Photo: Las Últimas Noticias
A family of religious extremists was rescued from their damaged sailboat after becoming lost for many weeks in the Pacific and has been flown back to the United States.
In May, Sean and Hannah Gastonguay, with Sean’s father, Mike, and their 3-year-old and 8-month-old baby daughters, set sail from San Diego bound for the Pacific nation of Kiribati, a group of islands just off the equator and the international date line about halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
Hannah is quoted by the Washington Post, saying that “her family was fed up with government control in the U.S. As Christians they don’t believe in “abortion, homosexuality, in the state-controlled church,” she said…. Among other differences, she said they had a problem with being “forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don’t agree with.”’ (Ms. Gastonguay, 26, is apparently unaware that the US government has not funded abortion for close to 40 years, so it is unclear which taxes she is complaining about.) Ms. Gastonguay also that she and her husband “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us.” She also said that they wanted to go to Kiribati because “we didn’t want to go anywhere big.” She said they understood the island to be “one of the least developed countries in the world.” Though not mentioned in the interview, both abortion and homosexuality are illegal in Kiribati.
Not long after setting sail, they encountered storms, suffered rigging damage and apparently got lost. After two months at sea they began to run low on supplies. They were ultimately rescued by a Venezuelan fishing vessel, then transferred to a Japanese cargo ship, which carried the family to Chile. As reported by the Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias, police prefect Jose Luis Lopez, who took the family’s statement at San Antonio, commented, “They were looking for a kind of adventure; they wanted to live on a Polynesian island but they didn’t have sufficient expertise to navigate adequately.”
Religious zealotry proved to be no substitute for basic seamanship.
Thanks to Linda Collison for contributing to this post.
People have been fleeing from religious oppression (real, imagined or self-inflicted) for thousands of years, but rarely have they been so ill prepared.
Having no religion and hearing a christian say that they have no religious freedom in the US is a joke. Should have taken the kids and left the crazy adults to drift around the Pacific till they woke up.
Amen!
However, with a lot of luck, and some inner tubes one can still get from Cuba to Florida!
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/14/planned-parenthood-gets-375000-from-dc-obamacare-exchange/ I am not saying I agree with theses people but the federal government definitely gives money to abortion organizations but it is not “supposed to” fund abortions. But that is kind of like buying pasta from a mafia member and saying I am not funding your drug running just past making. If you fund a organization that does abortions you indirectly fund abortions…
Sorry Paul, but that is total nonsense. The federal government is banned by law from funding abortions. Period. End of story.
The federal government does fund women’s health care, which is a good thing. Planned Parenthood, for example, spends 97% of its operating budget on health care and only 3% on abortion. No money from the federal government can fund its abortion services, services which, by the way, are a legal medical procedure in the United States.
Arguing that the feds fund abortion because it provides any money to a group like Planned Parenthood, which is hardly an abortion organization, makes exactly as much sense as claiming that the feds fund the cover-up of priestly pedophilia because they provide funding to Catholic charities. The federal government provides far more money to Catholic charities than it does to Planned Parenthood for women’s health care.
Yes if the catholic charities were founded to help with pedophilia then you logic would be correct. But they aren’t so it is not.
Let me clarify my comment above. Your comparison with Catholic charities is not valid because Planned Parenthood does not stop or ban abortions. In fact it does about 300,000+ a year. So pedophilia + catholic church does not equal abortion + Planned parenthood. Sorry. They are a abortion provider and so that is one of their official functions. For a better comparison it would be like giving federal founding the NAMBLA but claiming you only fund the community service part.
Paul, this is a nautical blog so I do not want to go too far afield. Nevertheless, outright falsehoods do bother me.
Your religious views regarding abortion should not interfere with the facts which are, as I noted before, that the US government does not fund abortion. Period. Abortion is a legal procedure and the fact that poor women or women in the military cannot get support when needed is an injustice fomented by the religious right, but so be it.
97% of all Planned Parenthood services are dedicated to women’s health. Planned Parenthood provides contraception, prenatal care and cancer screening to millions of women yearly. Only 3% their expenditures are related to abortion. If you choose to obsess on that 3% that is your issue, not mine. And yes, it is possible to segregate federal support for women’s health from abortions. The accounting is not that difficult.
And regarding the Catholic Church, it has engaged in an international criminal conspiracy to protect pedophile priests. In the US alone, the church has paid $2.5 billion dollars in settlements related to the institutional cover-up of priestly pedophilia. I think a far better case could be made for banning federal funding of the Catholic Church than to a provider of women’s health care.
We’ll probably never know the answer but I wonder how many of the people who helped these people are gay? Assuming some are, should the Gastonguay family jump back into the ocean?