Why are Doug and Bill at fault?

[formergothardite]

How did Stella Liebeck blame "TEH STATE"?

She did blame McDonalds for the severe injuries she suffered, and they were found to be at fault.

She suffered third degree burns and had to have skin grafts! I don't think anyone expects their coffee to be that hot.

[thoughtful]

This thread is so full of wonderful answers!

There is no "either-or," to me, but there certainly are degrees of blame.

I'd say that everyone who stepped out of a mainstream life to originate this crap is the most to blame, especially if they don't live it themselves, which certainly indicates that they don't think it's a universal answer.

Those who chose it as adults strike me as some combination of sinning and sinned against (if you'll pardon the expression! :lol: ). Those raised in it strike me as more to be pitied than condemned, and I certainly celebrate any of them coming to their senses and getting away.

I think this relates to the issue of being hands-off (or snark-off) about kids. We can draw an arbitrary line at age 18, but, really, my feelings about many young adults still enmeshed in this nonsense is always a mix of pity and disgust.

Believe me, I would love to see them all wake up and realize that they've been raised on dangerous bullshit. But, if they don't, I can't bring myself to be quite as disgusted by them as I am by those who designed it, or even those who walked into it as adults.

[LilMissMetaphor]

She suffered third degree burns and had to have skin grafts! I don't think anyone expects their coffee to be that hot.

Again, I'm not saying she shouldn't have filed a lawsuit and I'm not saying she shouldn't have won. What I'm saying is it sets a precedent which may have far-reaching implications. Until something like this happens, it would never occur to people to expect compensation for not following the instructions. If a pregnant woman gets on a carnival ride and subsequently miscarries, who is at fault? Well, the sign that says "pregnant women should not go on this ride" was written too small. Or it was the wrong font, or...

Ignorance of the law (or the warning) is no excuse. Common sense flies out the window and our sense of entitlement replaces it.

[desertvixen]

Again, I'm not saying she shouldn't have filed a lawsuit and I'm not saying she shouldn't have won. What I'm saying is it sets a precedent which may have far-reaching implications. Until something like this happens, it would never occur to people to expect compensation for not following the instructions. If a pregnant woman gets on a carnival ride and subsequently miscarries, who is at fault? Well, the sign that says "pregnant women should not go on this ride" was written too small. Or it was the wrong font, or...

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how you get to that point from your example, since there were a whole lot of other factors involved. Like the fact that she initially tried just to collect for medical expenses and lost wages, and the company refused to settle, offering a ridiculously low amount. She was also considered partly responsible by the jury who decided the case, because of her actions. She didn't get compensation for not following the instructions, but because she got third degree burns from the damn coffee.

[liltwinstar]

I think Doug and Bill (and others like them) need to remember that words have power and that people *will* make decisions based on those words.

For example, Doug has his don't-terminate-an-ectopic-pregnancy belief, that he, personally, has written about on his blog. Now, you notice he doesn't say, "my wife had an ectopic pregnancy and this is what we decided to do." No. He says "this is what you, my followers, should do, because it is BIBLICAL and if you don't, you are a MURDERER." To him, it's all intellectual exercise - not real life. It's just a mental game. Now, if his wife was faced with death because of a pregnancy that wasn't at all viable? Would he make the same choice that he tells his followers to make? I hope not!

However, if someone *did* follow Doug's words to the T and the wife died because of Doug's teachings, would he take responsibility for it? Would he help out the family that had lost the wife/mother, because his teachings directly contributed to her death? Would he say "this woman died because of my teachings, and these children are motherless because I taught this belief"? Probably not.

Similarly, does Bill Gothard take any responsibility for the heartache and brokenness suffered by the followers of ATI? No. Instead, they are told that it is *their* fault, that they are *bitter*, that they did it wrong, etc etc.

For a time, my family was really involved in the pro-life movement of the early 90s. There was all kinds of rhetoric that the killing of doctors could be considered "justifiable homicide" because it would save lives. We were told about something called Jury Nullification which, supposedly, could help release someone who was imprisoned for picketing/blocking an abortion clinic or for killing a doctor who provided abortion services. Yet as soon as Scott Roeder took that rhetoric literally and shot Dr. Tiller, did *any* of the major pro-life speakers out there take responsibility for that? Did they say "yes, my rhetoric contributed to that murder"? No.

(well, Frank Schaeffer did, but he's no longer a pro-life speaker, so that's a little different)

Anyway, my point is, you can't tell people how to live their lives, down to the last detail of bowel movements (as Gothard reportedly has done), and then say "but I'm not responsible for the outcome." Yes, there is personal responsibility on the part of the followers, but there is also responsibility on the part of the leaders to not teach destructive, potentially deadly, bullshit.

[Brainsample]

No one has mentioned the argument from the writings of the Apostle Paul that hold both teachers and leaders/elders to a higher level of accountability than the rank and file follower of a group. This does not mean that people are claiming that they arent' responsible for what happened or what they did when they were involved with a group. The leaders are held to a higher standard. So you could make that argument that they are in a whole different kind of trouble than their followers.

The other problem, as others have said, is that people are never given informed consent and full disclosure about the beliefs of these groups and what you're getting yourself into when you join. They use deception, denial, and manipulation, and then they use unfair manipulation when you want to leave. Who would join a group and get entrenched in it if they were told, up front, that if they left, they were asking for God to get them because they exited God's umbrella of authority. People really don't understand that and what is meant by that until they violate some rule (that they may not have known anything about before) or when they leave. It happened to me. I was told I couldn't leave my church, otherwise we would get cancer, die, loose our jobs, our kids would die.... Oddly, within three years, the guy who told me that had his kid in his 20s wreck his car on the DC beltway and he died, and then he got brain cancer and died himself. Anyway, if I had informed consent about half of the provocative beliefs like this when we were taking member classes, we would have run away as far and as fast as we could. So the group uses this dissembling of sorts to conceal things, so you really don't have all the info you need to make a decision about joining.

None of that undoes whatever I do as part of the group, and I do help the group perpetuate the garbage so long as I support them. I am culpable and fully responsible for what I do and how I contribute to the cause. But the guy who goes out and willfully sells this stuff has his own set of errors for which he is culpable.

[lovefromgirl]

Your metaphor is flawed:

Say you walk into a marketplace and there are ten vendors, each trying to sell you an apple. Obviously, you get to choose what apple you buy and obviously every seller wants you to buy their apple. They are going to do their best to sell it to you. They're not going to tell you if its bruised, there's a worm inside or if it's rotten at the core or if it has the potential to poison you. It's up to you to cut the apple open.

If it's a capitalist market, the vendor damn well better tell you the apple's going to kill you. Reebok owes a lot of people a lot of money because of false advertising! Also, most produce sections would have you pitched out of the supermarket if you started slicing into the wares.

Isn't that tantamount to someone blaming McDonalds for their obesity?

McDonalds is widely known for making a cheap, tasty, and ultimately not-that-nutritious meal. ATI/QF haven't had nearly the exposure, and if all they see is VF royalty living it up, families will decide "Shit, I could do that!"

[Patsy]

Again, I'm not saying she shouldn't have filed a lawsuit and I'm not saying she shouldn't have won. What I'm saying is it sets a precedent which may have far-reaching implications. Until something like this happens, it would never occur to people to expect compensation for not following the instructions. If a pregnant woman gets on a carnival ride and subsequently miscarries, who is at fault? Well, the sign that says "pregnant women should not go on this ride" was written too small. Or it was the wrong font, or...

Ignorance of the law (or the warning) is no excuse. Common sense flies out the window and our sense of entitlement replaces it.

I don't think that's what you said at all.

[marmalade]

The West has become a culture of blame and abnegation of personal responsibility, which is why if we're too dumb to hold a hot coffee without spilling, we think there's nothing wrong with accusing TEH STATE of making the coffee too hot.

It's not so much the "too hot" consequence as the "false prophet" one, so I think Dunkin' Donuts, whose coffee is advertised all over the Northeast, from what this west-coaster understands, is a better model. It's billed as one thing, the masses buy into it, but most move on when they find out it's a pig in a poke and go back to their old coffee. Those people were able to analyze and make a choice based on experience.

OTOH, those people who stick with a bad product are nothing more than non-thinking, followers, ie. lemmings. That is the always the metaphor in my mind when I think of the uberfundies who sacrifice a decent standard of living to follow Gothard, Dougie, Stevie, etal. This metaphor extends into the secular world when people blindly follow morons like Rachael Ray who package themselves as the girl next door while wearing boots that retail for $1500, and devises "healthy" school lunches that have 60g of fat and a full day's worth of calories under the umbrella of her "non-profit" which upon investigation is nothing more than a tax shelter.

As PT Barnum famously said, there's a sucker born every minute. And the snake oil salesmen/women of all types know how to reach them whether it be gotta have it to be shiny happy people, curiosity or plain ole guilt.

[formergothardite]

Again, I'm not saying she shouldn't have filed a lawsuit and I'm not saying she shouldn't have won. What I'm saying is it sets a precedent which may have far-reaching implications. Until something like this happens, it would never occur to people to expect compensation for not following the instructions. If a pregnant woman gets on a carnival ride and subsequently miscarries, who is at fault? Well, the sign that says "pregnant women should not go on this ride" was written too small. Or it was the wrong font, or...

Ignorance of the law (or the warning) is no excuse. Common sense flies out the window and our sense of entitlement replaces it.

The way you wrote it looks like you were saying she was too dumb to hold a cup of coffee and then accused the state? of making the coffee too hot and that she was wrong for going after McDonalds. If coffee is going to cause third degree burns and skin grafts, there better be a heck of a big warning label on that because nobody expects coffee to be that hot.