Jim Bakker’s Conviction

I am elated by defrocked TV minister Jim Bakker’s conviction (“Bakker Guilty of Fleecing His TV Flock of Millions,” Part I, Oct. 6). For me, however, this victory is bittersweet, as it comes much too late to spare me tremendous suffering.

You see, for many years the Bakkers and their cohorts broadcasted their disease into my home. They secured my wife, and brainwashed her into attending their churches. Our marriage was destroyed and my relationship with my children severely crippled--a relationship which has only recently begun to heal.

Despite my rage at Bakker’s behavior I don’t want to see him fined or put behind abusive prison bars. That cruelty would only serve to further stimulate his hallucinations of the mythological Satan--a symbolic manifestation for the reality of our diseased socioeconomic-geopolitical system.

I recommend compassion instead. Jim Bakker should be committed to a peaceful, countryside sanitarium, away from the ever-present destructive fear of surviving in a neurotically competitive society.

There he may find “a safe place to feel,” and perhaps acquiesce to the counseling he needs to hopefully cure him of his religiously metaphored mental illness, which not only harms him, but everyone he has ever infected as well.

SIMON JESTER

Fountain Valley