And all his works and pomps

According to the National Center for Reason and Justice, Francis Keller has been released from a Texas prison.

Since 1993, Keller has been serving a 48-year sentence for a crime that she did not commit. Worse than that, she has spent the past 20 years in prison for a crime that never happened.

Fran and Dan Keller ran a child-care center in Oak Hill, Texas. They were accused, and convicted, of Satanic ritual abuse. We know they were innocent of this charge because:

1. The child they were convicting of abusing, who was then 3 years old, has since said that no abuse occurred and that she was repeating the accusations she’d been coached and instructed to deliver.

2. No physical or medical evidence suggests any abuse ever took place and no physical evidence was ever found of the graves in which the Kellers allegedly buried young children alive after baptizing them in blood.

3. Satanic ritual abuse does not exist.

Yet Fran Keller was sent to prison for 20 years because of an imaginary crime committed against non-existent victims.

Why?

I can’t believe this was the result of well-meaning people who were just trying to protect children from people they sincerely believed were a threat.

“All I care about, my passion, is helping survivors of child abuse,” says Australian “advocate” Liz Mullinar. But Mullinar also claims to have helped more than 500 people who were victims of Satanic ritual abuse. That story isn’t from 1983 or from 1993. That story is from today, in 2013. And it’s all terribly familiar — the spectral evidence of “recovered memories,” the implication that the lack of evidence of the alleged massive conspiracy of Satanists is somehow proof of their power, etc.

But a “passion” for helping survivors or for protecting children won’t produce the lurid fantasies of grisly, bizarre rituals that we’ve been hearing ever since this moral panic began in the 1980s. Those fantasies in all their horrid detail had to be imagined, invented, disseminated and embellished — and that process doesn’t seem like anything that would arise from a motive of helping survivors or of protecting real children from real dangers.

This isn’t about protecting children or saving babies. It’s just fantasy role-playing — the sensation of imaginary heroism that comes from battling imaginary monsters.

Do you renounce the Satanic baby-killers and all their works and pomps?

No. Nothing good can come from renouncing that which does not exist. Defining oneself in opposition to imaginary evils only leads to real evils and real injustices.