LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY jenfer47)

A couple of years ago I began studying American Sign Language and scouting around for some practice video material. Almost everything I found was promoting some religious faction or other! It was probably inevitable, since it was ministers who invented the language. Today, based on the ASL newsgroups and listservs, most interpreters-in-training are wannabe missionaries.

Sun Myung Moon was one of the first to have his sermons interpreted for the Deaf. The Mormons were happy to send me a beautiful 15-volume video set of the Book of Mormon in ASL for way less than cost. The best online dictionary - http://www.aslpro.com - has a mega-religious content - but doesn't include the word "Pagan." The ASL sign for atheist is not the logical "not-believe-God-person" but "eyes blocked."

The only online source putting up fresh conversational content every day is http://www.deafmissions.com, which has content that is often downright offensive. In their view, Christians are duty-bound to try to convert unbelievers at every opportunity, and the sermons often end with "tell everyone you know about Jesus." Their earlier sermon on "hunger" briefly touched on food banks and soup kitchens, only to go into a diatribe about lazy people unwilling to work - particularly offensive when directed to a community where many people are unemployed due to inability to communicate.

In many undeveloped countries, missionaries provide the ONLY source of education for Deaf people, who can therefore be indoctrinated with all manner of dangerous nonsense. Poverty and lack of education place Deaf people at particular risk of AIDS, and getting their information from people who promote celibacy instead of condoms doesn't help matters.

In a similar vein, Sun Myung Moon has also started targeting Blacks, Indians and Africans, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - who is relatively innocuous as these guys go - has beat the government in extending native-language radio broadcasting to Native communities in the Far North.

The missionaries are just doing their usual thing by targeting their recruitment drive to people who are vulnerable and disenfranchised, and hence grateful for any assistance that comes their way. The real problem is that they often are the ONLY ones extending any services at all to these people.