Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Is He Ready?

Warren is doing just about everything necessary to get himself over to the other side - and why not?  I would.  I mean -- when you commit adultery or pedophilia - or whatever the word is for the debauchery he has committed, why would you want to stay on this planet?  If you have a conscience, if you recognize the severity of these types of sins, you realize that the least you can do towards atonement is to die.  In earlier times, fellow church brethren could oblige and help you take the step.  Nowadays, in this pathetic, namby-pamby culture we live in, you are on your own.  If Warren keeps starving himself, and if the prison staff don't get in the way, we could be observing his early and timely passing very soon.  The drawback is that he may be cherished as a martyred prophet rather than as a disgraced pervert.

My question is this - if the Lord's prophet is dead and buried, will Lyle step in as the rightful heir?  Is he next in line? Is he the senior member of the 12 or the 7 or the 3 (or however many it is)?  Is he secretly aching for the chance to wrest control like Warren did?  Is he ready?  Is the Lord ready?  At the very moment when Warren takes his last gasp, will God resume this ostensibly unending stream of revelations by talking to Lyle ad infinitum?  Is it natural and normal for the thousands of faithful FLDS congregants to simply transfer their unstinting obeisance to the brother-in-waiting? 

I remember the passage in Moroni 10: 3-5, where we are admonished to test purported revelations.  If we are presented with the claim of prophecy or revelation from another party, we must study, ponder and pray, and ask God if these things are true.  Only after receiving direct personal confirmation from above that the alleged utterances are from Him are we to embrace them.  I pray that all my fellow saints in all the remnant communities will remember not to skip this critical step.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Downgrade

Forgive me if I beat a dead horse, but I need you folks to work with me here a second, and see if I'm not crazy.  Driving into the office this morning, I heard the news on the radio that credit agencies are considering downgrading Germany's credit rating!

Now, it was Germany who made the biggest contribution to the bailout of Greece and Portugal.  Germany is the biggest economy in Europe.  Last week we read that China's debt crisis is so severe that it is in worse shape than Portugal - China had to appeal to the European banks for an emergency bailout.

During the recent tsunami crisis in Japan, news reports revealed that Japan has a horrible debt crisis (200% to GDP).  If the U.S. Germany, China, and Japan, (the world's economic powerhouses), are in such bad financial shape, and the second-tier players, France, Spain, Korea, Italy, Canada, Australia, England, Brazil, etc, are on the brink of ruin, which countries have all the money?

All modern nations are now corporations - businesses in a sense.  We know that the U.S. banks are sitting on a mountain of cash (the cash stolen from us by Bush, Obama, Geithner and Bernanke), so where is the gold?  Where is the real wealth?  You cannot eat cash.  You cannot even eat precious metals.  Money is merely a token, a receipt for wealth.  True wealth comes from land-plus-labor - the machinery of productivity.  It seems to me that the banker folks have schemed for centuries to achieve a massive transfer of the tokens of wealth - Gold and Silver, and paper money.  The banks know no borders.  They are not "patriotic".

If all or most of the nations are drowning in debt, then they have successfully surrendered their wealth and money to the guys who do the lending.  If I am not mistaken, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the "World Bank" (along with a handful of other regional lenders) have gained control of all of the world's currency and are manipulating it to create WORLD-WIDE poverty and austerity.

We ourselves are as much to blame as the lenders, because we should have known better than to get in bed with them and trade our inheritances to them for worthless paper.  In Old Testament times it was a capital offense not only to lend upon usury (interest) but also to borrow with interest.

Who has the wherewithal to rectify this problem?

Friday, August 19, 2011

Obama Buys Votes

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called the Obama administration’s new policy that will allow many illegal immigrants who don’t have criminal records the chance to stay in the United States “backdoor amnesty.”
In a statement, the Republican governor slammed the planned case-by-case reviews of the approximately 300,000 illegal immigrants who are currently facing possible expulsion.
“This plan amounts to backdoor amnesty for hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of illegal aliens,” Brewer said on Thursday.
The Obama administration announced Thursday that its top priority will be targeting illegal immigrants with criminal convictions for deportations, and moving low-priority cases — such as young people who were brought to the U.S. as children, military veterans and spouses of military personnel — out of the deportation pipeline.
Brewer, who enacted one of the country’s toughest immigration laws, said the announcement “is encouraging more illegal immigration at the exact moment we need federal focus on border security.”
Oscar Chacon, the executive director of National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, one of the organizations that led protests against the Obama administration earlier this week about the rising number of deportations, said Brewer “clearly doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“You really have to be in the imaginary world to paint it as some sort of amnesty,” Chacon told POLITICO.
Last year, the Obama administration deported a record number of people — nearly 400,000. The rising number of deportations has angered the Hispanic community, which is a key voting bloc for President Barack Obama.
While taking aim at Brewer’s comment, Chacon made clear that his organization and those like it don’t see the new policy as a real immigration remedy. The first step, he said, is to end the Secure Communities program, in which local police share fingerprints of detainees with federal authorities and immigration officials.
“One of the political goals of yesterday’s announcement was precisely to distract organizations like ours from the focus on Secure Communities,” he said. “While we commend the announcement, we think it’s very late – why did they have to wait two and a half years?”
Brewer — who called the new deportation plan “especially disturbing” for border states such as Arizona in the wake of U.S. weapon sales to Mexican drug cartels — said Obama’s new policy “got it really wrong.”
“We need to remind President Obama that we elected a president that serves beneath the law and did not anoint a king that is above the law,” she said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61691.html#ixzz1VWBKL99t

Thursday, August 18, 2011

An Open Letter

 This letter was signed by William E. Jessop and Willie R. Jessop
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Saturday, August 13, 2011

My Three Wives

Doctor Drew Gets Into Polygamy!
This week on his nightly HLN tabloid show, Dr. Drew Pinsky got heavily into polygamy.  Above is what I believe may be a picture of Pinsky with his three "wives".  Jealous of the attention given to notorious pedophile, Warren Jeffs, Dr. Drew has apparently decided to expand his own family.

Like many impulsive, skirt-chasing men, Drew has no idea what he is getting himself into.  The above picture shows his wives taking him to task.  He does not yet realize that he may be looking forward to many years of stuttering, lying and exaggerating.  He will likely eventually wish he were in the Huntsville penitentiary with Jeffs.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

"SHUT IT DOWN" !!! ???

The Headline News folks have been marketing the Warren Jeffs trial controversy almost as giddily as they flogged the Casey Anthony epic.  The various hosts and guests have offered their opinions about how to address the after-effects of the FLDS nightmare.  Two, in particular, Sonny Hostin and Drew Pinsky, have been especially vocal in calling for the dissolution of the FLDS community.  "SHUT IT DOWN !!" they say.  They want Hoary Reid to resurrect his RICO-style task-force legislation to target polygamous organizations (???).  They want the community to die or simply stop existing.  Their myopia and cruelty are stunning.

Sonny Hostin
Drew Pinsky

Their guests, Kathy Jo Nicholson and Carolyn Jessop, seem to have no hesitation in calling for widespread law enforcement intervention into the community.  Send in tanks.  Send in an army of social workers.  Send in 100 psychiatrists.  Send in dozens of new police officers.  Arrest all the mothers.  If Warren molested several pubescent females, the 10,000 community members must be invaded by the government machinery.  These busybody hater-crusaders CANNOT stop hankering for a massive siege upon one or more religious minority societies.

I have no idea how they expect the government to implement such a campaign, but it appears the government might try.  The government has amnesia.  It cannot remember 1953 or YFZ-2008. 

So here's my take on this.  You people are jerks and idiots.  Do you seriously think a massive invasion will achieve anything good?  Are you willing to go in there with the SWAT team and point a gun?  Do you have enough room in your basement for 6,000 people to crash?  Do you have the $20 million Texas already wasted on a raid one tenth the size of the one you are proposing?

Let me, Renn Oldsbuster, explain it to you in terms you might understand.  There are currently three fairly distinct categories of people in the FLDS community, and their numbers could change.  You decide which ones to capture and arrest . . . . . . . . . .

GROUP 1:
These are the henchmen.  This is a finite group of individuals, which would include Lyle Jeffs and the other collaborating brethren.  It also includes Warren's wife who assisted in the molestations.  If law enforcement wants more convictions, it needs to go after the parties who participated (if they actually did) in the commission or covering-up of the protracted perversions.

GROUP 2:
These are the inveterate suck-ups.  These are the people who had NO IDEA of the atrocities perpetrated by their prophet because they were deliberately kept in the dark.  These people needed Warren to be a true prophet (deviant or not).  They insist on his being a prophet still today (even in his despicable disgrace).  These are the people for whom truth is mostly irrelevant.  They see fine robes on the naked emperor.  These people will cling to the Warren myth till liberals vote for Ron Paul.  They will go down with the ship. Their obedience to a false prophet is vain and foolhardy. You CANNOT prosecute these people. Their only crime is their pride and hard-heartedness.  They cannot be identified by any visual means.

GROUP 3:
This last group is made up of true believers.  They do not worship men.  They can detect false doctrine.  They are heart-broken to learn of deceit in those people they trusted.  They don't believe a man is automatically a "Prophet" because of his leadership position in a church.  They are willing to sacrifice anything, but only for true principle and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  These people would never have expected such depravity and betrayal from their leader.  However, now, as soon as they learn of it and absorb it, they come down squarely on the side of righteousness and will gladly link arms with other equally sincere saints.  If you persecute these people, you can expect to face eternal repercussions. 
--------------------------------------
So, crusader, explain to me how you will carry out your grand invasion.  Maybe you had better spend more of your busybody energies looking for a needle in a haystack or preparing for the day when Obama, Bernanke and Sir Evelyn come for you.

I think that what Warren Jeffs did is horrific.  Many of those little girls are probably 17 or 18 or 19 years old now.  Are they still pining for Warren to come home?  How much counseling and healing must they eventually undergo in order not to have torment for the rest of their lives?  Are their families giving them the emotional support they need?

Let us not forget that this travesty occurred on a somewhat limited scale.  I am unaware of any more male perpetrators other than Warren.  Let us not forget that a few years ago the Catholic Church dealt with an epidemic of molestations by its priests.  Despite the magnitude of those horrors, NOBODY is calling for the eradication of Catholicism or a mass raid on Catholic towns.  It is clear that people harbor a special and inexplicable resentment towards Fundamentalist Mormons.  I wonder why . . . . . . . . . . .

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Two Policies

I find it ironic that we have two states, Texas and Utah, who have diametrically dissimilar approaches to fantasy polygabigamy prosecutions.

In recent TV reports, we have heard that Warren Jeffs participated in "spiritual marriages".  If these marriages were "spiritual", then how does the state have any power over them?  Granted, if minors and sex were involved, then a prosecution should (and did) ensue.  Nevertheless, Texas is pushing forward with "bigamy" charges for several men, including Jeffs.

Mark Shurtleff recently stated that, in his response to Jonathan Turley's challenge of Utah's (nutty) bigamy statute, he will argue that Kody Brown doesn't have standing to bring suit because he and his family were never charged or harmed (just threatened [to the point of flight] by endless prosecutorial saber-rattling).

Meanwhile Shurtleff's less reticent Texas counterpart, Greg Abbott, has no qualms about charging consenting adults (like Wendell Nielsen and his life-partners) with violating adult sex guidelines (!!!).  Abbott must be one of the few AGs who were sleeping under a rock when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas.  

This will be a fascinating time.  I wonder if Jonathan Turley will now go to Texas and take up the cause of Wendell Nielsen - to prove his commitment to illustrating the absurdity of post-Lawrence morality statutes and prosecutions - in more than one state.

Again, now that Texas is eating Jeffs for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I wonder if the Mo' Church will reach out to Texas prosecutors and IMPLORE them to drop the remaining, looney bigamy prosecutions (in order to preserve its treasured Reynolds decision).

Monday, August 8, 2011

Unraveling

The leadership configuration of the FLDS is currently unraveling.  As wretched behaviors have been uncovered, the questions are starting to arise.  Who participated with Jeffs in his lasciviousness?  Who had full knowledge of it (besides the FBI)?  Whom is law enforcement pursuing for further prosecutions, or are the cops just going to give all the other actors a free pass now that they have nabbed the kingpin?

To me it all seems very clear cut.  Certain people knew and participated (Willie named some of them on TV today), and the rest of the folks were as oblivious as I was. 

Time for decisions. Time to draw a line in the sand. Time to come down squarely on one side or the other.  Either you are with Warren and his pedophilia, or you are with true principle, righteousness and the welfare of your young'uns.  You have a little time still to work things through because, if you don't have the Internet, you aren't seeing the news or reading my cynical sermons yet.  I'm gonna trust that the Creekerville rumor-mill is more efficient than texting, that the critical mass of truth and reality is already cresting, and that Willie Jessop will soon be received as an Abinadi rather than a Judas.  Just don't kill him for having the courage to tell the truth.

On the topic of unraveling, I am reminded (by the media) that an alleged 300 families were dismantled by Warren for God-knows-what reason.  Many men were simply banished, never to be heard from again.  Their wives and children were taken in by other men.  This went on for years.  Presumably, by now, these transplanted wives have had additional children by their new husbands.  How do you unravel that?  If the ousted men were honorable, and were ejected merely because Warren wanted their wives or kids, can they now return and have their families restored?  Can all the re-configured, reassigned families be unraveled and put back to their correct arrangement?  Can the clock be turned back?  Can a community of sincere believers come to terms with the fact that it was swept up in a whirlwind of deceit and evil?  Can they reconcile the precious truths of the Gospel and the betrayal that sprang out of the idolatry and priestcraft that crept in unnoticed by most?

World Devalued

The downgrading of the US credit rating by Standard and Poors this weekend has made ripples across the globe.  The Saudi Arabia stock exchange took a dive on Saturday, and the Asian markets dipped substantially.  Today, the Dow Jones average dipped 635 points, capping the worst week since 2008.

Reports are coming in that France is in deep debt and economic trouble, followed closely behind by England (where rioters are burning government buildings while I type).  The strongest of Europe's corporate national economies is Germany, and Germany does not have enough money to bail out even Greece or Ireland again, let alone the other nations to its west.  Let's not even talk about Japan.

Am I the only person whose mind this information boggles?  Fox News' Elizabeth McDonald just reported that -

"China’s debt-to-GDP ratio is worse than the United States’ ratio. It is worse than insolvent Portugal, which is now relying heavily on the European Central Bank for help, and had to go to the International Monetary Fund to get a financial bailout.

So, let me get this straight - the largest holder of the US's $14.2 trillion (and growing) national debt is China, and China is practically insolvent (who wouldn't be?), then who is it that all these countries keep turning to for more and more bailout money?  The third-world countries can't bail us out.  Clearly, the answer is  -  the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  But the not-so-clear question is -  who owns the International Monetary Fund, and is it a collection of private, international bankers?  And where in the world did they get all their money from?
The amount of loose, mined gold in the world is always growing.   Manpower is growing.  Crops are growing (except in those places where there is drought or stupid, price-controlling farm subsidies).  The central banks (e.g. Federal Reserve) increase the money supply (ability to repay debt) by printing more paper money.  This devalues the paper wealth of a nation.  Every nation is having its net worth devalued.  By whom?  If all the industrialized debtor nations have had to put up their entire land area as collateral on the now virtually unrepayable debt, then they are all ripe for foreclosure, repossession.  All of this torment was created artificially through usury and currency manipulation.  you would think that the Devil wants to bring us to the point where we are all dead or at each others' throats. Is the ultimate purpose of usury to earn huge profit or to repossess the collateral?  Or is it to RULE THE WORLD ????
Does this all sound like insanity to you?  Who would repossess a western nation?  Who has taken our money and loaned it back to us at interest?  You ask - - if this has been perpetrated against all the (once) noble western nations, why don't they rise up and slay the banker bastard(s) who did it and put an end to all this deficit controversy?  Why? - - - - -

 - - - - Because they are in bed with them and have assented to the whole plan.  The politicians (and not a few of their buddies) are in on the scam.  This has been the scheme for the last five to six thousand years.

King James Bible (Revelation 14:8)
And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
Do scriptural prophecies tell us reliably what is awaiting us?

Who's To Blame?

Jeremiah 23:

21. “I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied.
22.
But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people,
and they would have turned them from their evil way,
and from the evil of their deeds.
23. “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away?  
24. Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord 

Over the last few years, I have wanted to explore the very topical question of accountability.  Who is accountable when a person in an authority position leads his subordinates astray?  The Mormon Church grappled with this question in the mid 1900's.  The message was, "When the Church leaders have spoken, the thinking has been done.  If a leader tells you to do something, and it is wrong, do it and you will be blessed for your obedience."  

It is such a cozy, comforting feeling to know that you have a prophet nearby.  If God doesn't speak to you, but He does speak to someone in your Church, you can feel very reassured.  You can relax and figure that when God wants you to know something, He will tell "The Prophet", and the Prophet will tell you.  Even more reassuring if you believe that you are in the only "true", "right" church, and that church is taking you straight to the Celestial Kingdom (while everyone else is going straight to hell).  This is just simple human nature.  We all want security and comfort (even sometimes at the expense of others).

So what happens when the Prophet-leader-dude mucks up?  What happens when the President of the Church violates what God has taught?  In 1889, God told President Wilford Woodruff to make no more concessions to the courts regarding plural marriage. A year later, Woodruff defied God and announced the (at least feigned) cessation of polygamous marriages.  Eventually it stuck, and now the two camps exchange public barbs at each other for devolving into false religion.  Who was to blame?  Was it Woodruff - or was it the people - the people who would relax, capitulate and go along with it?

What happens when the Church tells the people that God would not "lead the leader astray" and that "were he to lead them astray, God would take him out of his place"?  Is this a passport to divine infallibility?  Is this what happened in the "One-Man-Rule" hierarchy in FLDS-ville?  Did the church-members abdicate their own free agency in exchange for perks and the reassurance of a fast-track ride to heaven?  Who is to blame? - a lecherous leader who takes the people's money and daughters and commits depravity in secret? - or is it the people who (despite their naivete) willfully surrendered their self-determination and allowed others to govern their families' destinies?

This is the big philosophical question, and li'l ol' Renn has the answer.  EVERYONE is accountable!  Who was to blame for forcing the devout Fundamentalists into the "wilderness"?  Was it the Feds, the State, the Church, the Arizona and Utah citizens who supported the witch-hunt, and Detective Bishop Fred E. Curtis, who investigated criminal suspects during the week and excommunicated them on Sundays?  Who was to blame for re-structuring a community and stripping it of its basic Constitutional principles of common-consent and free-agency (Warren or Lintbag)?  The answer - EVERYONE.

It's time for everyone involved in this 100+-year mess to take a hard look at his and her own personal responsibility and choices - and then take accountability.  Then let's go back to loving and forgiving each other, and work together and prepare for the bigger challenge that awaits us right around the corner.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

The Saddest Part

This week's revelations about Warren Jeffs's molestations of pre-teens is positively galling.  I pray that the (now-somewhat-older-teen) girls are finding some solace and recovery from their doubtless horrifying experiences.  I hope they are safe, and that their parents are not dismissing their stories as heresy or fantasy.  The utter violation of these girls' chastity and virtue is an offense worthy of capital punishment (I mean it!).  The saddest part of this is that they probably had no one to turn to at the time - no one who would even begin to believe such clandestine treacheries were occurring in the church - perpetrated by one revered as virtually a god on earth.

Perhaps almost as sad is the fact that seven men are already serving extraordinarily long prison sentences in Texas for their (arranged) "marriages" to 15- and 16-year-old girls (see this article).  You and I both know the difference here.  First, these men's relationships were considered REAL (though plural) marriages - not some perverse orgiastic horror perpetrated in secret.  Early marriages were once considered acceptable in the FLDS community (if not everywhere else, including Texas).  By all accounts, these imprisoned men were/are model citizens and are deeply missed by those same wives (and their children).  Stirred up by its malice for Jeffs, Texas found a way to vent its rage upon these seven men, imposing sentences as long as 75 years ( - - teachers who molest 11- to 13-year-old pupils in Texas have even recently been sentenced to probation).  Don't think I am excusing these men's crimes.  They are all grown, intelligent heads-of-families who should have known better.

Secondly, however, my guess is that the marriages to these teen girls were most likely "sprung" upon the parties with little more than an hour's notice by the "prophet" himself, and the parties would have faced the loss of everything, were they to have protested.  If you have lived in that community since birth, and you want to remain, you do as you are told, or you would end up like many a Barlow  - houseless, wifeless, childless, jobless, churchless, and friendless.

So now we are left with a strange and sad state of affairs.  Warren has called off the crack legal team which was working diligently on the appeal of the men's convictions (based on an improper search).  The evidence should clearly be suppressed, but will it?  Not unlike the unwitting and uninformed folks back in Short Creek, these Texas inmates must know little of the trial of their (now-disgraced) leader.  Do they know yet the extent to which they were betrayed?  Must they now sit behind bars for decades wondering what the heck just happened, waiting for a liberation that isn't coming?

Justice and Mercy can be balanced out pretty well - -  if only politics and perversion don't have to be involved.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Cult Rumors

cult/kəlt/Noun

1. A system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
2. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.
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"The word cult pejoratively refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre. The word originally denoted a system of ritual practices. The narrower, derogatory sense of the word is a product of the 20th century, especially since the 1980s, and is considered subjective. It is also a result of the anti-cult movement which uses the word in reference to groups seen as authoritarian, exploitative and that are believed to use dangerous rituals or mind control. The word implies a group which is a minority in a given society." (Wikipedia)
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One of the news channels had Steve Hassan speaking about cults last night.  "Cult" is another one of those exquisite weapon words.  If you don't like another person's religion, just call it a cult.  Clearly there is disagreement over a strict definition of the word 'cult'.  Nevertheless, there seems to be consensus that it can rightly be applied to situations like Jim Jones' Jonestown People's Temple mass suicide event in 1978.  We have heard the word used regarding Sun Myung Moon (the Moonies) and also to the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who set up an enormous cult commune in Oregon (only later to run into immense legal problems and deportation).

Yours Truly, Renn Oldsbuster, has few peers more committed to the ideal of religious freedom, so I am prompted to wonder if, in a reclusive cult, religious freedom can suffer its greatest restraint.  It has become ridiculously convenient for outside critics to call the FLDS community a cult, so does it really satisfy the definition?  There are rumors being circulated by ex-FLDS people that certain cult-like conditions are developing in the FLDS society.  Are they true?  Are the people free to come and go and associate freely with whomever they choose?

It is being rumored that Jeffs' brother has taken temporary control over the community, that he has demanded that followers sell everything they can and bring the cash to him to fund Warren's legal efforts.  Purportedly, members are now forbidden to use smartphones or the Internet, or to watch TV or read a newspaper.  WHY ???  If this is true, could it be an attempt to guarantee that members do not learn of the horrible (alleged) bad acts committed by their venerated leader?

Some have suggested that, with a complete media blackout, the pro tem FLDS leader can spin the news of his brother Warren's conviction as a terrible miscarriage of justice - the proof of gross religious persecution.  If a large number of the members can thus be fooled into continuing to follow deceitful direction and false information, does that not then constitute cult-like control?  Do they even have a clue that they are not being told the truth when all news and information is filtered or manipulated?

Surely this has not been the case under all FLDS leaders?  There have been periods of openness - Glasnost.  Not always have other, fellow Fundamentalist Mormons been derided as "APOSTATES".   Why now?  Is it a carefully orchestrated cover-up?  Can the cover-up go on much longer?

With inevitable leaks, is there now a schism brewing?  Are there some community members (aligned with William E. Jessop) who have repudiated Jeffs' idiosyncrasies (excuse the euphemism), and who want FLDS-ville to return to the kind of society envisioned by Joseph Smith?  Are their numbers growing, as more and more members discover the inescapable truth and draw a line in the sand, morally distancing themselves from priestcraft and mind-control, accepting that they were temporarily and innocently misled by dangerous one-man-infallibility deceptions?

Are the "cult" rumors true, or it is time to make sure that they at least STOP being true?

Thursday, August 4, 2011

More Fodder

Brighter Days
What Happened ???
"I am not the prophet."

I happened to notice today that the Warren Jeffs sexual assault trial was wrapping up in Texas.  Apparently, there were audio recordings of Jeffs allegedly schooling young adolescent girls in the practice of human intimacy (shudder !!!!!!).

I saw some of the hater-nasties spouting their outrageous exaggerations on the Headline News network again.  It was a veritable "cult"-bashing fest.  In the absence of any counterbalancing voice, they were able to spout unchecked - - - water-boarding, dead-babies, incest, child abuse, abandoned boys, forced marriages - the list goes on.  With the shocking revelations emerging from the Jeffs trial, the hater-harpies appear now to have more fodder to call for the eradication of an entire culture.  If the allegations against Jeffs are true, he should do prison time.  If he had accomplices, then they should be prosecuted, too.  One anchor said that with the "cult's" leader now gone, perhaps this whole FLDS "cult" can be shut down - whatever that means.  I mean, what does she want to do with 10,000 people who have just discovered the human failings of their once-revered leader?  Should we nuke the whole town, kids and all (Waco-style)?

I am reminded of those "War of the Worlds"-type movies from the sixties - the ones where the army fires on the aliens before the aliens can even voice the words, "Take me to your leader".  If it looks like a Martian, kill it, then ask questions later.  - - - Or the Frankenstein ones with the frantic mob of Transylvanian townsfolk with torches and pitchforks, itching for a bloodbath.

Hopefully now, the long-overdue epiphany can occur in FLDS-ville - where the faithful congregants can see past the deceit of "divine infallibility" of their corruptible human leaders.  Meanwhile, the State, with all its fangs, can call off the dogs and realize that, just because one maniac went kooky and destroyed precious lives, the innocent people around him don't have to be guilty by association.  Perhaps the hater-hags can think seriously about providing sincere support instead of spreading lies and exaggerations all over the television - more fodder or not.  Sadly, the truth is still not as sexy as wild fabrications.  What motivates you - money, fame, notoriety, political ascendancy, revenge, lust, power?  Are you not as corrupt as the one at whom you are throwing stones?

Three Tiers

In the seventies, the United States Supreme Court was feeling the need to bolster the civil rights protections craved by certain groups.  If a state legislature got a wild hair to pass a dumb law - like "Negroes must not sing on street corners", then the high court could overturn the law and void it.  As various classes or groups then clamored for similar protections, the Court was then faced with a dilemma.  The question was - how far could the Court go to intervene in state statutes?  By what standards could the Court review the state's laws when someone complained that they were unfair or biased?

There were people who were poor and people who were old.  The Court had sympathy for them, too, so it had to formulate a way of preventing bad laws targeting them.  But surely poor or old people weren't discriminated against as badly as were colored people, were they?

Ultimately, it was decided that the Court would use a "Three-Tiered" framework of review to scrutinize the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of certain legislation.  Thus, if a law impacted people according to race (or even religion), then the Court could apply the strictest standard of scrutiny ("Strict Scrutiny") to that law.  The impacted class was termed a "Suspect Class".  See this article.

The second tier - the one affecting poor or old people - would trigger "heightened (or intermediate) scrutiny".  These people fell into what was called the "Quasi-Suspect Class".  This also came to include people discriminated against because of gender.

The final, and lowest standard of review is the least demanding.  The term often used is "rational basis".  This means that, if the state can show that it had at least a "rational basis" for enacting a law, then that would satisfy the Court - the Court would just look away, basically.

So, in short, if you (as a member of a particular class of individuals) want to be protected from unreasonable laws, you had better be at least poor or old, or, better still - have dark skin.

This process signaled the need to define what a "class" of people was.  I quote from Wikipedia -

"Some of the criteria that have been cited include:

  • The group has historically been discriminated against, and/or have been subject to prejudice, hostility, and/or stigma, perhaps due, at least in part, to stereotypes.[1]
  • They possess an immutable[2] and/or highly visible trait.
  • They are powerless[2] to protect themselves via the political process. (The group is a "discrete" and "insular" minority.[3])
  • The group's distinguishing characteristic does not inhibit it from contributing meaningfully to society."
Certain types of people fell neatly into a class - for example - albinos (or amputees).  Albinos don't get to choose to stop being albinos.  Blacks do not have the ability to choose to be Caucasian.  Old people cannot decide to become young again (except for Joan Rivers).  These classifications are permanent and easy to define.

Other, less easily definable classes include Catholics, felons, homosexuals, polygamists, etc.  In the 1990's, gay Coloradoans fought hard to be viewed as a distinct class (in order to merit "protected status") (see Romer v. Evans).  After all, virtually all gay people feel that their sexual orientation is NOT a choice.  They are unable to experience sexual attraction to people of the opposite sex.

The Supreme Court disagreed and decided that the three-tiered framework would be final.  No new groups could be added to the Suspect and Quasi-Suspect classes.  This was brought to my mind again yesterday when I read a blogpost from a gentleman who insisted that homosexuality is an involuntary condition, while polygamy is a choice.  WOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Think about that!  Gay people are drawn to same-gender partners.  They cannot get excited about the opposite sex.  Still, when they bond with one or more individuals, it is a CHOICE.  They select a partner through free choice.  They reject the partners they find unappealing.  Why is this different from polygamists?  The fact that polygamists are a "class" of people who have not been accorded any special kind of status (suspect or quasi-suspect) is the reason why the state of Utah can get away with arguing that its asinine bigamy law is worthy of only "rational-basis" review - that it need only argue that it has a "compelling interest" in protecting the sacred sacrament of holy matrimony within its borders.  With such a low standard of scrutiny, the Supreme Court is at best complacent.  The argument, however, is as flawed as the one promoted by the Prop 8 supporters in California who insisted that if Tim and Jeremy next door got a marriage license, then the neighborhood children would grow up to be murderers - - there simply is NO causal relationship.

If you think about it, there are thousands of polygamous families in Arizona and Utah.  If Reynolds were overturned, what would change?  NOTHING !!!  Their numbers would remain the same.  The only difference would be that perhaps they would be persecuted less, and they would live more in the open, and the Mormon Church would feel a little bit more self-conscious.

I am attracted to Beatrice.  I love Beatrice.  I want to have children with Beatrice.  Beatrice is my wife.  I choose not to leave her.  I love Violet. I can't make myself stop loving her.  She is physically attractive to me.  I am not attracted to Fred.  I cannot make myself be attracted to Fred.  Intimacy with Fred would disgust me.  I love Cecilia and Phoebe.  They love me too.  They trust that I will never leave them or our children.  I cannot make myself stop loving and supporting my plural family.

Tell me how polygamy is a choice.  I could say I choose not to be attracted to Marilyn Monroe, but it would be a lie.  No course of therapy could get me to find her ugly.

I think this is the fundamental logical disconnect in society's view of polygamy.  Society feels that polygamy is a sin, a crime, and that its practitioners should just choose to stop committing this "sin", this "crime".  There is confusion over what is inherent nature and what is moral choice.  Serial killers may be born with psychopathy or may have acquired it.  Therapy does not fix them. The inclinations are permanent.  Their crimes are a combination of nature and personal decision making.  Nature does not excuse accountability. 

I am a polygamist - it's hardwired into my DNA.  You cannot change that.  You can kill me, but, like Ogden Kraut, I will still be a polygamist.  By nature, I am attracted to a significant number of women.  I choose not to commit adultery.  By nature I am not attracted to children.  I choose not to marry nasty women.  I choose to pay my bills.  Most guys I have met seem to have an innate tendency to be attracted to multiple women.  That is biological or genetic or something like that.  The "choice" part comes in when the guy "chooses" to be loyal or not.  Fidelity is a conscious choice.  Polygamous attraction is no less hard-wired than same-gender attraction - - - - PROVE ME WRONG !!!!

I believe that gay people are incapable of undoing their homosexuality.  That is not a choice.  Whom they choose to marry is entirely free will.  I cannot undo my polygamousness - it is a permanent part of my biology.  I do, however, freely choose whom I marry.

My point is that, when the Supreme Court starts down the pathway of defining classes of people, it should remember that I can no more choose to stop being a polygamist (by nature) than a person with Down syndrome can choose not to have Trisomy 21.  My conduct is, however, pursuant to my choice.  No argument defending the rights of gays to marry does not also prove that polygamists should have the right to marry.  If legal marriage can be inflected by gender, why can it not also inflect by number?
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Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Irony of Ironies

Simpson
Lintbag

General Authority
Stake President
An article today in Utah's Salt Lake Tribune reported that Judge Diseased Lintbag just ordered Shark Murtleff to pay Brutal Wisass's trumped up ($5 million) in fiduciary (ripoff racket) fees.  There are too many ironies in all of this for me to capture all at once.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that these three characters are all establishment Mormons - I mean - the kind of Mormons for whom Church membership is a badge, a trophy, a lubricant, a passport, a club membership card, an indulgence, a free pass, a mask,  - - - you know what I mean.  One thing it is not is a guarantee of purity.

They are locked in a bitter struggle despite their unstinting allegiance to the mother Church.  Clearly, Lintbag is in Wisass's corner.  She has NEVER NOT ruled in his favor.  She is his advocate.  She must almost be hoping for a cut of the ill-gotten gains. She desperately wanted to sell UEP property chunks to raise money for Wisass's commissions. Now that it looks like there is little chance of getting blood out of the UEP stone, Lintbag has decided to mine slightly deeper pockets - the Utah A.G.'s.  She now finds herself in Dee Benson's corner.  Perhaps Lintbag's campaign against the FLDS and the federal judge must take a back seat to the need to secure cash for Wisass.

The FLDS and Shurtleff made repeated good-faith efforts to arrive at a settlement agreement, but Lintbag refused at every turn, effectively causing Wisass's fraud meter to keep on running.  The only conclusion I can make is that Lintbag spent so much time at Happy Valley U, that her brain went permanently soft.

As I have said before, just because the leader of the FLDS community has long been devolving in a pathetic public disintegration, is that justification to persecute an entire community???  Lintbag and Barbie must have taken Hubris 101 together.  Governor Pyle could have taught them a thing or two about tar babies.

Gerunds - "-ing"

In English grammar we have an element of speech often referred to as a gerund.  Latin has gerunds (verbal nouns) and gerundives (verbal adjectives).  Both translate into English as gerunds.  A good example of a gerund is the word - "drinking" - in the following sentence -


"Drinking too much is unwise."

We use gerunds every day in our spoken and written communications.  Gerunds typically end with the suffix "-ing", e.g. - "I am sinking".  In the recent revelation given to Warren Jeffs by God, demanding Barbie's immediate recusal from Jeffs' trial, one can clearly see that God is liking to using gerunds (as evidenced by their copious using throughout the revelation).  Here is an excerpt (followed by a list of the gerunds used). Take a look -

  " . . God is in the labor of this and other labor of pure way of truth, having full way of knowing what is in the heart of each person who is on my holy way of pure doing, to let them see I am the Doer of my Delivering for my Order of Eternal Union, of the holy noble way of my most pure way of pure abiding my law powering of pure holy labor in a full labor of my holy way being of Celestial power of my revealing truth."

"Dismissing, doing, recusing, doing, doing, titling, writing, having, knowing, doing, delivering, abiding, powering, doing, believing, pertaining, revealing, having, using, corrupting, revealings, defiling, ruling, heeding, allowing, protecting, having, deriding, having, giving, judging, considering, coming, abusing, abusing, taking, upbringing, care-taking, monitoring, corrupting, living, living, helping, allowing, training, living, being, abusing, deceiving, lying, doing, allowing, heralding, desecrating, revealing, abiding, guiding, exalting, being, requiring, desecrating, exalting, revealing, condemning, proceedings, rulings, allowing, defiling, administering, everlasting, being, governing, defiling, warning, rulings, keeping, setting, defiling, building, living, being, proceedings, heralding, judging, defiling, voicing, doings, appearing, cleansing, administering, honoring, living, revealing, suffering, revealing, being, judging, thinking, revealing, contemplating ruling, ruling, judging, revealing, administering, publishing, adjudicating, thinking, guiding, abiding, proceeding, doing, ruling, recusing, suffering, doing, persecuting, delivering, revealing, publishing, ruling, protecting, judging, knowing, assembling, doing, writing, abiding, removing, governing, governing, appearing, judging, exalting, repenting, doing."

I am thinking that that about sums it up, doesn't it?  I only wonder how different the revelation would be, were it to have come through the pen of Dr. Seuss.

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