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9th February 2019, 08:46 PM | #1 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Nov 2010
Posts: 4,314
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America's Most Wanted FLDS Homeschool Tour
Among other things for a homeschool adventure we went to Warren Jeff's old cult compound, Colorado City, a "Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints" (Mormon) closed community.
Three generations ago an FLDS break-away cult built the city straddling state borders so they could flee either way depending on who raided them. You may have seen Jeffs, the last cult leader on America's Most Wanted. The mansion he had built in Colorado City is now a hotel with that name. It was awarded to a nephew of an ex-cult wife we stayed with there. All the church property was seized, put in a trust, and is being distributed to petitioners. My interest was most keen on the cult's economics. It was stunning to see side-by-side an Indian Reservation with the most destitute poverty America has to offer... against all the wealth of Jeff's cult. They had huge new complexes for each guy with multiple wives, to house dozens of children. More like apartment buildings with commercial kitchen and dining, recreational facilities, new SUV's in three and four car garages, and RV's. The America's Most Wanted building has really thick high surrounding walls and iron gates that are controlled electronically, with security - and you know they were armed to the teeth. The Indians have a mobile home or shack and one rusty vehicle. A cattle gate. You can just drive across. One barbed wire fence along the highway, and nuthin' but tumbleweed everywhere else on the Indian land. The trust that got the seized property was over $100 million. It's an order of magnitude more than that in wealth changing hands. The businesses were worth far more than the buildings and land they were on, they had ongoing contracts, a cash flow, so who knows. Places equidistant from the same National Parks have giant hotels, restaurants, air service, etc. The way Jeffs ran the program he inherited was to work out mathematically how many boys he had to ex-communicate in order to have the right number of wives to assign among himself and his buddies. The first wife is a legal marriage. The next four or seven are "single moms". Nobody owns property. Nobody earns income. The church owns everything. The church has businesses like construction, the guys commute with tools, and the Church earns the money. Men are assigned a place to live, or one is built for them, and provisions are supplied so long as he remains in good standing. Like Mormons in general these people were hard working, ant-colony level zealots. So it is ironic, drawing full welfare benefits on multiple wives and having the state support most of your children. Warren Jeffs called it "bleeding the beast". Since society has made plural marriage illegal, then do war with the beast using his own rules against him. These were technically legal welfare recipients, and it was no secret to the government the amount of money involved. That has to be one reason the government took him down. Talk about thumbing your nose at authority. Women were educated through 6th grade, ostensibly - but towards the end especially it was a curriculum the genius Warren Jeffs wrote himself. Cartoon level stuff, hard to wade through. The women were educated big time in home crafts and it meant there were no restaurants, laundromats, clothing stores, etc. in the colony. The hardware and tools the men used in their trades were owned/managed by the various companies the church owned. So they had buildings and land, industrial scale commerce but you could not buy a cup of sugar or a pack of gum anywhere. Buying fabric wholesale and having the women make clothes - it is a tremendous value-added to the colony, not one penny of which is taxed. Warren Jeffs decided who went to dental or medical school, who learned plumbing and who farmed, etc. The council, mayor, and sheriff's department were all FLDS before they nabbed Warren Jeffs. There was a highway intersection through town, but if you pulled into any street as an outsider you would be watched and followed. There are some tragedies, like people booted off the land because they did not pay property taxes after the land was deemed no longer Church property. Some claim to have paid the church, and probably did. Things are in disarray. The council, mayor, and sheriff's offices are no longer FLDS. Some were expecting a second coming, Warren would be carried out of jail on a chariot or something. They refused to pay the taxes on the principle that the state was jailing their Jesus. So if someone stepped forward and petitioned for the property, and paid the back taxes, and could prove to this trust they had an FLDS connection like having bent over as one of Jeffy's 90 wives I guess then you could obtain good title. So now, a Subway sandwich place opened up. A Dollar Store. People are doing bed and breakfasts. the tourist trade is going to quickly rise to prominence because Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon are all nearby. I'm sure all of us feel the same sense of tragedy as another cultural treasure is trampled upon by the State. They got 'ole Jeffy on audiotape with a 14 year old. I think he married himself a 12 year old too. Which, by the way, is legal and certified by judges in the USA for Muslims. |
9th February 2019, 09:19 PM | #2 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: WA USA
Posts: 10,927
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9th February 2019, 09:48 PM | #3 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 12,632
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I don't know about the Islam thing, either, but:
http://apps.frontline.org/child-marr...y-the-numbers/
Quote:
eta: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a6921246.html
Quote:
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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9th February 2019, 10:01 PM | #4 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: WA USA
Posts: 10,927
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Interesting link to say the least. I stand corrected.
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9th February 2019, 10:12 PM | #5 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 12,632
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__________________
"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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10th February 2019, 04:34 PM | #6 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Nov 2010
Posts: 4,314
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There's nothing like seeing it with your own eyes.
There is a treaty too, that acknowledges marriages across borders. Philippines recognizes multiple marriages, and the Muslims do this down to age 12 where we live there. Maybe younger, I dunno - but the law makes plural marriage legal for Muslims and illegal for Christians. By treaty the marriages recognized in Philippines are recognized in the USA. So when they come here, the US has to recognize their plural marriages. That is what they tell us, and that is how I learned. |
10th February 2019, 11:40 PM | #7 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: WA USA
Posts: 10,927
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I found a website that seems to allow child brides into the USA. https://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo...-marriage.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.435e84f7a3a5 I don't think a man is going to be able to bring his wives into the USA legally. Perhaps his "wife" and "daughter". I haven't seen anything that makes it legal for muslims but illegal for christians
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11th February 2019, 10:16 AM | #8 |
Orthogonal Vector
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 53,184
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This was news from the efforts to end it in florida recently.
"A bill had been proposed for multiple years in the Legislature to close the loophole allowing minors to marry, but lawmakers credited this year’s passage to six years of advocacy from Sherry Johnson, a child marriage victim who was raped, became pregnant and was married to one of the men who assaulted her by age 11." And while only one person voted against it, it took years of repeated effort to get a vote on it. People didn't want to be seen to be against it but didn't want to cause problems with the fundamentalists christian groups that support it. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/pol...204314529.html |
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11th February 2019, 10:02 PM | #9 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Nov 2010
Posts: 4,314
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Thanks for those links. I heard about some of this from refugees out of Marawi City, where ISIS took over and a 5 month war leveling the city went on.
And I am interested to see the property division recognized for plural marriages so that is a pretty strong foothold, the very basis for "marriage" in the first place. The co-mingling of finances. I see they do not like the underage sex thing in plural marriages. I see how these naughty boys have to do it: First, you marry an 11 year old. That one gets through. Then you marry nothing but legal tender, lol. Anyway, no dog in the fight. I am however pleased to do some VERY back-of the napkin first draft tinkering on the economics of the FLDS lecher program. Google is reporting, roughly $40K in various cash, housing, health, WIC, Snap, whatever - for just two kids and their mom. These Mormon girls were baby factories. Eight or ten kids, common. Six, the low end. It has to be more like $60K. Just penciling here, we know which categories to look at, and bump up the # of children in each category. But let's take five wives, $60k each in welfare benefits. That's $300k. None of them make any money on paper. The carpenter for the FLDS building corporation does not make a wage. Does not own a house. He gets food stamps too. Poor fella. So hungry all the time. In that apartment complex sized "house". In order to have the after-tax income to pay for $300K in equivalent money/goods/services you would need to make more like $400k. Order of magnitude. The prices you would pay too - retail. And not one retail outlet for any product whatsoever in the entire city (twin cities) of this cult. Better than wholesale prices on some things. They raised grain, made soap, grazed cattle, bought them on the hoof, and anything they did not do themselves was wholesale. This is what I saw, the wealth of the FLDS cult city. Next to Indians on the Reservation. But that is over. The government sure took the stuffing out of them. There are remnants, and "sister" cults in the LDS diaspora. But 90% of the property has been re-distributed to individuals. |
12th February 2019, 08:51 AM | #10 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Port Townsend, Washington
Posts: 39,057
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One of the cable TV networks (A&E?) has a show called Sister Wives glorifying these morons. It makes me angry when I see ads for it.
ETA: It's on TLC. Which is no longer "The Learning Channel". Tabloid television. |
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12th February 2019, 10:01 AM | #11 |
Muse
Join Date: Dec 2018
Posts: 536
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22nd February 2019, 02:39 PM | #12 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Nov 2010
Posts: 4,314
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Haven't seen it. But television is generally low IQ stuff that is reverse-engineered. You already know what line you are going to play for the audience before you film it. No different from scripting a show - you select the people you want to show, and edit it all down to your meme.
We don't care about polyamory, we do it ourselves. But our little trip demonstrated the tactic of one marriage + four "single mom's" is a recipe for relative wealth. If you have no scruples. It's legal, I can't deny that. It would not surprise me if people on the television shows are doing so. Wonder if they bother to mention it. |
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