Sam
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 8567
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 Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 12:54 am Post subject: Know your cults: the FLDS |
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Ok, everybody knows about scientology. Plus they are now also being subject to the most frightening campaign ever in the history of mankind aka
SCIENTOLOGY VERSUS THE INTERNET
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . oh my god
so because now pretty much everybody knows about Xenu and dead agenting and l. ron hubbard's actual life story I guess attention shall naturally drift to the next crazy cult in the news. This time we meet
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CHURCH OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS starring WARREN JEFFS
which is currently hot news, because Texas authorities responded to a call about sexual abuse on a Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) compound and apparently just discovered that the prepubescent girls on that cult compound may somehow be in danger of sexual abuse when their cult leaders force them into marrying middle aged men and have been obviously doing so for decades. Yaay. I guess if it took them that long to kind of figure that shit out then we should at least award them some praise for actually acting at all ever because it's kind of scary to think about how long the FLDS has been allowed to get away with it for so long, and still does so in some places.
But first, let's talk about the FLDS, starting with the most important question: are these mormons?
The answer: ummmm, technically yes but really no. They definitely call themselves mormons, but honestly they are about as representative of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (the 'official' Mormon church, with the tabernacle choir and the salt lake city temples and all that) as the Westboro Baptist Church is representative of Baptism.
The FLDS essentially came into being when the Mormon Church decided that it had to change its fundamental teachings to get rid of things like polygamy (and later racism!) because criticism of these things being doctrinal were really gonna slowly kill the religion off, so they had to be removed. The Prophets of the church actually even straight-up changed/removed passages in the Book of Mormon in order to help accomplish these doctrine retcons. In the end the LDS renounced polygamy and racism entirely and actively denounce both practices with total consistency up to this day.
When the LDS's policy reversal on polygamy happened, a number of religious conservatives were pretty much outraged at this and refused to accept these actions as being legitimate, and kept their plural marriages. Then, in 1904, the church began actively excommunicating all members who kept multiple wives, and a bunch of these excommunicated polygamist families and communities gathered together under the rule of some dude named John Barlow who was committed to keeping a 'real' Mormon community where you were allowed the god-given right to have multiple wimmins all to yourself.
That's it, really. That's all it was about. It's a branched-off cult that was founded by mormons that refused to give up polygamy. They're so small compared to the multimillion-member strong LDS that they're almost irrelevant. They should be fully irrelevant but unfortunately there's a huge quantity of people who read about the FLDS and assume that it involves the LDS and therefore end up with the mistaken notion that the LDS Mormons still practice some polygamy. It's actually pretty annoying to LDS members.
So, after its official schism from the LDS, the FLDS began a process of becoming more and more weird and culturally isolated. It has been led by a succession of cult prophets who take over after a previous leader's death and each claim to be called by God to lead the 'true' mormons. Many of these new leaders have been contentious and this has resulted in further schisms within the FLDS. When a guy named Rulon Allred was appointed in the 1950's, a large portion of the breakaway FLDS separated to create a breakaway-breakaway second-tier schism called the Apostolic United Brethren. Today there are many separate fundamentalist Mormon breakaway groups, but the FLDS itself remains the strangest because it has always ended up getting led by the most fucked-up dirtbags.
Case in point: In 2002, Warren Jeffs became the prophet of the FLDS after the death of his 92-year-old father, Rulon Jeffs, and immediately began consolidating his rule. The man is essentially a petty-minded, paranoid tyrant and he took every single bad thing about the sect and intensified it. While the FLDS was already pretty bad before Warren Jeffs, it became outright dystopian when he took over the helm.
| Quote: | | Having constructed an 8-foot wall around his home compound, he promoted seclusion among all church members by establishing new rules forbidding followers from talking to any non FLDS members, even their own family members. He also enlisted groups of men as the “Sons of Helaman,” to enter UEP members homes looking for unapproved literature. Violators were excommunicated from the church and expelled from UEP property, with the men’s wives and children reassigned to more worthy FLDS patriarchs. |
http://www.mormonfundamentalism.com/ChartLinks/FLDSChurch.htm
He excommunicated longtime members and assigned their wives and children to other men. He instructed followers to rely on his teachings and not the Bible, and banned virtually all contact with the outside world and he did this all to personally consolidate total control over the entire cult, both socially and economically. Here's some primary source fun involving the way this guy acts. He subsequently lost most of his control of the cult because he was running from the law for forcing pre-teens to marry and be raped by adults but the people he appointed were essentially just as bad and they continued his process of making sure that nobody in the cult was allowed any access to the outside world. Here's some fun primary source stuff, Warren Jeffs in his own words:
| Quote: | The following are excerpted from transcripts of several audio clips featuring the preaching and teaching of FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs. The audio clips were obtained by The Eldorado Successand are posted on the SuccessWeb site, www.myeldorado.net.
On Race
"You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, or rude and filthy, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits; wild and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is usually bestowed upon mankind."
"So I give you this lesson on the black race that you can understand its full effects as far as we are able to comprehend. And that we must beware – if we are for the prophet, the priesthood – we will come out of the world and leave off their dress, their music, their styles, their fashions; the way they think, what they do, because you can trace back and see a connection with immoral, filthy people."
"It was necessary that the Devil should have a representation upon the earth as well as God. So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God.
"So the Negro race has continued, and today is the day of the Negro as far as the world is concerned. They have influenced the generations of time; they have mixed their blood with many peoples, until there are many peoples not able to hold the priesthood. …
"And the lesson is, if anyone mingles their seed, their bloodline, with the seed of Cain, the Negro, they also would lose all rights and priesthood blessings."
On Rock Music
"I was watching a documentary one day, and on came these people talking about a certain black man [Little Richard]. In the program it was revealed that this black man was homosexual, immoral, on drugs – the worst kind of person. And then it showed the modern rock group, the Beatles. It showed them as pingy-pangy, unnoticed, useless people nobody would hire. And so the manager of their group called in this Negro, homosexual, on drugs, and the Negro taught them how to do it. And what happened then? They went worldwide. And all other music has followed that pattern, the most famous of what we call the rock groups.
"So when you enjoy the beats, the rock music – maybe even toned down with an orchestra – you are enjoying the spirit of the black race. And that's what I emphasize to the students. And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption – to forget their prayers, to forget their God. And thus the world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways."
On Marriage and Women
"Many young men, when they receive their first wife, are just so untrained. The woman, if she's not careful, will be overbearing and always ask permission for what she wants. And ladies, build up your husband by being submissive. That's how you will give your children success; you will want your children to be obedient, to be submissive to righteous living." |
hi i'm the biggest fuckhead since l. ron hubbard how fuckin cool is that
Yaay. My favorite part? Appreciating anything remotely resembling rock music is letting your spirit be corrupted by the homosexual festering satanism of the Negro. Warren Jeffs, ladies and gentlemen.
So anyway this guy was on the run for a long time and was on the Top Ten most wanted list for a while and eventually got caught.
So, what's the kind of society that Warren Jeffs builds for himself? A totally creepy one! Every member is required to wear magical long underwear to keep satan out, no matter how hot the day gets. Dress code is very rigorously enforced, including hairstyles for men and women. Men have moderate freedoms in personal attire long as its prurient and long-sleeved but women must ALWAYS appear in practically the exact same fashion: "solid-color homemade long-sleeved dresses, between ankle and mid-calf, and long stockings, keeping their hair coiffed."
As a result the women of the compounds have even more enforced modesty than the ones who roleplay the plymouth colonists.
For a good indication of what life is like for the women in the FLDS, take a look at the legal case that has sunk the captured Jeffs into a life sentence:
| Quote: | These isolated, insular mini-theocracies, 60 miles south of the Grand Canyon, have resisted change for 50 years. Now there is revolution in the air. Perhaps emboldened by the authorities' decision to prosecute Holm, some of the wives who have suffered as a result of polygamous marriages are suddenly speaking out.
Elderly women are revealing that resistance networks of safe houses in Las Vegas and Phoenix have been used to smuggle girls to freedom.
Meanwhile, the large home of the community's leader, Warren Jeffs - known throughout the area as "The Prophet" and also under legal investigation - is guarded by young men who are often armed and interrogate strangers as to why they are there.
Dissident churchgoers claim that girls are granted to men by Mr Jeffs as a reward, and taken away as a punishment. Illegal weddings involving girls of 14 and 15, conducted by Mr Jeffs, are claimed to have been commonplace.
According to fundamentalist Mormon theology, Hildale's male residents need a minimum of three wives to secure a place in paradise. Sisters are often required to marry the same man. Mr Jeffs himself has 12 wives.
"What goes on in that place is nothing less than sexual slavery," says Flora Jessop, the daughter of a polygamist who as a teenager rejected her upbringing. "At 16, after I rebelled, I was given an alternative: a forced marriage or the mental asylum," she claims. "The local police and judges were in cahoots with the church."
Few women in Hildale or Colorado City are encouraged or able to look beyond their tightly controlled circumstances. Absolute obedience to husbands is stressed from childhood. Formal education for girls is curtailed in the early teens. Wives have no access to bank accounts. Newspapers are never seen. Access to television is often banned and always monitored.
"The idea of leaving, to go to an unknown world which you have been taught is evil, is terrifying," said Miss Jessop. "And for older women, there are the children you would leave behind."
In the end she fled Hildale with the help of a woman known in Utah as "Auntie Jennie", who lives in the nearby town of St George and has helped more than 30 girls to escape a polygamous marriage. ...
Unlike the young men, girls are jealously watched, guarded and then married off against their will. “If you run away as a minor, they will hunt for you,” explains Miss Jessop, whose sister, Ruby, was caught as she was about to flee. “She was about to be married off at the age of 14. I was to pick her up at night in Colorado City, but when I arrived the plan had been discovered.” Utah child protection officers left Ruby to her fate. Now 17, she has one child and is pregnant with a second.
As the siege mentality grows in the town, rebels find life ever more uncomfortable. Pam Black, one of those invited to appear on Oprah, and her 70-year-old mother were recently evicted from their homes by the leaders of the church.
Pam now lives in a trailer across the city limits, protected by the eldest of her 13 children. “I was creating trouble for the leaders and I mean to keep on doing so,” she says. “My daughter is a polygamist wife who has given birth to seven children in 11 years. She’s on Prozac, as are many, many women here.
“My sister’s husband married a 12-year-old girl. Another 17-year-old girl is being refused a hysterectomy she needs for medical reasons. Her husband told her she had to produce at least three more children for him. This place is like a mixture of the Taliban and the Mafia. It runs on intimidation, ignorance of the outside world and fear.” |
"Three Wives will guarantee you a place in Paradise," Daily Telegraph
Summary: since Jeffs' church controls all the land and all the local business and government, the church itself uses its power to force the women into sexual slavery, even dictating medication for their depression and arresting and detaining the women who resist their arranged marriages and keeping them restrained as mental patients.
The boys in the FLDS suffer a very specific form of abuse: that sect of polygamists cannot have a stable society unless they cull young males from the cult as fast as possible, so they excommunicate teenagers for trivial offenses after teaching them that the only way into heaven is through their church; an abolishment mentally worse than death. Then they are dropped frequently into neighboring towns as complete outcasts.
| Quote: | Gideon is one of the ''Lost Boys," a group of more than 400 teenagers -- some as young as 13 -- who authorities in Utah and Arizona say have fled or been driven out of the polygamous enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City over the last four years.
His stated offenses: wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to compact discs, and having a girlfriend. Other boys say they were booted out for going to movies, watching television, and staying out past curfew.
Some say they were sometimes given as little as two hours' notice before being driven to St. George or nearby Hurricane, Utah, and left like unwanted pets along the road. |
The Lost Boys of the FLDS
The men with the most power in this society will actively work to excommunicate the sons of rivals and less powerful families, not only because it consolidates breeding availability and wealth for their own family line but because they often want more of the pool of women in the recently 'available' generations (age 13 or so up) made available to them as new harem stock and they dislike having to share them with boys even remotely of the women's same generation. The stories are pretty trippy; these kids have grown up in a ruthlessly controlling religious cult that has denied them any understanding of the outside world and are basically force-fed lies about the rest of society, so they're totally bewildered when they emerge and have to get rescued by social services. Apparently Jeffs and other leaders of the cult taught that man has never landed on the moon so they get real surprised when it turns out that we actually sort of, uh, have.
The women, in addition to having it worse involving the whole arranged marriages thing, are also legitimately being subject to a real-live honest-to-God eugenics program run by the cult founder to breed women to be more docile. I am not making this up. They're explicitly and intentionally breeding in stupidity and complacency into the females. Those that have been "rescued" are not exactly well functioning members of society. And, of course, the remaining pool is beginning to inbreed fantastically and generate endemic birth defects for both men and women.
If you want to get a good idea as to how completely brainwashed and pacified these women are, watch this creepy video of three FLDS women agreeing to appear on television to plea for their children to be returned. They come off about as pleasantly as the Stepford Wives.
Seriously, it's so creepy.
The FLDS is a profound picture of total societal dysfunction.
Anyway, here's how it went down for Warren Jeffs:
| Quote: | A paper license tag, a salad and stories that didn't make sense pricked the suspicions of a state trooper who stopped the car of a wanted fugitive polygamist in Las Vegas.
But it was the pumping carotid artery in the neck of Warren Steed Jeffs that convinced Nevada Highway Patrolman Eddie Dutchover that he had cornered someone big.
"I knew some type of criminal activity was possibly afoot," Dutchover said after he stopped Jeffs with a brother and one of his wives in a new luxury SUV that had only a paper tag instead of a license plate.
nside the car on Monday night, Jeffs seemed evasive and started to eat a salad.
"I noticed Warren was extremely nervous. He was sitting in that right side back seat and wouldn't make eye contact with me," Dutchover said.
"But his carotid artery was pumping."
Dutchover separated the brothers and questioned them. Isaac Jeffs said they were heading to Utah, but Warren Jeffs said their destination was Denver, Colorado, Dutchover reported.
"Their stories didn't make any sense to me," Dutchover said.
He called in back-up and later the FBI when he and his fellow trooper realized they had captured one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives with a $100,000 bounty on his head. (See what FBI agents say they found inside Jeffs' car)
Jeffs himself later confirmed he is the man who is wanted in Utah and Arizona on a variety of charges including child rape that are linked to his allegedly arranging marriages between girls and older men in his polygamist organization, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
"He said his full name -- Warren Steed Jeffs -- and he just kind of like sighed. And that was it," the trooper said.
Fugitive kit
FBI agents said they found many different items that could be the trappings of a life on the run inside Jeffs' maroon 2007 Cadillac Escalade, that retails at nearly $55,000 for a base model.
They recovered:
# 15 cell phones
# Walkie-talkies
# A police scanner
# Laptop computers
# Wigs
# Sunglasses
# Credit cards
# At least $54,000 in cash
A duffel bag recovered from the SUV was stuffed with unopened envelopes that may contain even more money, according to the FBI. |
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/08/30/jeffs.arrest/index.html
lol the cop busted him because his carotid artery was pumping furiously during a traffic stop and he tried to casually eat a salad.
| Quote: | | ST. GEORGE, Utah (Reuters) - U.S. polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs was convicted on Tuesday of being an accomplice to rape for arranging a marriage between an unwilling 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old first cousin. |
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . they imprisoned him in a tv like in willy wonka
Apparently to this day he tries to rule from prison but the FLDS is already starting to schism again.
Then, recently, this happened: the recent event you have probably heard about — the state of Texas takes over 400 kids into their custody after raiding the Texas FLDS compound and the site of their only temple.
| Quote: | More than 400 children taken from a ranch run by a polygamous sect will stay in state custody and be subject to genetic testing, a judge ruled Friday.
State District Judge Barbara Walther heard 21 hours of testimony over two days before ruling that the children be kept by the state. Individual hearings will be set for the children over the next several weeks.
She ordered that all children and parents be given genetic testing. Child welfare officials have said they've had difficulty determining how the children and parents are related because of evasive or changing answers. |
| Quote: | The state of Texas took a big risk when it removed more than 400 kids from the polygamous separatist compound in West Texas, and even more when the decision was made to isolate the older children from their mothers.
It risked a crushing burden on its own perennially strained Child Protective Services apparatus. It risked a chaotic and protracted court fight.
It risked a tornadic storm of criticism – one Texas-based advocate for parents of children in the child-welfare system, incredibly, was quoted by ABC News as likening the state’s actions to "the Nazis and how the parents and children were divided on the train platforms." Looking the other way while the secretive FLDS (not, for the thousandth time, to be confused with mainstream Mormons) flourished in isolation was a long-held policy in Arizona and Utah, where the splinter group is concentrated.
Those states were understandably wary of the investigatory obstacles deliberately constructed by the sect, and of the political consequences of separating entire communities of children from their parents.
So for years, they practiced discreet inaction, treating the FLDS as a wacky but benign order of sectarian oddballs on par with communal nudists or free-love herbivores.
But there’s ample evidence that what they were overlooking was infinitely more disturbing: A creepy authoritarian cult that favored older men with sexual access to underage girls in the guise of multiple "spiritual wives." An isolated community where children are conditioned from infancy to accept abuse and degradation. A self-governed, self-policing enclave that ignores the laws and safeguards that regulate most of us.
"The fact that this has been going on all these years, and the fact that justice has not been there to protect women and children … from amazing civil rights violations – it is an embarrassment," Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. "I don’t want to indict the states of Utah and Arizona, but mea culpa – we are responsible."
The Times exhaustively documented evidence that the group’s leader, the now-imprisoned "prophet" Warren Jeffs, personally assigned underage "wives" to older men (including himself). It cited the group’s practice of banishing teenage boys and young men to restrict the pool of marriageable males.
Most disturbingly, it found claims of domestic violence, child molestation and incest that were allegedly covered up by church leaders.
And as media scrutiny intensified in Arizona and Utah, the sect started construction on its new compound in Texas.
Listen, we are accustomed to storming City Hall in protest if a harried caseworker returns an abused child to an unrepentant mother or if a convicted child molester is paroled into our neighborhood.
Do we have a different standard for the protection of children who are kept out of sight by a secretive cult?
Do we leave children in the care of blindly obedient mothers who may have acquiesced to the rape of their daughters because they were subjected to similar treatment themselves?
There is no doubt that it’s traumatic for children to be separated from their families, questioned by strangers, placed in foster care.
One of the few even more traumatic scenarios I can imagine would be to endure a lifetime of brainwashing, abuse and sexual enslavement.
There’s not an ideal alternative here, no choices that aren’t certain to mean hardship and censure. |
So yeah that's the summary, let's see where this wacky Texas saga plays out. Apparently the whole cult got cranked and that's why the state has possession of all their children. |
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