Homework: "Who is God to me?"
September 17, 2015 9:36 PM   Subscribe

Holly Salzman of Albuquerque, NM, had to attend 10 court-ordered sessions with counselor Mary Pepper to resolve co-parenting conflicts with her estranged husband. Local KRQE reports that the class has highly religious overtones, which Salzman disagrees with but she could not get the courts to change the counselor.

On her website, Mary Pepper touts herself as an experienced teacher and family counselor, without mentioning the religious aspects. However her activities also include parenting classes for Project Defending Life, a pro-life organization.

Regarding the paid sessions at the local libraries, Albuquerque indeed do not allow for sales of products or services on library property.
posted by numaner (25 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
"What is god to me" "the almighty dollar."

What a disgusting farce.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 9:50 PM on September 17, 2015


Yuck. Reminds me of public health nurses. Such an agenda.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:25 PM on September 17, 2015


Take from Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
posted by gurple at 10:31 PM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
posted by axiom at 10:36 PM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yuck. Reminds me of public health nurses. Such an agenda.

huh? Public health nurses do difficult and important work. Are you referring to something specific?
posted by threeants at 11:48 PM on September 17, 2015 [12 favorites]


Yuck. Reminds me of public health nurses. Such an agenda.

This requires further explanation. What on earth could you have against nurses?!
posted by five fresh fish at 12:25 AM on September 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


“No one should be put in a position where they are forced to accept training or therapy that violates their own religious beliefs and morals,” said Peter Simonson, ACLU Executive Director.

Unless you bake wedding cakes.
posted by three blind mice at 1:37 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


If you are forced to worship wedding cakes by government action, be sure to let someone know.
posted by Scattercat at 1:43 AM on September 18, 2015 [46 favorites]


I've twice now run into public health nurses (prenatal classes and at the hospital) who so obviously had their own opinions of "how it should be done" that it made me quite furious. Like one barely acknowledged meds for pain relief, seems she truly believed everyone should do it au natural, and so on. Her course outline very clearly followed her biases just like this woman in the article. I didn't understand how her message could be so divorced from actual medical practice.

This is in Canada tho - maybe the US is different.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:50 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


I know its not really the point but wouldn't you just spend the entire two hours arguing pretty much every assertion?
posted by biffa at 3:09 AM on September 18, 2015


You could, and then presumably she wouldn't sign off on you successfully completing the course.

I wonder if there's a court clerk somewhere gurgling, "Follow the money!" into a payphone.
posted by Slackermagee at 4:12 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


In the UK, an NHS nurse tried to get me interested in Zen. But not as an alternative to the stuff he was putting into/taking out of my arm at the time, and it came naturally out of conversation. We were spending a lot of time together, and I was asking what the benefits of being in a caring profession were to him, so that didn't bother me. The incompetence of others bothered me more.

This is also an issue with AA and related (often court-mandated) twelve-step programs, but it doesn't have to be - and frequently isn't, even with the AA 'higher power' stuff. It is certainly possible to have a religious motivation behind a program, or to want to be a facilitator in one, while not making it ostensible - a family member, an evangelical Christian, was a volunteer on the phones for the Samaritans (which was started by a priest) for a while, and they were very clear about that not being in any way part of the conversation with the people who called.

It's called, I believe, professionalism. Which I would hope would be something of a requirement, regardless of the whole church/state business.
posted by Devonian at 4:42 AM on September 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


Local KRQE reports that the class has highly religious overtones, which Salzman disagrees with but she could not get the courts to change the counselor.

I'm trying to understand how this travesty is not court-ordered religious indoctrination, and how quickly it'll be struck down if -- preferable when -- the ACLU takes up the case.
posted by Gelatin at 4:55 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


five fresh fish: This requires further explanation. What on earth could you have against nurses?!

Nothing, unless you count nurses running around with doctor stethoscopes and stuff.
posted by dr_dank at 5:18 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Pepper said 50-percent of her clients are referred from the court. She said has about 10 court-ordered clients a week.

So, half of her income is coming from court-ordered clients. Makes me wonder if the court is choosing Pepper because there's a dearth of counselors in Albuquerque and/or whoever is supposed to be vetting them is overworked/incompetent, or if she's got some shady kick-back deal going with someone in the court system.

But there are more red flags. Pepper holds her meetings inside public libraries.

“That way I can keep my costs down,” Pepper said.

But she’s not allowed to work in public libraries. City policy forbids the sale of products or services on library property.

Salzman says Pepper is aware of that– claiming she has her clients book the rooms in their names and pay her in cash.

“She had actually explained to me that you need to be discreet about it because I’m not allowed to exchange money in the public library. So I had to kind of hide the money and then literally pass the money under the table,” Salzman said.


Shady as hell. You can pass a check to someone as discreetly as you can pass cash. I wonder what a good auditor could turn up? If she's not using some of that cash to bribe someone, she's almost certainly being creative with her tax returns. She thinks she's above the library's rules, I bet she thinks she's above the IRS' rules too, in the name of 'keeping her costs down'.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:48 AM on September 18, 2015 [19 favorites]


“We went back to court. I expressed concerns again about the religious overtones and they stated they hadn’t heard any problems concerning Mary Pepper with religion,” Salzman said.

I've seen this pattern repeated so often I wonder if there's a name for it. Someone complains "I am unhappy with X because they did Y" and the authority in charge responds "We don't have any complaints about X doing Y."

Well, you've got at least one.
posted by layceepee at 5:56 AM on September 18, 2015 [20 favorites]


St. Peepsburg - I'm not sure that a sample size of 2 public health nurses is enough to determine that they're all out to force their beliefs on you. Come on.
posted by DrLickies at 6:45 AM on September 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


the authority in charge responds "We don't have any complaints about X doing Y."

I think that's just a structural reality. If there's nothing on record at all, they've got nothing to act on. An authority of any kind can't be expected to know what they don't know and no one has ever told them. Someone who approved this program screwed up, but their screwup might never have been discovered unless someone complained. This woman put it on record, and now there's something to investigate. But I think the reason it's standard is just the procedural nature of complaints against bureaucratic organizations.
posted by Miko at 8:11 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Or, there is no mechanism for making such a complaint and the judge is ignorant of federal case law prohibiting court-ordered attendance at religious classes. Wanna play a game of "what's more likely?"
posted by 1adam12 at 9:18 AM on September 18, 2015


I'm sure the teeming folks clamoring for Kim Davis's religious freedom will be along any moment to back up Holly Salzman.

Yup. Any minute now. Guys? GUYS?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:02 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think that's just a structural reality. If there's nothing on record at all, they've got nothing to act on. An authority of any kind can't be expected to know what they don't know and no one has ever told them.

That would explain cases when the response is used to account for why the authority hasn't taken action in the past, but it seems to me it's quite often used to provide the authority a rationale for taking action in the current instance. That seems to be what happened with Salzman and her complaint.
posted by layceepee at 10:46 AM on September 18, 2015


I'm not defending this court in particular, just noting that it can be a function of bureaucracy. The full extent of the description in this story is as follows:

“We went back to court. I expressed concerns again about the religious overtones and they stated they hadn’t heard any problems concerning Mary Pepper with religion,” Salzman said.

There is a lot of information missing from this, which I am sure the ACLU will discover, but the lightness of this reporting leaves much context around this statement unexamined. And there is very little coverage from decently reported sources so far. You can speculate about what's likely, but there's too little information to conclude anything. In general, though, if it's a first time a complaint has surfaced I am not surprised to hear whoever was sitting in court that day say "it's the first time a complaint has surfaced." Should they have said "that doesn't sound right, here is how you can make a complaint?" Certainly. I'm not saying they should not have done that. And I'm not saying Pepper is not totally full of crap, shady, and corrupt; she clearly is. I hope the problem with the court-approved counselors is cleared up and perhaps the ACLU, and more reporting, will help clarify exactly where the problem was generated.
posted by Miko at 10:51 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


In general, though, if it's a first time a complaint has surfaced I am not surprised to hear whoever was sitting in court that day say "it's the first time a complaint has surfaced."

My point is that they didn't say "It's the FIRST TIME we've had a complaint." They said "We haven't had a complaint." The difference may be subtle, but to me it is real. When someone makes a complaint and the response is "We haven't had any complaints" you are discounting the report the person has just made.

Should they have said "that doesn't sound right, here is how you can make a complaint?"

It wouldn't make any sense to say that, because the person just made a complaint. Apparently, they figured out how to do it all on their own.
posted by layceepee at 11:14 AM on September 18, 2015


Well, not quite. She said something in a court; people say things in court routinely, and they are routinely unhappy with things that happen to them there; but taking formal complaints in that venue without a legal action is not necessarily within the court's business. We'd need to see a court transcript to better understand how this was framed and acted on, or not. So that's not the same thing as making a formal complaint. We don't know what procedures there are for making a formal complaint; I spent some time earlier on the court website to try to discover that, but the information was not easily available. Of course, in a democracy, one can always make a formal complaint through your representatives within whose jurisdiction the particular court body falls, but again, this is a procedural matter and it's going to be subject to some set of bureaucratic procedures.

Salzman may have thought that voicing an objection in front of the court was the same things as a formal complaint, a dispute, a request to suspend the order pending investigation, etc., but I suspect that in a legal sense, it was none of those, to her misfortune. This is an important distinction.
posted by Miko at 11:27 AM on September 18, 2015



This is exactly the same issue with 12 step programs: every court that has ruled on the issue has said that forcing people to accept a higher power (whether it's Jesus or a doorknob), surrender to that higher power, confess your sins and make amends is religious whether AA wants to admit it or not. The fact that some atheists and non-Christians can make it work doesn't mean that 12 step programs and literature do not promote a very deeply Christian philosophy (everything happens for a reason; suffering is the path to growth; etc.)

Nonetheless, 80% of American addiction programs push the 12 steps and most require acceptance of them— and yes, about 1/3 of their patients or more are forced there by the courts.

There is a lot of violation of the separation of church and state that goes on under the guise of "therapy" or "treatment."
posted by Maias at 3:18 PM on September 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


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