Off With Their Heads

I am still scratching my head over the FLDS implosion.  In 2005, the State of Utah seized the FLDS UEP trust and ran up millions in inflated fiduciary fees.  The Hooles assisted with the rewording of the UEP trust statement, hoping to plunder the trust for their own gain.  Warren told his followers to "Answer them nothing."  Young men were illegally detained and imprisoned in an Arizona prison, simply because they had no idea of Warren's whereabouts and could not disclose something they didn't know.

Warren was captured in 2007, but his conviction in a Utah court was overturned.

In 2008, 439 children were confiscated from the FLDS ranch in west Texas.  The feds knew at the time that Warren was molesting little girls.  The little kids were returned thanks to Julie Balovich, but Warren was later convicted by a Texas court, and should remain in his Texas prison until the next millennium.

Probably dozens of the young teen girls (now adults) still remain under FLDS house arrest.  Only God knows how they can regain a normal life in the wake of the destruction of their perverse, fairy-tale culture.

Fiduciary Bruce Wisan eventually had to get his filthy lucrative fees from the Utah legislature.  Mark Shurtleff, then the A.G. who targeted the FLDS, found himself at cross purposes with Judge Denise Lindberg, who would make a ruling in favor of the FLDS if her life depended on it.

Federal Judge Dee Benson demanded that the State return the UEP trust to its trustee (Warren Jeffs), but that got thwarted, too.

A wise man once told me that one can liken the UEP trust to an egg.  The egg was once fresh and whole and desirable.  Then somebody scrambled it and cooked it.  Then someone else came along and burned it.  Try as you might, you cannot return that egg to its shell, and put things back to how they were before.

Willie Jessop sued the FLDS church to recoup the money he loaned Warren to pay for all the lawyers who defended him.  Answering "them nothing", Warren watched Willie win the suit by default and earn a $20 million award.  Since then, Willie has gained control of the spectacular mansions built for Warren by his followers since his incarceration.  The porn theaters have been removed. 

After a period of time under the leadership of John Wayman, the control of the FLDS people has been handed back to Warren's brother, Lyle.  Warren and Lyle have bled virtually every penny out of the remaining faithful.  The number of faithful is dwindling steadily as they are systematically ejected from the fold because of any number of petty violations or heresies.  Families and children are abandoned, then jumbled up at Warren's whim.  Warren is now certifiably insane, so one has to wonder why Lyle complies with every directive.  Perhaps it is because he likes not working and living for free off other people's labors.  No one has been allowed to marry since 2006, and rumors abound now that a select group of men has been selected to play the role of community impregnators.  One thing is for sure - hundreds of families have been ripped to shreds, and some exiles are still trying to gain back the infant children they handed over to the church police while they were still sucked in by Warren.

This is turning out to be one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the days of Stalin.  It is a true tar baby for the State.  The State may have had a vision of some sort to rehabilitate the twin towns, but it didn't come about.  My sense is that the degree of indoctrination in the FLDS was so extreme, that many of the excommuniqués barely understand what has happened to them.  Would you feel guilty if you had been born into an oppressive cult, and had surrendered your free agency to a lunatic, just because your church's theology so dictated?  Would it be your fault, or just the fault of the lunatic and his cronies?

I wrote a blogpost in 2011 - Critical Mass - in which I pondered the eventual dissolution of the community.  I guess we are there now.  If we accept the premise of a pre-existence, we allow that all of the participants in this adventure consented to come to earth at this time and be tested by it.  For us outsiders, our duty is to provide whatever kindness and support is desired by those who have become victims of the nightmare.  I hope that we remember that it was NOT POLYGAMY that caused all this.  It was stupid humans doing cruel, selfish stuff.  That's the lesson.

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.

What Does It Mean?

I just read a Salt Lake Tribune article about the moral departure of Willie (R.) Jessop from Warren Jeffs.  What does this mean?  Jessop was quoted as saying, "I came to the point where Mr. Jeffs’ conduct was indefensible and have chosen not to defend it publicly or privately."  Jessop said also, " . . . but what came to light in Texas is morally indefensible.”  What does he mean?  Does Texas law enforcement have critical information about Jeffs that the rest of us have not yet seen?  What is in the "millions" of pages of discovery documents Texas seized?  Did Jeffs confess to actually having sex with 12-year-olds?  Does someone have information about sex with 12-year-olds which corroborates the discovery documents?  Have the general members of the FLDS communities been shielded from access to such information?  Are they vouching for Jeffs only because they have been kept oblivious of the truth?

If Texas has damning evidence about foul acts on Jeffs' part with pre-pubescent girls, can it be made public before the trial?  Will the trial be delayed until Jeffs' attorneys have had a few years to read the "MILLIONS OF PAGES" of discovery?  Is Jessop revealing this now because, if he doesn't, it could be a long time before it comes to light?  How many other people know the information?  Did Jeffs expel other people because he learned that they had discovered his (allegedly) "indefensible conduct" and didn't want them to come forward with it?

So many questions !!!

I say Jeffs (like all Americans) has a constitutional right to a fair trial (a thing which the other Texas defendants likely did not get).  It was long claimed that Jeffs' twelve-year-old "marriages" went unconsummated until the girls were older - which begs for the production of more evidence.  Nevertheless, I also applaud Jessop's courage in speaking what he apparently believes to be the truth in what some are claiming is an atmosphere of secrecy and fear.  This is a delicate situation, because one would not want to see a fair trial be derailed because of revelations made by a former defense-team-member.

I don't envy the Commerce Division (or the court) who may soon be tasked with the job of deciding who is the rightful holder of the position of Corporation of the President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Somehow it seems that it should no more choose the religious leader of the church than Diseased Pousse Lintbag should have re-written the Trust's religious intent language.

It makes me want the truth to be made clear very soon, so that the good people of the FLDS congregations can "choose the right" and have their Trust and normal lives restored.  After all, is that not what they want?  Is that not what the State always wanted?

I also echo the sentiments of Mary Bachelor who, in June of 2008, wrote this post.  If it is demonstrated that Jeffs is truly guilty of the (I say - capital) offenses alleged, will the community eventually conclude that Jeffs' leadership was fraudulent and morally bankrupt from the start, and that many families should not have been forcibly dismantled?  What does all this mean?

Head Scratch

He's cuter than she is !!!

I'm still scratching my head.  I heard a news reporter last night pose the question of whether, in the history of our nation, two different sovereign courts have ever gotten into such a tussle as the one currently escalating between the Utah district court (Pousse Lintbag) and federal district court (Dee Benson).

Today, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on Judge Benson's order to return FLDS documents (at least until it can be briefed on the controversy).  I told you - polygamy gets people all lathered up. If this thing gets any more crazy, I think the world could split in two.  Actually, worse than that, the FLDS might not get their trust back.

The court wants more hearings and who knows if the attorneys are getting paid? Brutal Wisass is about to be disqualified as an evil trespasser, and, worse still, the internal squabble over FLDS leadership threatens to derail the return of the trust to its rightful owners - the FLDS people.

Looking at the big picture, I seriously doubt that Shortlaff and crew want to keep their fingers in the UEP Trust pie for very long. It has brought them nothing but expense, frustration and humiliation.  Maybe some people just want to see it destroyed - wiped off the map.

I think it's time for the parties involved who are stupid, wrong, selfish or evil to back off and realize that the community was created by decent, honorable people, so it should only be controlled by decent, honorable people, and not by liars, plunderers or outsiders who care more for themselves than for the welfare of the people.

However, as I scratch my head, I think of the feud that lasted years in Northern Ireland between virtual kinfolk - the Irish Protestants and Catholics.  They bombed and murdered each other until the children could no longer remember what the original argument was about, or who hit whom first.  I wonder - does it need to get that bad?  Do these kinds of battles help the participants to show their true colors and their true nature?  Did we come to earth (or to the Rocky Mountains) to show God whose side we are on (as evidenced by the way we treat our fellow man [or woman])?

I believe this war has been about religion and authority - whether Monson or Jeffs or Wisan or someone else is the true holder of the keys of leadership in the restored church.  Do we truly want to come to blows over a theological nuance (or has it been about money and control all along)?

More Insanity

Last week, our nation was perched on the brink of destruction . . . . . NOT !!!!   We fell off that cliff already in 1865 (or earlier).

The debate raged on for weeks, splitting angry hairs over several partisan issues.  The argument hinged on approximately $38.5 billion in deficit cutting measures.  The current (2011) deficit will be larger than last year's regardless, so what did we gain?  In fact, the 2011 deficit is really seventeen hundred billion dollars ($1.7 trillion).  The New York Times blasted the Republicans for jeopardizing the health and welfare of the old and the poor.  The liberals are so hell-bent on running up America's indebtedness, that there can be no doubt that they are determined to crash the economy and bring about a fundamental (new world order) regime change (the inevitable outcome of national insolvency).  Not long ago, the International Monetary Fund announced that in the "new order", capital will need to be driven more by the state than by the market.

I heard politicians from both sides of the aisle today saying that if we do not let the federal debt ceiling be raised next month, the nation will default on its debts and face "cataclysmic" repercussions.  This one hurt my brain, so I pondered on it and realized that what they mean is that we must agree to secure a higher "credit limit" because we need to be able to borrow more money -------- IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO PAY OUR DEBTS BACK !!!!   Go figure !!

Here in Arizona, we waited with bated breath today for a state judge to FINALLY find Brutal Wisass guilty of felony criminal trespass but, lo and behold (and despite promises to the contrary), the ruling did not come today - - - - and what happened instead was that Diseased Lintbag issued a smug ruling and thumbed her nose at the federal district court, forbidding Wisass to turn over the previously ordered documents to the FLDS UEP trust representatives.  One has to wonder if Lintbag and the Arizona judge are colluding somehow, or if quiet money is changing hands.

A wise man pointed something out to me last week - something I was embarrassed not to have realized on my own.  Over the years, a string of abuse allegations have been leveled at the FLDS community.  Every community has its black sheep - a percentage of bad seeds, abusers, cheats and charlatans.  Look at any large or small city or even at the Mormon Church!  It would actually be a bizarre aberration if the FLDS people (the vast majority of whom are humans) DID NOT have a statistically predictable fraction of perpetrators in their midst.  Why, then, must detractors, politicians and reporters focus SO MUCH of their attention on that remarkably small percentage of troubled adherents in a single fundamentalist Mormon congregation and extrapolate from their failings that the ENTIRE community is crooked, perverted and evil - and that it must be eradicated?

This is just more insanity to me.

  7.   Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you, and ye shall be hated of all nations, for my name's sake;
  8.   And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another;
  9.   And many false prophets shall arise, and shall deceive many;
  10.  And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold;
  11.  But he that remaineth steadfast and is not overcome, the same shall be saved. (Matthew 1, [JST])

Strange Bedfellows

Some ironies can reach historic proportions.  I would argue that it was the religious Christian folks of the 1870's who clamored the loudest for the eradication of the Mormons (or at least the "barbaric" Mormon practice of polygamy).  Whether unintended or not, the eventual consequence was that the Supreme Court weighed in and authorized the states to limit First Amendment "free exercise" when associated with certain claims of religious protection. This amounted to a legislative "blank check".  You could "believe" what you wanted to, but the "exercise" of those beliefs had to now be supervised by government moods.  It was understood that the government would thenceforth control the sacrament of holy matrimony.  Marriage contracts went from common-law ecclesiastical to civil-law legal.

Now that marriage is a government institution (where the state is a party to your marriage), it might be easy to limit the number of the spouses, but much more difficult to dictate the gender of the parties to the contract.  Several states (and Canada) now marry same-sex couples - mostly because there is no intelligent argument for why our government should favor one religious theology or sacrament over another (not to mention family arrangements post-Griswold and Roe).  Our nation may have been founded as a Christian republic, yet, with the fraudulent "ratification" of the Fourteenth Amendment, we are now a secular corporation in which religion should hold no influence.

The irony of this situation now is that those same religious Christian folks (who yearned to curtail the rights of the Mormons) are upset with the (unintended) outcome.  They are not sure of whom to be most afraid - the gays or the polygs.  Even more ironic still, is the mass migration of the Mormons themselves into this petulant crusade (evident in the Proposition 8 madness).  Last Friday (2/5/11) LDS Apostle Dallin H. Oaks gave an impassioned speech arguing for the protection of Americans' rights to "exercise" their religious beliefs.  Before you get fooled into thinking that he is arguing for a full-scale reversal of the Reynolds decision, let's see what his primary focus is:

Said Elder Oaks: "Along with many others, I see a serious threat to the freedom of religion in the current assertion of a 'civil right' of homosexuals to be free from religious preaching against their relationships."

Problem is - Dallin - you cannot have your cake and eat it too, so, while you are busy championing your right to exercise your belief that government must not allow gays to marry, I am grateful that you are simultaneously championing my right to call my three girl-friends "plural wives" without having to go to prison for felony bigamy. Oaks also said:

"If that [constraining the freedom of religious speech] happens, we will have criminal prosecution of those whose religious doctrines or speech offend those whose public influence and political power establish them as an officially protected class." 

Am I the only one who sees the irony and hypocrisy of these statements when they are analyzed against the backdrop of political/ecclesiastical policies in Utah?  Judge Desleaze Lintbag said that she cannot give the UEP Trust back to the FLDS people because their practice of plural marriage makes them criminals!  Remarkably, she is re-enacting the conduct of earlier government officials who would not return the property of the LDS Church in the 1890's unless it repudiated one of its core doctrines. I think Lintbag, Snortlaff and Oaks need to get their stories straight before they talk or try to shape public policy.  Let's read more of what Oaks said - -

Religious individuals should insist on their constitutional right and duty to exercise their religion, to vote their consciences on public issues and to participate in elections and debates." Elder Oaks said.  He called for a unified, broad coalition defending religious freedoms — a proposal that doesn't require common doctrinal ground between faiths, but a shared belief that the rights and wrongs of human behavior have been established by a Supreme Being. "All who believe in that fundamental should unite more effectively to preserve and strengthen the freedom to advocate and practice our religious beliefs, whatever they are." he said. "We must walk together for a ways on the same path in order to secure our freedom to pursue our separate ways when that is necessary according to our own beliefs." 

YEAH  - NO KIDDING !!!

Also - did Dallin Oaks write (or collaborate on) this recently proposed Utah bill? - -(HB 109)

Section 3. Section 63G-12-103 is enacted to read:
Prohibitions on state and local governments.
Except in the most limited instances when strictly necessary to avoid the gravest abuse of a constitutional right and more paramount public interest and subject to the provisions of Section 63G-12-104, the state or a political subdivision of the state may not:
(1)  infringe or substantially burden a person's religious liberty, including compel, restrain, or burden a person in their goods and civil capacities; or
(2)  restrict or deny freedom of religious speech and the free expression of religious and moral beliefs in public.

Section 4. Section 63G-12-104 is enacted to read:
Compelling state interest.
(1)  Religious liberty is substantially burdened when a person is coerced or required to act or significantly modify behavior contrary to sincerely held religious beliefs and principles and freedom of conscience.
(2)  The state or a political subdivision of the state may not substantially burden a person's religious liberty unless the state or political subdivision can demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence:
......(a) that the application of the burden to the person is:
............(i) in furtherance of a compelling state interest required to protect the peace, health, and safety of the state; and
............(ii) strictly necessary to avoid the gravest abuses endangering a constitutionally recognized and more paramount interest; and
......(b) that there are no other means reasonably available to achieve such ends.

If you're not confused, I am.  COME ON, GUYS.  MAKE UP YOUR SCHIZOPHRENIC MINDS !!!

He Gets It, He Really Gets It!

The UEP trust controversy surfaced again a couple of times this week - first in the Utah Supreme Court (some FLDS bishops want to be intervenors in trust issues) and secondly in the local federal District Court with Judge Dee Benson (the FLDS want to reverse Judge Lintbag's decision to rewrite/reform the UEP trust).

I'm going to distill this topic down to the simplest possible element. WHY? because I understand that that is what Judge Benson did (in Federal Court) yesterday. Apparently the government (defense in the case = Shields, Jensen, and Richards) tried (for hours) to defend the wisdom of Judge Diseased Lintbag's actions:

"She had no choice"
"She did what she thought was best"
"No FLDS person protested the reformation"
"It's not healthy for the FLDS to honor their leaders' inspiration"
"We couldn't let Warren Jeffs control the trust; he's bad!"
"We couldn't let those poor, poor people lose their homes"
"We had to protect the disaffected ex-members"
"Poor Bruce Wisan needs a paycheck"

Arguing for the Plaintiffs (FLDS people), Judge Benson reiterated 100 times that, despite the fact that the State had a duty to go in and protect this (charitable) trust from doom and destruction (threatened by the Hischers and the Fooles), it did not have a Constitutional right to barge in and start controlling everything else about the trust, even to the point of changing the very founding language of the trust, removing its religious intents, and selling off big chunks of it to put ill-gotten lucre in Wisass's pocket. Judge Benson argued that Judge Lintbag should not have gotten her dirty fingers into this pie in the first place. He argued that, if all of Lintbag's overreaching interference constituted a breach of the people's Constitutional, First-Amendment "Free Exercise" rights, then the whole thing has to be re-wound - Laches or no Laches.

The A.G. attorneys kept trying to say that Judge Lintbag had no choice but to do what she did, and Judge Benson kept saying that it doesn't really matter one teensy weensy little bit what she thought was in the best interests of those poor, beleaguered, criminal polygamists, if what she did was JUST PLAIN DOWNRIGHT VIOLATIVE OF THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.

I think he gets it - he really really gets it. Maybe Lintbag can now reimburse all those poor, poor people who have suffered loss.

Proportional Representation

I eagerly watched media reports about today's FLDS mass demonstration at Utah's Matheson Courthouse. One TV station reported that the number of attendees was "up to 1,000". Another outlet reported "over 1,000". I'm still confused.

Either way, maybe the State of Utah will start to figure out that, if you want our dirty, little state secret to go away, blatant fraud might not be the best approach. Willie Jessop alluded to a possible "extermination order". Maybe if we deprive all the polygamists of their homes and land and businesses, they'll be so destitute that they can finally be convinced to go on C.H.I.P. and welfare and unemployment and food stamps.

I've said it before - if polygamy is such a "CRIME", then why don't they arrest all of them. It's not difficult to figure out who the polygs are. There are several angry snitch people who will provide family trees to law enforcement. If you put the 10,000 adult polygs in prison, you can put all their kids in foster care, and then you can console yourself with the satisfaction of knowing that you have cleaned up our beautiful state of the ugly blight imposed on the Great Basin by our horribly misguided pioneer ancestors.

I'm still struggling with Judge Denise Lintbag's formula for proportional representation. By my last count, there are several thousand UEP beneficiaries residing in the Arizona Strip. As one observer so aptly put it, there must be at least ten or twenty disaffected ex-members who are hungering for a chunk of the loot if the trust is dismantled. Plus, Bruce (plunderer) Wisan is steadily gutting the trust of its wealth. Not to mention a couple of politically-minded attorneys general who have agendae.

By my sophisticated mathematical calculations, I have ascertained that the FLDS folk constitute about 99.997% of the total number of interested parties at the negotiation table. So, why do they get to constitute only about 0.000001% (or less) of the representation in the legal process. Perhaps their religious beliefs impose such a powerful disability upon them that they are not entitled to full citizenship in a modern, bankrupt America.

Whether the State believes it or not, well-nigh 100% of the FLDS fully support their current leaders. They likewise fully supported their leaders and the UEP trustee(s) at the time the trust was summarily reformed. The judge has publicly stated her desire to prohibit a "UEP 2". Her ostensible goal MUST be to destroy the trust and hence the welfare of its beneficiaries.

What forces are in play here? Is Lindborg a Mormon? You know that all temple-going Mormons must annually forswear ANY sympathy for "apostates" (= Fundamentalists). What that means in layman's terms is that it is (and has been) "open season" to persecute polygamists. After all, they're criminals, aren't they? Hurt a polyg, and you can be one step closer to the Celestial Kingdom or, at least, promotion in the earthly church. Are there dark LDS forces whispering insidious, ex parte promptings into Lindberg's ear, urging her to stop at nothing in her campaign of cultural genocide? A wise man once told me, "The Church eats its young."

A distinguished scholar of Mormonism opined last year that the Fundamentalist Mormons share the overwhelming majority of their theologies with the mainstream LDS Church. Why then, must there be so much antipathy?

I quote the immortal, stammering words of Rodney King, who said, "Can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along?"

We'll see . . . . . . . . .