"Judith Moffett - The Bird Shaman's Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffett Judith)

martyrdom, had united and empowered the Ephremites as a people set
apart. They established a kingdom in a desert, and the kingdom thrived.
Deprivations? Plagues of locusts? Military occupation? Mass arrests and
jailings? They rose above it all; their indomitability kept pace with their
suffering. A mulish determination to triumph over adversity seemed
hardwired into the collective Ephremite psyche. As a people they were
tough as nails, and the toughness had survived into modern times. The
more Pam learned about them, the more she admired them for it.

But child sexual abuse had long been a special problem among the
Ephremites; andтАФas with the Catholic ChurchтАФa powerful, patriarchal,
self-protective governing authority had allowed the problem to persist and
spread. The Ephremite community was deeply family-centered, with many
children and lots of activities organized for them. All those Scout troops
needed leaders. If you were a good God-fearing Ephremite pedophile, you
had no trouble finding victims, in or out of your own family, and nothing
much to prevent you, or help you if you wanted to stop. Every Ephremite
male was inducted into the Meshak Priesthood when he turned eighteen.
For children raised to believe that members of a Priesthood held a
God-given authority over them, disobedience was not an easy option. What
Lexi had done by exposing her grandfather had taken more nerve than
anyone unaware of all this could possibly appreciate.
 The Ephremite ChurchтАЩs way of dealing with the problem was to
encourage repentance and forgiveness, to counsel wives that the main
thing was to keep the family together and that kids needed their father at
home. A perpetratorтАЩs local Church authority, his Canon, would
explainтАФand honestly believeтАФthat pedophilia was basically a moral
problem, that could be cured with prayer and counsel.

The Hefn solution of assigning all child-abuse cases to the Gaians
worked a lot better than prayer and repentance did. But the Ephremite
leadership hierarchy, stripped of authority where certain of their members
were concerned, could perhaps not be expected to feel very grateful.

****

2

When the mysterious and powerful Hefn had arrived on Earth, theyтАЩd been
horrified to discover a sentient species there, busily destroying its own
biosphere. Taking charge, theyтАЩd set out at once to reverse the damage.
They imposed sweeping reforms on agriculture, transportation, and
manufacturing; they established the Baby Ban, mass infertility brought
about by mass hypnotic suggestion. Also, one HefnтАФHumphreyтАФset up
the Bureau of Temporal Physics, where young math intuitives, known as
Apprentices, were trained to operate alien devices that could be used to
locate the placetimes in human prehistory where people had once lived in
harmony with their world.

The BureauтАЩs findings had launched the Gaian Movement, with its