended and brought along our 14 year old niece. My niece is obviously not one to look forward to an evening of mud facials and charades with women (GASP!) her MOTHER'S age. So, she decided to spend the evening with me.

It was great. I was thrilled to eat a dinner that was not exactly what I wanted because I got to have it with her. FYI, it was Taco Bell. But it seemed like Chez Panisse to me.

I took her to Blockbuster and let her choose two movies I would never have thought of watching. But I was eager to watch them because I would see them with her.

And the thrill in my heart when she called out (while making popcorn), "don't start the movies without me!" was more than I can describe.

All you parents out there (especially you dads) know exactly what I'm talking about. Every time I think about that night, I'm the happiest guy in the world.

But something crept into my consciousness. Something that turned my mood from ecstasy to sorrow.

It's the story of the dads I knew at the Spiritual Rights Foundation - the dads who never had the chance to experience the kind of joy I shared with my niece.

Members of the Spiritual Rights Foundation were encouraged to have children. In fact, the arrival of a child was celebrated. That seemed well and good at the time. It actually was one of the things that attracted many of us to SRF.

These dads also thought that was well and good. They thought having children was what SRF and their God wanted. And at first, it seemed they were correct.

After the baby arrived, it didn't talk long before the nights, weekends, holidays and every other available moment of every SRF dad began to fill with "love projects", ministerial duties, meetings, classes, construction projects, destruction projects, and any other kind of activity the leaders of the Spiritual Rights Foundation could imagine.

The parents - the dads especially, got no more than a whisper of time with their children. Nearly nothing. No evenings at Taco Bell with Blockbuster movies. Not much of anything at all. I saw kids on their own most of the time. Some of them were not only playing without parents nearby but some were without parental support. While the Spiritual Rights Foundation and its leaders kept the parents busy with tasks for the benefit of SRF, there were kids on their own to feed and clothe themselves. I've fed some of those kids after discovering they missed meals. And after seeing some of them working at the SRF farm in winter without warm clothes and dry shoes, I dug into my pocket to buy them parkas and boots.

What's worse, while couples conceiving children was encouraged at SRF, having a relationship with your own children was not.

The relentless, psychotic drive to serve the church and its leaders always took first place in the lives of the followers. It didn't matter if you had a family - your life was the leader's life. If you dared pay a small amount of attention to your family and your child, the consequences could be dire.

This excerpt from Steve Sanchez's book, "Spiritual Perversion" illustrates my point:

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One night I insisted we go as a family to the movies together. It took us a week and a half to find a night that we could both go. We went to the movies and had a good time. Afterward I felt a little high, that maybe things were going to go my way now, and maybe we would even have sex for the first time in a long time.

When we got home ******* called and said I had missed [church] band practice. She was angry. I had forgotten we were supposed to have band practice that night [at SRF headquarters]. She told Ang, and Ang told Rev. Bill, and the next day I paid the consequences.

Ang called [my wife] and drilled her on what I had done. Then Rev. Bill talked to her. It was clear things were looking very, very bad for me. I got that horrible, devastating feeling of searing fear and worthlessness in my gut. I couldn’t believe they were overreacting to everything like this. It was all so insane. [my wife] came out of all this it clean. They blamed me. Rev. Bill told [my wife] I had soul sickness, and that I was putting my dick before the beginning students.

When I was preparing to go to Santa Clara she told me not to go. She said Rev. Bill said I was taken off Santa Clara as the Director because they couldn’t trust me with the beginning students. Now I was useless and had nothing to do. Rev. Bill told [my wife], “I told you so. You can’t trust men. I try and to set you up in the an apartment together, and his ego immediately goes out of control trying to get his dick wet.”

After being pounded by Rev. Bill, [my wife] told me she was kicking me out of the apartment until I got my head straight. I told her that she she couldn’t do that to me, that things were just starting to get better. But she was like a stone. She wouldn’t budge. I was told to go live in the mobile home on Russell Street. I had gone from prestige to hell- like that. Out of nowhere. The misery and devastation of this was intolerable. I don’t know how I withstood it; I just floated through the pain. The thought of leaving remotely occurred to me, but this place was my whole life. I was tied into it by everything— my marriage, my job, my friends, my church, my teacher, my daughter. It was most crushing to me that my daughter saw me this way and that I would be living away from her again. We had lived there together for just two months.
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That was Steve's consequence for putting his family first. No one but a crazed, psychotic lunatic would have gone to those lengths to punish a man for daring to maintain his family's integrity. And Steve's story is not unique. I've seen other parents given task after task and responsibility after responsibility and project after project with no regard to giving time for them to raise their children. In fact, the children were often brought to the Spiritual Rights Foundation headquarters and dumped in an empty room alone or left to run wild on the premises while their parents were gathered together and led deep into a beneficial and positive guided trance state or engaged in a task for the benefit of the cult

Later, as the children grew, they were left an hour away working on the farm at Bethel Island while their parents were busy at SRF headquarters in Berkeley.

But those children did receive attention. Certainly not much from the parents (especially the fathers). So if not from the parents, who?

We often heard from Rev. Bill Duby that his role was to "father us from above". And "father" he did.

Bill seemed to surround himself with the children of his followers. Whenever he had the opportunity, he'd do something with "the kids". Although Bill had a child of his own, he never considered the children of his followers to be merely his daughter's playmates. After watching him with his follower's children I knew: he insinuated himself as the "father" of his follower's children and worked diligently to replace their real fathers by speaking often of how the real fathers were not "real" fathers and how "real" his "fathering" was.

The behavior became sickening. Bill would take the children to carnivals and fairs while their parents would toil away at cult projects or activities. Every Halloween, Bill would gather the children for a hearty round of trick-or-treating while the fathers were directed to teach classes, perform manual labor or do some other work for the cult. And while his followers slaved promoting Bill's agenda, he would speak ill of them to the children. The relationship between the fathers and their children became so strained because of that, at night, the kids would ignore their fathers and run to give Bill a goodnight hug.

Disgusting.

At any rate, why one would deliberately and methodically insert himself into the relationship between father and child is just too sick to ponder.

But now Bill is dead, is the insertion of SRF leadership into the family unit a thing of the past?

When an ex-member announced their intention to leave the cult and begin a new life of their own it was said the leadership replied the departure would be allowed on one condition: the soon-to-be-ex-member's child must be delivered to SRF headquarters immediately when summoned. I won't say why. It's disgusting enough to know a child would be used as chattel, depersonalized to the level of a poker chip.

I have heard a tale of a young couple with a young child - a toddler. While the mother is summoned to her weekly (and never-ending) class, the little toddler is whisked away to the leader's residence and kept there until the mother is finished with her class. What happens there is anyone's guess. One observation is Bill's daughter (now an adult) "plays" with the little toddler. You may have noticed the word "babysit" was not used. I didn't hear the word "babysit" either. I heard from other ex-members the word "plays". While I'm sure I would not just give up MY child, given what I have seen happen, I would have to wonder why anyone would just leave a toddler with a child who grew up to be no more than a child.

I mean, how many of us would have just dropped our kids off with Michael Jackson?

It also seems likely the leaders of the Spiritual Rights Foundation are developing a "relationship" and are "bonding" with the child. For what purposes is not clear. But if history is any example, someone may be "mothering from above" just like a certain dead preacher.

I remember one girl who's father was involved in a custody case. For the years before this child's plight was brought to family court, Robin Dumolin spent time with her. A lot of time. So much, Robin was heard to say "I am ******'s spiritual mother." During a hearing to determine custody, Robin appeared unnanounced and un-called for. She arrived to support the child in the hope of pursuading the court to deny any contact with her father. Robin's reason? She didn't have one. At least not a legal reason. Robin just didn't want to give up her time so the child could be with her father.

The father did absolutely nothing to endanger his daughter. Ever. There was just no legal reason to deny him a relationship with his own child. But in the vast wasteland of Robin's mind, this father had no right to be a father if that right kept Robin from doing every thing possible to push a father out of his daughter's life.

Robin announced to the cult members gathered at family court she was more of a mother to this girl than either parent was a parent. Then entered the courtroom with the rest of the SRF lynch mob to conduct energy techniques via hand waves and gestures intended to influence the judge. The judge had them thrown out.

You tell me if the crazy cycle of insertion and replacement started by Rev. Bill Duby is continuing.

Well, I can tell you from my observations at the Spiritual Rights Foundation: if I had kids while I was at SRF, I could kiss them. Once. Kiss them goodbye. Goodbye forever.

And that thought, those tales of lost children and heartbroken parents made that one night with my niece all the more special.