laklak wrote:ESPN has pulled a play-by-play announcer from a University of Virginia football game because his name is Robert Lee, and that might offend people.

felltoearth wrote:Seems they were just trying to avoid the possibility that he may become the butt of a joke. Not unreasonable.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/n ... 592458001/

laklak wrote:Maybe they should just cover him with a black cloth, like they're doing with the statues.

Dan and Fran Keller will receive $3.4 million from the state of Texas for being wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades on prosecutors' claims that they sexually abused children as part of satanic rituals at the daycare they operated. (RICARDO BRAZZIELL / AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO)

Long before the age of the Internet and the fleeting spasms of mass hysteria that came with it (Remember Jade Helm? Pizzagate?), and going back to the late 20th century, when irrational fears moved slower and lasted longer, there was Satan.

The “satanic panic,” some call it now. It began some time in the 1980s, when newscasters and fundamentalist Christian cartoons warned of the evils of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and stretched into the 1990s, when police and psychiatrists saw thousands of unfounded accusations of ritualistic sex abuse and children were seized from British parents accused of devil worship.

One case still stands out.

“This country hasn’t seen anything like it since the Salem witch trials,” Texas Monthly wrote in 1994, in a profile of Dan and Fran Keller, operators of a daycare in Austin, Texas, who had been thrown in prison two years earlier.

The Kellers had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992. Children from their daycare centre accused them, variously, of serving blood-laced Kool Aid; wearing white robes; cutting the heart out of a baby; flying children to Mexico to be raped by soldiers; using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush; burying children alive with animals; throwing them in a swimming pool with sharks; shooting them; and resurrecting them after they had been shot.

They were hardly the only people to be accused by children during the panic. Many were exonerated long ago, like the 20 people wrongly convicted in the infamous Kern County sex abuse cases. Some now blame the phenomenon on “a quack cadre of psychotherapists who were convinced that they could dig up buried memories through hypnosis,” as Radley Balko wrote in a column for the Washington Post.

But the Kellers suffered for decades.

They served nearly 22 years in prison before a court released them in 2013, after years of work by journalists and lawyers to expose what proved to be a baseless case against them.

He named the baby Gary, after himself. He allegedly kept the biological father enslaved in the basement

Gary Willett Sr. is charged with forcible confinement and assault of the man to whom he allegedly didn’t provide the necessaries of life for nearly 25 years, as well as theft over $5,000 and abduction of a child under the age of 14.

A husband and wife enslave a homeless couple, routinely subjecting them to beatings and verbal abuse. They take their newborn baby and claim him as their own. The woman manages to leave after four years, abandoning her son, but her former partner remains captive for more than two decades, sleeping in a dirty basement, eating dog food, his teeth rotting.

A supply teacher's call to police about a six-year-old Muslim boy with Down’s Syndrome led to his family being investigated for terrorism.

Officers launched the probe after six-year-old Mohammad Suleiman allegedly kept repeating the words “Allah” and “boom” class.

His parents from the Texan city of Pearland, around 20 miles south of Houston, have claimed this cannot be true because “he doesn’t speak at all” and has “the mental capacity of a one-year-old.”

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By John Lancaster, CBC News Posted: Dec 14, 2017 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Dec 14, 2017 9:43 PM ET