Elizabeth Smart & Brian David Mitchell and Elissa Wall & Allen Steed

Brian David Mitchell, a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, kidnapped Elizabeth Smart from her suburban Salt Lake City bedroom when she was 14-years-old. For weeks her family and law enforcement were stumped as to what might have happened to her but a relatively unknown anti-polygamy activist named Flora Jessop came forward not long after the kidnapping to warn law enforcement and the public that this had all the markings of the work of a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist.

She was ridiculed and laughed at, and as it turns out, she was right.

It took over 8 years but he was eventually convicted in a federal court for kidnapping Elizabeth and raping her every day, in order to fulfill his mission to his false Mormon god. You see, he needed her, because without participating in polygamy, according to his prophet, Joseph Smith, he could never reach the highest level of the afterlife, where he would become the god of his own planet and live out eternity having sex with all his spiritual wives in order to populate his planet.

A court rejected his argument that he was insane and a jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to 15 years in a federal prison for what he had done to Elizabeth. He stole her innocence and her childhood.

Elissa Wall was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints in 1986. At the age of 14 she was informed by her family that she was to be given in marriage to her 19-year-old cousin, Allen Steed. She resisted. She cried. She begged her family not to make her marry him. She stood sobbing as her mother and other family members made her stand still for her wedding gown to be fitted.

She was then transported across state lines [violation of Mann Act? Human sex trafficking?] to a motel in Nevada, where the sect's leader, Warren Jeffs performed a marriage ceremony for the two. She told her new "husband" that she did not want to have sex. She begged him not to violate her innocence, and he did it anyway. Later she went to Jeffs to beg him to release her from the "marriage", but he advised her only to go home and submit herself to her rapist, "mind, body and soul."

There you have it, two 14-year-old girls, both raped by fundamentalist Mormons in order to become gods and get their own planet in the afterlife. You see, they needed these girls, had to have them or they wouldn't "get to Heaven."

The difference?

Today the state of Utah offered Allen Steed a plea deal for raping then 14-year-old Elissa. He will serve 30 days in jail for his crime.

Brian David Mitchell raped a 14-year-old and got 15 years in prison.


What is the difference, when neither child was willing to submit to their rapes?

Elissa had the bad luck to be born into fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, and that my friends is a very dangerous place for any girl with her own mind to be born.

Someone please try to imagine your 14-year-old little girl being pushed down and having a man repeatedly forcing himself into her, over and over...and then being sentenced to only 30 days in jail for it.

Shame on Utah, it doesn't deserve to be in our Union, not today. Today you are VILE!

And to any polygamists here it Texas? You take a good long hard look at that flag at the top of this page. You will not succeed in coming here to Texas to rape us or our children, or in making us VILE like YOU. Got it?
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Correction! Thank you, Texas-1 for pointing this out:

"Brian David Mitchell has been convicted, but has not yet been sentenced, his sentencing will be 25 May 2011 in SLC.

Mitchell's wife Wanda Barzee was sentenced to to 15 years, which she is serving at a prison located in Fort Worth."

Texas Women and San Jacinto

The Battle Flag of San Jacinto

I am humoring myself, lately, with pondering the Battle Flag of San Jacinto.

When I returned to Texas in 2008, I met in Austin with the assistant to Representative Hilderbran. I remember showing the documentation I'd returned with and saying, "Eldorado was like an Alamo for the future of women's rights in Texas, and if we don't get a San Jacinto we're going to be in trouble".

Over a year later, I took the time to look up the San Jacinto Battle Flag, and found myself amazed at the prescience of the characters of the women who were behind it, and their remarkable story.

http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/sylvesterjames.htm

"Thousands are said to have waved the company off as they departed by steamer from Cincinnati on the Ohio River. Legend says that Private James A. Sylvester was given a long red glove (a white glove in some accounts) by the daughter of the host at a departure dance just before leaving for Texas which he tied on the flag staff. It was said to be a "talisman" and inspired the ranks at San Jacinto."


"I take it as a pledge of victory, and shall die before I surrender it to a foe."
~Private James A. Sylvester

As I ponder this revealing historical information I wonder about things.

I wonder what a group of officer's ladies in Kentucky in 1836 would have thought of a religious leader who proclaimed the color red to be completely banned from all public or private settings.

Would this have been a case of the ladies of Kentucky Vs. The Grinch?

The Grinch is, after all, the only other character in recent history who has successfully banned the color red from the sight of children. Even if it was only a bad fairy tale, and not the stuff of every day life, as it is for FLDS children, one has to wonder about this person's genuine spirituality...

The battle flag has captured more than my imagination since taking a good long look at it, and the history, which brought it to the field in Texas where our liberty as Texans was so decisively won. It was here the stage was set for the Mexican-American war and gave The United States the northern half of Mexico. This area later became the U.S. states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

And there was our gift back.

Everything about the Battle Flag of San Jacinto is the ultimate antithesis of Warren Jeffs, and indeed, polygamy.

After all, if someone can document, historically, one incidence of an FLDS lady presenting a long red glove to her man as a talisman of good luck, or designing a flag for him to carry into battle, which features a bare breasted woman wearing a red skirt, raising a sabre, and holding a banner that says "Liberty or Death"...well, I will be glad to eat my hat for anyone who can produce such historical evidence.

She was called by the women who sent it to us, "The Goddess of Liberty".
Only Texas women have the pleasure of such a history.

We do not come from Utah and Arizona where the liberty of their women is so lightly removed in the criminal practice of the human rights abuse of polygamy.

We are free women.



It was gift from our sisters in Kentucky and Ohio, who seemed to understand their own liberty was a gift from the creator, and no man could take it way from them in a civilization where human liberty was to flourish as prolifically as wildflowers.

We are free women.

Someone else can tell my Cherokee or Hillbilly friends in Tennessee, that Texas has decided to lay down the power to protect its women and children.

I will deliver my sisters there no such message.

Someone else can go tell the Mississippi Girls that we have laid the banner down and will be quiet now that we have a group lobbying our legislature, hoping to form a "Safety Net" style Committee here in Texas.

I will not.

Someone else can go tell the Alabama women, where they are proud to declare "We dare defend our rights", that polygamy will be normalized and accepted here in Texas as long as the children here are raised to believe doing it is their only means to eternal salvation.

I won't be making that call to Alabama either.

Nope, I don't plan to pick up the phone and make any such report to anyone in any state.

We are free women.

When we take a husband he is our only living equal. The law supports us and protects us in this right. We will be appealing to our laws.

After all, aren't our laws what make us civilized?

Men are good at killing people and breaking things but only women can build a culture worth living in on top of the ruins.

I like my civilization, here in Texas, just as it is right now, thank you very much.

I should really go get a copy of this flag.

Eldorado needs this flag.