A Simple Sexist Test

"If this were done to a man or would it ever be done to a man—has it ever been done to a man?"
~Gloria Steinem

Is the practice of polygamy inherently sexist or abusive? Take a long look at this photograph of Warren Jeffs' concubines and put it to the simple test one noted American feminist recently suggested.

With that simple test taken, now I invite you to review a piece I wrote in February of 2009. It angered some and offended others. I still stand by it, though.

An Open Letter to My "Sister" Feminists

Dear American Feminists,

Although I have contacted numerous national feminist organizations, which I will not attempt to embarrass by naming here- because I would still like to see you step up to the plate, about the gross abuses occurring to women and children living in polygamy, in the American west, none of you has responded, not one. You have ignored me.

To my "sisters" on the East and West Coasts, I have concluded you must not think I am a real woman or a real feminist. I suppose, I've failed to attend Vassar, Brown, Berkley, or NYU, and abort a baby or two along the way to protect my academic career and prove I'm worthy of being considered a real woman.

To my "sisters" in Atlanta, who are diligently working to ensure that road signs are not sexist, by spearheading a campaign to change them from "MEN AT WORK" to "WORKERS AHEAD", all I can say is, bless your hearts.

It is to the rest of America's women, who may not fall into one of those groups, I now appeal. We have a problem here in Texas, with a sex cult run by Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints leader, Warren Steed Jeffs.

We have hundreds of eyewitness testimonies from men, women, and children who have left, been abandoned, abused, or exiled from polygamy in the states of Utah and Arizona, where the FLDS residents of the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas came from. We now have evidence of sexual abuse perpetrated against young girls, Texas citizens, on Texas soil.

Our other "sisters" continued silence indicates they are indeed flirting with the trendy, liberal idea of allowing legalized polygamy in America, as another valid alternative lifestyle choice. In doing so, they are allowing their sophomoric, fantastical, and unrealistic ideals about political correctness and liberal tolerance to endanger every woman in America.

If they go along with legalizing polygamy as a valid alternative lifestyle choice, here, based on my four-year investigation of the FLDS in Mohave County, Arizona, is what you can look forward to as an American woman:

• Your husband can come home one day and tell you that he has taken a new wife or three...
• You will now have to compete for his time attention and affection, daily, or divorce him.
• You will now share the financial resources of your family with the other woman or women, and any children who come along.
• The more that come along, the less there is for your children, or their futures.
• If you leave, you are no longer entitled to half of everything in your marriage. Now you get one third, or depending on the number of concubines in the marriage, one sixteenth, or one hundredth?
• Muslim American men, now free to build American harems, pressure masses of Muslim American women to wear the burqa.
• Other costumes, uniforms, or "coverings", such as long prairie dresses emerge from Middle America, as men claim "religious inspiration" to pressure their concubines to dress "appropriately".
• These same masses of women will be secluded, and as they give birth to more children, their access to communication with the outside world and education cut off.
• Emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual, and physical abuse will thrive in environments where one man is now the focus of the complete attention of multiple women.
• When a polygamist man dies, and his multiple unions recognized as legitimate marriages, each wife is now entitled to receive a check from Social Security.
• Each now legally legitimate child also gets Social Security benefits.
• Thousands of women will find themselves thrust into abject poverty, because their husband is unable to support all of his concubines and children equally.
• Thousands more will be forced to accept government assistance for food and medical care, for the same reason. Their family structure is legitimate in the eyes of the law, so they will qualify for multiple government assistance programs for the poor.
• Birth rates among polygamist marriages will skyrocket, more children = more benefits.
• Infant mortality and child death rates among polygamists families will soar – see the Colorado City, Arizona death rates.
• Accidental child death rates among polygamist's families will increase – see the Colorado City, Arizona death rates..
• The reporting of domestic violence shrinks to zero in entire communities, for decades at a time – see the Colorado City, Arizona history of zero prosecutions for domestic violence in over a decade.
• Competition to the older, more powerful men, underage boys and young men driven from their communities, with no education or job skills, become a burden on law enforcement and social services in neighboring, non-polygamist communities where they are abandoned - see the Colorado City, Arizona history of driving 400 boys out of their town.
• Trained from birth to expect assignment in marriage, complete submission to patriarchal religious authority, and acceptance of the "blessing" of an early marriage, millions of bright American girls, along with their potential talents and contributions to society, will be lost for generations.

We face that chilling future if polygamy remains either unchecked or legalized in America.

These sorts of things, however, are apparently unimportant to the average American Feminist.

Stay up there in your classrooms, drum circles and symposiums, where you can drone on forever about the suffering and ignorance of the typical American housewife, I mean homemaker. My grammar check doesn't seem to like the word housewife and has now twice suggested homemaker, as an appropriate gender-neutral job title.

You laugh when I support a Marriage Amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman. I'm not an intellectual, I'm a Southern conservative, so how can I know anything about the world?

On Gays and lesbians: Come let us reason together. Like Sara Palin, I am not against civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, the key word being couples. They deserve, when they are in loving, committed, stable, and monogamous relationships to enjoy the tax, ownership, inheritance and medical power of attorney benefits, or the same property/custody/relationship termination headaches of heterosexuals. Kinky Friedman is right, "Homosexuals should be free to be as miserable as the rest of us".

Go play with your words. I've got dozens of unexplained dead children, sexually abused little girls, abandoned little boys and abused women to think about. You know, the same ones that child advocates and anti-polygamy activist in Utah and Arizona have been begging for your help with, for years now? I am a Texan and a Southerner. I am a woman who believes in living in a free country, where I have rights equal with men.

Nobody is going to come down here to Texas and take away my right to be my husband's only living equal. I know many other people, straight, and gay, across America that feel the same way about protecting women and children from the cultural disaster of polygamy.

If we have to fight this alone down here, we will. Y'all just hide and watch how real Southern sisters take care of each other.

Don't, however, expect to own the words feminist or feminism when we get done, especially if you threw all your party invitations away.

P.S. Confidential to Phylis Chesler and Noni Darwish:

Help!

Texas Heroes

Howdy Warren,

And, "Wel-come-to-the- great- state- of -Tex-as! If you didn't grow up going to the State Fair of Texas at Fair Park in Dallas, to stand at the feet of Big Tex every year, to be fair, you may not get that one.

I had an interesting meeting with a writer from Austin yesterday, who has written a book on religious maltreatment. We do not agree on all of her hypothesis, which I found broad. What we have in common are some core understandings of what constitutes an abuse of religious authority in a child's life. Or even the abuse of adults, spiritually.

Texas, although many people will never even know it, is full of heroes. The local abuse hotline staff, Schleicher County Sheriff's Office, Texas Rangers, and Child Protective Services, right down to ordinary citizens, including churches, on the ground made heroic efforts to save 400 children from the abuse, which was occurring on the grounds of the YFZ Ranch, in Schleicher County, Texas, in April of 2008.

Although those of us in the media have come to call this 'a raid,' the truth is, it was a rescue mission. Right up until someone in Austin decided to throw their hands in the air and say 'We give up! Take them all back.'

Since the trial for Warren Jeffs begins on Monday, I thought we could perhaps review some of the heroes of this story that will probably never get the attention and admiration they really deserve.

The FLDS had been in these good Texas people's backyard in tiny Eldorado, Texas for around five years when the call came into the hotline. There had been plenty of time, and plenty of warning given to the citizens of the area regarding the ritual sex practices of the FLDS, which include incest, regular child marriage and regular child rape. Little girls are born only to become future concubines for powerful men.

These men have money and plenty of it. They own and operate businesses from Utah to Texas, and Mexico. They even have lucrative government contracts, at both the federal and local levels, as well as multiple businesses devoted to the construction industry. Within years of locating their giant houses designed for communal living, instituting massive infrastructure improvements including a sewage treatment plant, a cement plant, a brand new religious temple along with manned and armed guard towers overlooking Schleicher County, one of their concrete companies had the contract to lay the pad for every new wind turbine in West Texas.

This FLDS is the same one Flora Jessop remembers as a child in Colorado City, Arizona, when Senator Orin Hatch used to come and play the organ in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints services. Senator Hatch, typical for a Utah politician, is for ignoring the felony crime of polygamy, and he personally knows "many fine polygamist people."

Needless to say, these are the kinds of forces our heroes knew nothing about. The heroes simply set out to do a job, and that was to be prepared. So they were very prepared for the abuse they saw. Nothing, however, could have ever prepared them to understand or account for the inexplicable actions of top ranking state employees, who shut them down after they had done nothing but their job, and document it.

Top ranking heads rolled in Austin for taking the position that someone like Warren Jeffs, and other parents on that ranch, had no business having any legal parental rights to any child in the state of Texas. The position from the top was clear, 'It doesn't matter how much abuse you have documented, we're giving them all back.'

The heroes of our story kept working. They did things like push children across the floor as they cried and begged not to be made to go back to their abusers. They handed over a toddler with bone scans showing multiple fractures through his tiny body. They gave girls back to mothers, who they knew had willingly turned their child over for sex, with a man on the YFZ Ranch. They handed a young girl back that spent 3 days in labor on the ranch, without any pain medication or a doctor.

They hugged them. They told them they could always call, no matter what.

But the real story of our unsung Texas heroes is even deeper. These social workers had something happen to them when they started working with the FLDS children. The children were racists. They were raised that way. In the early days of the rescue many of the children, who had most likely never even laid their eyes on anyone who was not also Caucasian, hurled racial insults at some of the social workers.

I think, because of that, I was unsure what the emotional reaction of the minority social workers might have been. That was all put to rest when me and Flora took to the road in the summer of 2009 and we met them, these heroes. They didn't just come to buy Flora's book, they needed to meet her, viscerally.

I could give multiple accounts of meeting social workers across the state who expressed the same feelings, but I never saw anything like I saw when we got to San Antonio. That was special. Flora's appearance, signing, speaking and question and answer periods were clear and concise. The event was at the San Antonio Public Library, where there was a crowd.

At some point, while answering a question about the abuses common in the group that Flora grew up in, a woman from the back of the room spoke out and challenged Flora, and told her she was exaggerating the abuse found on the YFZ Ranch. She then actually said there was no abuse found on the ranch, and that she was an attorney who represented one of the FLDS women in the case.

Incensed, I grabbed my satchel and whipped out the final CPS report. I shook it at her and said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but I have the final report here and it identifies victims, lots of them. Don't you dare come in here to Texas and think you can sell anyone on the idea that it's okay to rape little Texas girls, just as long as you call it your religion."

It's one of those moments in life, where things could take any old turn, and for a moment you wait to see if a crowd turns on you or stands with you. Two women jumped up from the crowd, like lions and started blurting out that they were CPS caseworkers, and had worked with the FLDS children. Before we knew it, the room went rather wild with people turning on the woman identifying herself to be an FLDS woman's attorney in the case. It was a CPS room, and they had all worked with FLDS children taken in the 2008 Texas rescue mission at the YFZ.

They started shouting out about their cases, especially the idea that the FLDS women on the YFZ were in some significant part just as legally guilty as the men. The caseworkers understood the children's abuse, much of it ritual, racist and full of hate, had to have required the enthusiastic participation of the children's mothers as the girls were traded, inside the fences of the YFZ Ranch, across the country to Mohave County, Arizona, up to Bountiful B.C., and down to old Mexico. Nobody's little girl just leaves for Canada one day and never comes home again, right?

No one could possibly be a capable and responsible parent if when you wake up, and you're told by your husband or maybe even one of his other concubines, that your 13-year-old-daughter has gone to live in another country, you don't demand her return, and then immediately notify the law.

If you don't pick up the phone and call the police to report your 13-year-old is missing, aren't you a criminal participating in the disappearance and sex trafficking of your baby?

Imagine, if you will, you are the young idealistic graduate who decided to go into social work, because you deeply cared about people and truly wanted to help protect them. Imagine you carry within you, this noble desire to protect the innocent from harm and to provide hope to the hopeless, so with your life, you serve. It's not hard to imagine what must be in the hearts of lots of people who go into social work or law enforcement.

Now imagine having all of this in your heart and then being a minority faced with pure racism, up close and personal, so blatant that it takes your breath away?

What I discovered is that these ordinary Texas folks were so taken back with the evil of it, that the only weapon with any chance of working was love. So they did that.

They grabbed these kids by the scruff and loved on them. With a white-hot-fierce sort of love they overcame their own distaste and repulsion, and just loved them. They prayed for them. They rocked some of them. They hugged some of them. And when they had to give them back, to whatever force that had shoved so much hatred and evil at those little souls to begin with, they cried, like babies.

After the FLDS attorney had been put in her place, it was like Oprah entered the room. Suddenly, it was alive with people talking to each other, sharing their grief at what happened to the FLDS children, how they were terrified Texas was making a mistake in giving them back to an institutionalized abusive society, run by sex predators, and using fundamentalist Mormon religion to protect themselves from prosecution of their crimes.

The trouble is, our constitution does not allow religious individuals or organizations to commit crimes and then declare immunity from prosecution, just for being who they are, that is to say: religious.

"Before the Supreme Court, Reynolds argued that his conviction for bigamy should be overturned on four issues. These included that his grand jury had not been legal; that challenges of certain jurors were improperly overruled; that testimony by Amelia Jane Schofield was not permissible as it was under another indictment; and, most importantly, that it was his religious duty to marry multiple times."

Among other findings one from the court wrote, ""to permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."


These Texas heroes loved the hate right out of those kids, and in return they got kicked in the teeth. My new friend, the writer from Austin, has a chance soon to speak to a lot of these heroes. I hope she tells them what I think of them, and that someone out there still knows.

In my mind's eye I see every one of these Texans wearing a white hat. In case, in this strange world we live in these days, you don't know what that means; in Texas it just means they are the 'good guys.'

The CPS workers who jumped out of those chairs, like lions, reminded me of the goddess of Liberty on the San Jacinto Battle Flag. These weren't women or government workers who didn't give a damn about what was happening, these were heroes. These people had been wounded in the heart by the hate and abuse they saw perpetrated against the FLDS children.

I hope someday, some of them will feel safe to come forward and share their stories. That is my brightest hope. I'd like all Texans to know about these real life Texas, good guy, heroes.

Have you ever held anger, racism and hate to your breast and rocked it to sleep with a sweet song, praying that while you did it the hate was being rubbed right off and away? That's a true Texas kind of love.

I know heroes who have.

I know lions of love.

I know the kind of people Dr. Martin Luther King dreamed about.

I have a good life.

G-d Bless Texas

Glorious and Free

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!

From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

The Canadian reference case on whether the ban on polygamy violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, in essence, over. Closing arguments are scheduled for March 28th and B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman has been asked to determine whether the polygamy law is constitutional.


Late last week, special prosecutor for the state of Texas, Eric Nichols sent information gleaned from the 2008 raid on the YFZ Ranch in Scleicher County to the prosecutors in B.C. This information included evidence that one 13-year-old girl child and two 12-year-old girl children had been trafficked from their homes in Bountiful B.C. to Mohave County, Arizona, and then on to Texas for the purpose of "marriage" to FLDS leader, Warren Steed Jeffs.

Activist have known for years that this trafficking of minor female children has taken place under the noses of both Mohave County and Canadian officials. But in the warped politically correct world of "can't touch that" religion, a blind eye was turned.

Now Texas has shown them all the truth, and like roaches I'm sure most Mohave County, Arizona officials are creeping into the dark corners of their filthy hives to do their best to ignore it. I'll give anyone a dollar who can show me a story run on this development in the Mohave Valley Daily "News" in the last week.

Moreover, I will also give anyone a dollar who can show me a link to a CNN story on the same development in the last week, and I will give you $2 if you can show me a link where they run this old interview of FLDS "mothers" from 2008, starting at about the 5 minute mark.

Pray for Canada. Get on your knees for her and pray like the future of your daughter, your grand daughter and her great grand daughter depend on it. For indeed, it does!

For if the court should decide to recommend the decriminalization of polygamy in Canada, then it will surely spread here. And that is when the future for all our children will change forever, and someday a girl child in the future will look back on the freedoms you have today and sigh, saying before she is led to the alter and then the bed of slavery, "What must it have been like in the golden age?"

Jeffs' "special needs" are fulfilled

So this week we were treated to the news that Warren Jeffs has finally found an attorney to fulfill his "special needs".

Who is Jeff Kearney from Fort Worth? It seems he is an attorney who specializes in fighting for some of the lowest scum to crawl the earth. He successfully defended one of the Branch Davidians from charges he killed a federal agent. The Branch Davidians were another group practicing polygamy and raping children. And Kearney unsuccessfully defended a Muslim client from Richardson, Texas; Hazim Elashi, who was co-owner of the Richardson-based company, InfoCom Corp, and one of five brothers convicted of doing business with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas [See above for their philosophy of life and the value of children].

"Hazim and Ihsan were convicted in the first of two trials on charges outlined in an indictment that also charged the defendants sent money to defendant Mousa Abu Marzook, an investor in Infocom and a self-admitted leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, a/k/a Hamas." Read the DOJ press release here.

I've had so many survivors of polygamy tell me that they see the FLDS as "The American Taliban." It makes so much sense that Jeffs would look for representation from someone very highly experienced defending what is essentially the indefensible.

Welcome to Texas, Warren

To read the press release from the Office of the Attorney General click
Here


G-D BLESS TINY ELDORADO
and
G-D BLESS TEXAS!

Like veal in pens

I have nothing against veal personally. I don't care for it, so I don't eat it, however the veal calves I've met have all been happy as larks; since their entire life consisted of being constantly fed any young cow's dream diet. Miserable veal wouldn't be any good for market, so producers have motivation to take proper care of the animals.

I'm not a member or supporter of PETA, because I happen to think human life has more meaning than an animal's, which they clearly do not, "A pig is a boy is a pig" etc.


No, my mission in life is to concentrate on serving the purpose of improving human life. There are plenty of others, who also don't buy PETA's message, who do care enough about animal life to make it a mission to help protect and improve it.

I am most moved to action when I see the abuse of human beings, especially on such a large scale, like we see in the practice of polygamy.

Keeping human beings like veal in pens is wrong. That is how the women of polygamy are born and raised. When you see the Care Bear colored mothers on TV, nodding their heads and saying, "It's a wonderful life. This is our choice. Oh yes, we are very happy. It is a very pure life".

Is it now? And could we possibly have different definitions of the word "pure"?

Every woman on the YFZ Ranch knew about the child rape of a 12 year old little girl. If they didn't know when she was "married" to Warren Jeffs, all those concubines knew it afterward, when she most likely gave birth to a child, which no doubt was either taken from her at birth or at the time of the 2008 raid.

This child is now one of those "women" on the YFZ who don't believe they are abused.

This little girl thinks it is a wonderful life, her choice, she is happy...and she is pure.

You see, having a man [one you have been raised to believe is a god] in his 50's rape you on a special alter bed in your religion's temple, with the assistance of two more of his older concubines, while they tape recorded the whole episode, and later had every perverted command, and prayer and grunt transcribed on to paper as well...

This, in her world, the world of an FLDS girl child, is a pure life. Being sexually used to breed children for your religion is the epitome of purity.

Raising animals in pens for slaughter is one thing. Raising human beings in them, for the same purpose?

Nobody in Utah or Arizona seems to see any real problem with this.

I consider that a human rights problem and a feminist problem.

For if the government will continue to turn a blind eye to the illegal spread of male patriarchy, which abuses women, what world do you expect to leave for your great grand daughters?

If raising human veal is ignored....

Jeffs Begins His Fight

POINT OF THE MOUNTAIN STATE PRISON, Utah (ABC 4 News) - Warren Jeffs won't be going to Texas without a fight.

In prison on Thursday, he was given a "waiver of extradition" which he refused to sign. That means he will have a hearing on extradition before a Utah judge in the next 30 days.
For the rest of the story click here: http://www.abc4.com/content/news/slc/story/Polygamist-leader-Warren-Jeffs-fighting/9Lnu_v2gjE6uA6A8kuthXw.cspx


I just don't see "Mistaken identity" as a defense that will hold up for Warren to avoid being brought back to Texas in shackles.

It's Liberty Stupid

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

FLDS and many other polygamist women are born, and indeed, bred in captivity, not Liberty.

Their unalienable right to ‘Liberty’ is gone the day they are born.


I’d like someone to ask Flora Jessop if she believes she was born with any access whatsoever to Liberty as the dictionary plainly defines it here; and exactly at what point in her life she finally obtained it.

Liberty
n. pl. lib•er•ties
1.
a. The condition of being free from restriction or control.
b. The right and power to act, believe, or express oneself in a manner of one's own choosing.
c. The condition of being physically and legally free from confinement, servitude, or forced labor. See Synonyms at freedom.
2. Freedom from unjust or undue governmental control.
3. A right or immunity to engage in certain actions without control or interference: the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights.


Was Flora Jessop born a free citizen of the United States of America?

Was Flora Jessop born into an illegal Theocracy, operating independently of, and opposed to the laws and values of the United State’s Constitution?

You could even say, “It’s the Constitution, stupid”.

Flora Jessop was born into an organized crime family. The sexual crimes committed against her person as a little child were heinous. Escaping, only to be betrayed by a Utah Judge, who called her a liar to her face, Utah CPS sent her back for more physical, mental and emotional abuse by the same group of organized criminals who had conspired from her birth to ensure she became one of them, and would 'choose' to break America's polygamy laws.

Flora Jessop was born in the Concubine state of Utah.

Things really are just this simple sometimes.