Consider these five cases: (1) Myra Obasi, a Louisiana schoolteacher, was—she and her sisters believed after consultation with a hoodoo practitioner—possessed by demons. Her nephew’s nightmares were part of the evidence. So they left for Dallas, abandoned their five children, and the sisters then gouged out Ms. Obasi’s eyes. At the trial, she defended her sisters. They were trying to help her, she said. But hoodoo is not devil-worship; it is a cross between Catholicism and African-Haitian nativist religion. (2) Parents beat their child to death because she would not embrace their brand of
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