The latest cast of Big Brother features a gay man named Kevin, who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. I don’t normally watch this show, but the addition of a ex-JW cast member who is publically acknowledging the hardships of growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness and a repressed homosexual could be interesting. If this aspect becomes a part of Kevin’s role on the show, it could also serve the purpose of raising public awareness of Watchtower shunning practices, and the role this policy plays in the destruction of families.

Kevin’s proudest accomplishment comes from one of the most trying times in his life, growing up a Jehovah’s Witness. He was eventually excommunicated at age 21. Cut off from his family and friends, he didn’t let it destroy him. Instead, he found happiness and thrived. He currently works as a graphic designer.

Read the full biography at the CBS website.

One of the primary tenets of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (and many other religious sects) is that the world is experiencing violence and wars on unprecedented levels; increasingly and necessarily so as the Biblical war of Armageddon allegedly draws near. Their publications often paint a bleak picture of a world that is a very deadly and scary place in which to live, one which only God himself can possibly rectify. And of course, membership in the Watchtower organization is touted as the only possible safe haven. But is this really the case? Have wars, deaths, and violence really been on the rise since ancient times?

Evolutionary Psychologist Dr. Steven Pinker explores these beliefs in this TED presentation:

The President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, stepped in when Jehovah’s Witness parents removed their young daughter from a hospital in order to block a blood transfusion, who is in critical condition after suffering severe burns. The President emphasizes the importance of government intervention in cases where a parent’s religious opinions threaten the life of a minor child. Criminal charges are possible.

President Saakashvili made a televised intervention in a case involving a four-year-old girl’s medical treatment, who required blood transfusion after sustaining burn injuries.

Reportedly her parents, who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, refused to allow doctors to administer blood transfusion because of their religious belief and doctors allowed parents to take the girl back home after they signed a special form absolving doctors from responsibility.

Late on June 8 President Saakashvili met with Healthcare Minister, Sandro Kvitashvili, on the matter. Television stations showed on June 9, 2009 the footage of the meeting in which Saakashvili tells the Minister: “Are we the state or simply helpless observers? No matter how the law will be interpreted by various people. To save the life of a person, especially of a little child, is above their [parents’] religious beliefs or, lets say it directly, their whim and absolute unawareness and also above of any normative acts. I categorically demand to return this child back to hospital within next few hours. I instruct police and prosecutor’s office to intervene and to bring this child [back to hospital] even with force if necessary and if other methods do not work. We should never allow in future that in the similar situation, when it is possible to save a person, either your doctors, or the law and state agencies appear in a helpless situation. It is absolutely unimaginable. Act immediately. I am not interested either in the opinions of her parents in this situation or anything else. Go, bring and save her. Then, the issue of such parents should be discussed separately by court.”

Then the television pictures showed patrol policemen taking the girl, lying on a stretcher, from the ambulance vehicle and bringing her into the hospital.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are well known for playing the ‘religious persecution’ card when government intervenes in cases such as this. After all, this is standard fare for all religious cults: If you can claim persecution, then you have more fodder for manipulating members with the fear of suffering for their beliefs. The JW’s take this a step further, and claim that any opposition is another sign that they are living in the ‘end times’. No opportunity is missed to attempt to bolster this belief, even if it means risking the life of your child.

In this case, I tip my hat for President Saakashvili. The country of Georgia is a frequent target for the Watchtower’s PR spin-doctors. I’m all for religious freedom, but if ‘persecution’ means saving the life of a 4-year-old girl, who has no choice in the matter, and whose parents want to turn her into a martyr for their religion, then persecute away.

Article sourced from Civil.ge. A TV news report was also released via YouTube video.

Dutch researchers from the Netherlands Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology have stated that pregnant Jehovah’s Witness mothers are six times more likely to die during childbirth, due to the practice of refusing blood transfusions:

They found that 20 percent of the women who died were Jehovah’s witnesses but only an estimated 29,500 members of the group live in the country of more than 16 million people. Most of the deaths were from severe haemorrhaging. Women who refused red blood cell transfusions were the most likely to die.

Read the source article or the press release from the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Lots of activity coming to light this week in the fight against the Watchtower’s deadly blood transfusion doctrines. Here are a few stories that stand out.

Monday saw the dismissal of an appeal by Lawrence Hughes, whose daughter Bethany was killed due to her and her mother’s refusal to receive proper medical treatment. Instead of a simple blood transfusion, Bethany was spirited to a secret location by her Jehovah’s Witness mother, where an experimental alternative treatment consisting of arsenic and Vitimin C ultimately led to her demise.

Mr. Hughes had abandoned his Jehovah’s Witness faith to fight for transfusions, refusing to allow his teenage daughter to martyr herself for religion. This made him, under Church rules, an outcast: his wife, his other two daughters, his friends, all shunned him. He has come to refer to the Church as a “cult”; his daughter, he says, was the victim of implicit threats of social and familial ostracism - “disfellowship” they call it. “If you accept the blood transfusion, you lose your family, your friends,” Mr. Hughes says. “It’s like someone standing there with a gun to your head.”

While the appeal was dismissed, Hughes and his lawyer see a subtle victory and progress in the fight against the medical malpractice and doctrinal suicide encouraged by the Watchtower.

“To me, what is significant in this judgment is what it does not say, more than what it says,” says Alice Woolley, a legal ethicist at the University of Calgary.

What it most clearly does not say is that Mr. Hughes is necessarily wrong in claiming that his daughter received problematic advice from lawyers working not just for her, but also for a religious body intent on seeing her denied the blood she needed. “If I was advising [the Watchtower Society and its lawyers] I would now say, ‘At some point, this is no longer going to work out for you,’ ” Ms. Woolley says.

A follow-up article released on Thursday provides a glimpse into Hughes’ continuing legal battle, which has not yet ended, despite the Watchtower’s litigous harrassment and attempts to silence him.

Randy at Freeminds.org forwards on some information from a Watchtower insider familiar with the blood doctrine and one of it’s major proponents, Bethelite Gene Smalley.

Earlier this year, a Russian Jehovah’s Witness mother denied a blood transfusion for her newborn baby. The infant died as a result.

Another story published on Wednesday, reveals JW parents who are attempting to block a necessary blood transfusion for their one month old anemic daughter. A Judge has thankfully overruled their decision, but the parents would still rather see their daughter die than to allow a basic life-saving treatment.

Because of their religious beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the parents–Stephanie and Pierre Binns–do not want to see their baby girl get any foreign blood, even if it’s a matter of life and death.

When/if this child survives and grows up, I’m sure she would love to find out that her JW parents wanted her to die in the name of their religious beliefs, which she had no choice over, rather than receive basic medical care.