Brainwashing Moonies

Should parents be allowed to hire strong-arm experts to abduct their own children and argue them into forsaking the religious cults they have joined? That process, called deprogramming, has just been excoriated by a New York judge as a violation of the First Amendment (TIME, March 28). Last week, however, the deprogrammers won the first court test of a new way to legalize it.

The strategy is the creation of Michael Trauscht, a former county prosecutor in Arizona who now heads the Freedom of Thought Foundation, a deprogramming center in Tucson. Under his plan, parents sue for a 30-day "conservatorship" over even adult offspring, using laws designed mainly to protect the senile from fraud. Hearings are held and custody orders issued without the knowledge of the cult members. The members can then be legally seized and held for high-pressure deprogramming sessions (typical cost: $8,000 to $10,000).

Trauscht boasts of success with 88 of 90 disciples taken from the Booneville, Calif., camp of Sun Myung Moon, the supposed messiah from Korea. When parents of five Moonies, ages 21 to 26, sought conservatorship, however, the judge, the Moonies' lawyers and their parents' lawyers agreed to make a test case. In a lengthy hearing in California Superior Court, the parents' attorney, Carl Shapiro, argued that religious freedom is not absolute, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 1890 ban on Mormon polygamy. A parade of psychologists testified that the Moonies had been brainwashed. Under Moon's influence, Shapiro said, they had "made a complete turn-around in every aspect of their moral and intellectual lives."

Right One. Of course they had, retorted the Moonies' attorney, Ralph Baker, comparing their conversions with those inspired by Billy Graham. Youths who had undergone deprogramming told their stories of browbeating. "I was subject to humiliation and constant intimidation for five days," said one. Pleaded Baker: "Are we going to let a psychologist decide which religion is the right one?"

Judge S. Lee Vavuris granted the parents temporary custody last week because the parent-child tie is "never-ending," even if "the parent is 90 and the child 60." It was an agonizing decision, he said. "I have nothing to guide me. This is an unprecedented case." He encouraged a challenge to his decision. The Moonies' lawyers will do just that. Said one of the disciples who now faces 30 days of deprogramming: "I thought America was the land of freedom. You could do anything here. Sell flowers, become a zealot..

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