As if social media wasn’t toxic enough, it has now been weaponized by a Reddit group to target “fundamentalist Christians” explicitly. The group @FundieSnarkUncensored lists as its primary purpose:
“This is a snark sub for fundamentalist Christians – keep it fundie & keep it snarky. While we welcome snarkers from all different backgrounds, the people we snark on are Fundamentalist Christians and only Fundamentalist Christians. There are other subs dedicated to other faiths about religious bulls****ery in general if you find run-of-the-mill religious weirdness. This means no snarking on Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, etc. Some branches of Christianity considered fundamentalists (in addition to fundie Protestants) are TradCaths, hardcore Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
The group has over 200,000 members and appears to be run by people who consider themselves “normal” Christians, among others.
Their crusade seems to be centered around harassing and exposing other Christians who they deem as fundamentalist to the extreme. This justifies their malignant campaigning to denigrate them online, but that’s not enough.
In more than one instance, the targeting has included mass campaigns to government agencies, like Child Protective Services, falsely claiming parents are neglecting or abusing their children. Several families admit to having been targeted but feared speaking up due to embarrassment or intimidation.
However JD and Brittany Lott of Texas found themselves harassed to the point of receiving texts, phone calls and threats from Florida DCF while on vacation in the state. The crusaders from @FundieSnarkUncensored had been tracking them, literally, as they shared their family vacation via Reddit on their @AmericanFamilyVacation page boasting over 600,000 followers.
After several exchanges with DCF telling them to stop where they were on the side of the road for a wellness check. At one point, DCF threatened the family that if they did not comply, they would issue an order to have the children taken into custody that would be enforceable “nationwide”.
Rather than comply with the DCF supervisor’s threat, they contacted the Family Freedom Project, which recommended legal counsel. They then went to a nearby hospital in Georgia, where medical doctors checked the family until police arrived.
When law enforcement showed up, Florida’s Voice reporting on the story indicated that Lott’s attorney Lynn Salvatore, of Parra Harris Law, said, “…everybody’s like ‘I don’t understand why we’re even here, everything was great’.”
Salvatore noted these situations are “not uncommon.”
This appears to be more of the same from activists posing as concerned citizens who utilize the false pretense of mass mobilization toward a small target with the intent of discrediting or hoaxing a threat in order to achieve the desired outcome – in this case, taking children away from a perfectly normal family.
“What amazes me is the amount of time and energy that these people on Reddit spend to target this family and other families is mind-boggling. If they could channel that energy for something that is productive, it would be amazing, the world would be a better place,” Salvatore said.
Father JD Lott told Florida’s Voice the situation is “sickening” because it is a “coordinated effort to harm our family by swatting us using the government.”
Mom Britney asks “The question is, are we actually free? Are we, as Americans, free because if we can’t say online that ‘I believe in the Lord and I believe in Jesus Christ,’ then am I free? I would say no, if I can’t say that without my children being taken, that’s not a free country anymore.”
A petition has been started to move Florida’s Attorney General Ashley Moody to hold Reddit users accountable for false reporting, which is a felony in the state.
With the recent use of government power to keep the Mid Vermont Christian School sports teams from playing at the Vermont Principal’s Association level after forfeiting a girl’s basketball playoff game featuring a 6’2” trans-boy on the other team, how long until a similar story emerges here in the Green Mountain State. Hartford High School, which offers a cooperative sports program for MVCS, took it upon themselves to keep an MVCS girl from playing on their soccer team as a result of the VPA policy. Already, I’ve heard of Christian families being denied foster care in both Vermont and Oregon on the basis of their beliefs if they wouldn’t support transitioning a child.
With Massachusetts government fundamentally rewriting the designation of family nullifying terms like “mother” and “father” while offering new power to the state to determine who will parent the child it appears the activists claim that “it takes a village” means the village will use any means necessary to take children from parents, if they can find a way.
