Over in This MPSIMS thread, I expressed some concerns regarding the trust and secrecy issues enforced upon minor children of both genders by the Freemasons.
I’ll quote back from my post in there to explain my concern:
So, there you have it. I am respecting the wishes of the OP’er, and starting a totally separate thread so that his is not hijacked any more.
Are there any Dopers out there who have had negative or damaging or upsetting dealings with these groups who feel they can share them in the Dope? I would be highly surprised if my nephew is the only 12 year old boy ever told he’s not allowed to tell anyone what he does when he goes away with adult men for the weekend. Not his Mom, not his Dad, not his uncle ( me ). Nobody, pretty much. See, it’s secret.
Secret. So here’s your chance to unburden some of those secrets. My nephew got out, but not easily. To this day he cannot talk about what happened during the years he was involved in DeMolay.
Are there any Dopers out there who can?
Since this is feeling like a poll of sorts, I’ve posted it into IMHO.
Since this happened in Pennsylvania and that’s where I ran into rude cold roadblocks, the quote from the Pennsylvania DeMolay Youth Protection Page is particularly ironic/appalling:
In point of fact, this is exactly what occurred for years and years. He was not allowed to tell his parents where he went, or what they did. He told them what time he should be at the Temple for the trip, and what time to pick him up at the end of the trip. That’s all.
Re the five questions you raised in the other thread, and your request that I answer them, I cannot. Note that I say “cannot” and not “will not.” I am not a past member of DeMolay, nor have I ever had any involvement with the organization. Therefore, I am not privy to any information about it. I simply noted that I personally have never heard a word of scandal associated with the organization nor those men who have been involved. As far as the inner works of the organization goes, you might well know more than I.
I do hope someone with more knowledge will respond; I’ve become curious.
Sorry, but this “poll” has no place in IMHO. You want to pit the group, and are asking for horror stories and information to further justify this pitting.
Okay, this was long ago, I was not in DeMolay (wrong sex), but I knew boys who were, and there’s nothing. It’s a youth group; the adult sponsors are Masons.
They did not go on trips with groups of adult men. These were boys with an adult leader or two. Sure, things can happen and have happened in those situations (think altar boys here, scout camp) but usually they don’t.
It’s just the kind of thing where you are told you will learn secrets you can’t tell, and you learn them, and they are cheesy secrets but you already promised. Secret handshakes, secret distress signals, secret symbols.
And I never heard of anybody having a hard time getting out, as you said about your nephew in the MPSIMs thread. They just quit going. Or not. Same as any other Boy Scouts/Girl Scout/Rainbow/Job’s Daughter/Circle K/fraternity/sorority.
The “secrets” are, as I said, cheesy. But if you tell somebody then they will know you are not a person who keeps his word, and you sure don’t want to be thought of as a person who doesn’t keep his word for the sake of a cheesy little secret handshake, do you?
I used to work for an outsource of Dell Tech Support, and our offices were located in the same building as the Masonic Temple. We were on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors, the Masons on the 6th and 7th. I had the opportunity to share the elevator with Masons on several occasions, and one day I plucked up my courage enough to ask exactly what went on upstairs. The Mason [an older gentleman] seemed to have no qualms about telling me that it was a fraternal organization and they gathered to have dinners and dances and ceremonies pertaining to their history. He even showed me his costume [not the right word, I know, sorry] for the ceremony they were having that night, and told me they were having a collection [monetary] for the family of a recently and unexpectedly deceased member. Not worth much, I know, but I had heard about how secretive and weird the Freemasons [omg Illuminati!!11] were for years, and I found it enlightening how open and kind he was to my questions, espcially since I was a 19-year-old girl with black and scarlet red hair, a Lesbian Avengers t-shirt, and two tons of eyeliner.
My grandfather was a Mason, I went to gatherings all the time when I was little. My entire family would go to the weekly pot luck on saturday afternoons. We went out to dinner frequently with other Masons. When I needed a babysitter, a wife or daughter of another Mason would normally come over to watch me. In all the time I spent with them, I don’t remember any function when I felt uncomfortable.
I don’t believe that it is common practice among the Masons to take a group of twelve year old boys and to exclude their fathers. Most of the children around Masonic gatherings are the children and grandchildren of members. I do find that the circumstances in the OP to be suspicious, but I don’t believe that the majority of Masons operate in that manner.
Heck, Cartooniverse, from the original post and not knowing anything else about the situation, I have to agree with Larry Mudd here. I agree with the idea that they shouldn’t tell the kids to not tell their parents what goes on (which apparently even the group agrees to officially), but you went from zero to psycho pretty much in no time flat.
What did the parents of this child have to say about it? Why is the uncle calling people up to give them a hard time? If the parents want to object and take the kid out of the group, great, but I don’t get at all where you suddenly appoint yourself to try to raise a fit when the parents apparently don’t think it’s a big deal.
Respectfully, Cartooniverse, I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish here. You’ve apparently concluded to your own satisfaction that the DeMolay organization is comprised largely of pedophiles. You’d like to convince others of the same. So you start a thread soliciting other SDMB members to provide you with anecdotes you can use as proof? Usually evidence comes before the accusation.
Your passion on the topic convinces me that you feel you have certainly proven the case in your own mind. But to outsiders who have not met your nephew, the fact that he won’t talk to you about DeMolay admits of more than one explanation. Other than characterizing it as “loads of shit” you don’t provide much information about what the PA DeMolay youth leader told you. And many people become uncommunicative when you ask pointed questions and call them on their shit, which I take to mean a less than respectful challenge of their answers. You don’t explain at all what difficulties your nephew had in leaving the organization, so again there’s a wide range of possibilities. Then there’s the AG, who has amassed a lot of information (“quite a thick file”) on the group. Well, what did the AG’s office tell you? Better yet, what charges have they brought based on the information contained in that file?
Pedophilia is ugly and intolerable, but please consider that unwarranted accusations of it are not much less so, and you’re spreading that mud awfully wide.
Well, you got one hit: **Cave Mike ** provided a case in Florida, but it may not be damning or far-reaching enough for you: you’ve assumed a heavy burden of proof. You might consider laying some of it down by narrowing the scope of your accusations a little, at least until they can be supported with more facts.
I’m quite well-disposed towards the Masonic movement. My dad’s a Mason. I think it is generally a benign organisation that does a lot of good in society - or at least tries to. Sure, there’s a bit of networking too - good luck to 'em.
That said, I am on Cartooniverse’s side here, assuming he’s being truthful with us, and I have no reason to doubt him. In this day and age, it’s not what you do, but what you are seen to do. Whether Cartooniverse has over-generalised or not is one thing, but dammit you don’t take young boys away for the weekend with a bunch of grown men and not allow their parents to know every last detail down to the number of peas on their plates at breakfast.
I’m not a Mason, and I don’t seek to know their secrets, beyond what they are willing to tell me. As said in this thread, if you actually ask a geuine Mason, they are happy to tell you quite a lot more than you might expect. I do know enough about Masonic ritual to know that “telling nothing about events between being dropped off at Temple and being picked up there again” is total BS. If they are pulling that stunt, then Cartooniverse has every right to start raising hell. As a dad, I’m damned sure I would.
I am a Mason and a DeMolay. Further, I’m from Florida. I was active in DeMolay from 1983-1989 and my father was active for several years longer than that. Here are my experiences and recollections about the organization:
DeMolay encourages the participation of both parents in almost everything. Mothers are not allowed to attend certain ceremonies (although there is a special ceremony just for them), but fathers can attend everything whether or not they are Masons.
For every trip, boys had to get an insurance form signed by at least one parent. This form explained the destination, length of stay, activities to be participated in, and requested medical information (allergies, medicines, etc), a contact number, and an authorization for emergency treatment. No form, no trip. AFAIK, this form was standard in Florida (required by our insurance carrier actually).
Hilarity is correct (at least in my experience), on every trip I went on, the DeMolay outnumbered the advisors (ususally by a large margin). Activities that were typical: playing sports, fishing, camping, cooking out, snipe hunts, fan-tan, and other teenage boy stuff. It was extremely rare and heavily discouraged for only one advisor to take a group anywhere.
Most of the advisors (at least when I was in) were fathers of the boys in their chapter. The younger ones were invariably former members, often the older brothers of current members.
How did they prevent him from leaving or talking? How was he a member if his dad wasn’t a Mason? if his dad was a Mason, why wasn’t he active in DeMolay? Why werent you? How do you know he was too frightened of DeMolay to discuss it, as opposed to too frightened of his overreacting uncle? How do you know the secrecy wasn’t your nephew’s choice? You erroneously branded me frightened in the other thread,. Could you be projecting the same state on your nephew?
How do you know this wasn’t your nephew’s choice? How do you know he was not allowed? How did they prevent him?
When did this case occur? That seems to address your concerns right there. If theyve changed their position on secrecy, whats the probem?
If you want me to tell you what happens in the ritual, the I’m going to have to advise you to grow up. Alternatively, you can become a Mason and thereby be allowed into the private ritual events.
As for not telling you what happens at all, that’s fucked up. There is nothing secret except for a few ritual events per se, and the secret ones are a lot like the public ones.
You have some serious issues to work out, however. If your kids are going off with total strangers then shame on you for not getting involved. Ditto on your nephew’s parents. It’s a question of parental involvement, and parents do not have to be Masons to be involved in the organization. If you’re so concerned, then you should get involved.
As for your accusations: give me a break. If you feel that youth groups are a sink for pedophiles (technically, not the correct term), then get involved and make a difference. The only option to your pedophilia concerns are to either eliminate youth groups altogether, or to have youth groups with no adult supervision whatsoever.
If a youth organization has problems with abuse, sexual or otherwise, we cannot blame the victims; however, the victims’ parents do bear culpability for not being responsible parents.
So quit bitching and get involved. It’ll do you some good, especially when you’re old and infirmed and wishing you had some younger friends to keep you company.
If he was molested it wasn’t because of any sanctioned actions of the organization. And actually, he can talk all that he wants to but it appears that the boy suffers froma condition called “having a little class”. More likely is he made a promise to his fellow participants not to divulge the “secrets” of the organization to others.
The DeMolay organization is a fraternal order, not too different from from college fraternities and other bonding organizations like boy scouts, etc. One difference is that they have closed meetings (non-members are not allowed admission) which have a ritualistic structure. This is not so much to hide any activity as it is in remembrence of the founders of the organization who had to maintain secrecy to protect their lives from religious prosecution. The namesake, Jaques DeMolay, died as a result of religious prosecution. Their message or theme isn’t so much a religion as it is people should have the right of self determination for their religious beliefs.
I’m a former DeMolay. I won’t tell you about their rituals either because I occaisionally show a little class myself, though not often if you ask some others around hear.
If I was inclined to “lose my class” and tell you all about the secrets I’m pretty sure I could have you nodding off from boredom in about 20 minutes.
It might be said that the most important thing about the secrets is that they encourage loyalty from the young men involved. In other words, the secrets aren’t important but sharing them is.
Nope, its been very obvious to the members of this board that this is a pitting and you tried to wrap it in an IMHO envelope.
That just shows that not only have you been talking out of your ass but you also lack the balls participate in the one forum where your accusations it belong.
Point of Information: I am no longer involved in any Masonic order and have no desire to be in one. I lost interest in DeMolay and left the organization at 17. After leaving I saw no practical use in revealing the “secrets” to anyone.
I would like to agree but with a caveat, one that I hit on above and which I’m not entirely sure I sufficiently stressed. The amount of stuff DeMolay has that is actually secret is very small relative to the scope of activities in which they engage. If the organization’s (sp?) advisors refuse to divulge what goes on outside of those ceremonies, then I do indeed say, “That’s fucked up.” I was a DeMolay, as was my brother, and my two sisters were Job’s. I was even an officer at the state level of the organization.
In all honesty, the only thing I can think of where a whole weekend couldn’t be divulged would be a ritual competition, but even then the kid could say, “It was a ritual competition. I can’t tell you what happened, other than to say that different chapters competeted to see who did the best ritual. We got third.” There may be secrets in the sense of boys making a pact to keep their adventures to themselves, but as far as the organization goes, the amount of secret activity is relatively small. Otherwise it’s just the same old stuff that other groups do.