The Strawberry Blog

May 13, 2006

Today’s topic: morons. I was having a perfectly nice Saturday morning. I’d already received an early AM missive about the latest fire in my New Orleans neighborhood, and paid a visit to my foot specialist who inserted a long needle into my flexor hallucis brevis, when the front page of The Los Angeles Times landed in my palms. (Thanks to staff writers David Kelly and Gary Cohn for encouraging morning cheeriness).
The theme: Stupidity.
The story was about members of a secretive polygamist sect living in a rural enclave on the Utah-Arizona border. More specifically, it was about those particular members who have left it, but not without suffering the wrath of having been stupid enough to join (and subject innocent children to) this cult community headed by a pedophile, in the first place. You feel sorry for the woman on the front page of the paper—all frumpy, stupid, tattered-coated 38 years of her. She decided to leave the cult because she was afraid that the sect leader would marry her 13 year old daughter.
I wonder why it didn’t occur to her earlier that it also might not be a brilliant idea to allow her 12 year old son to be removed from school so that he could pursue a thrilling, liberal arts education in construction. There’s nothing wrong with construction. My uncle did it, and I thank God for people who can do it. But they weren’t forcibly removed from the 6th grade to do it. One questions this mother’s logic. Was the imminent rape (call it what it would be) the final straw? If so, then good—at least it was an impetus scary enough to shake her from her stewed density and move the hell on (with her brood of eight and twenty dollars in her pocket).
Let’s first take a look at the group and its leadership. All of this stupidity has got to have a tenet on which to grasp its tiny little collective mind. The group, an obscenely patriarchal, racist sect, is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FDLS. And as hard as this is for the average American voter to believe, about 10,000 of these amazing Mensa candidates live in an enclave in a remote place in the desert, led by…a pedophile.
Here’s a little run down of the sect’s beliefs. Incidentally, absolute adherence to these beliefs is what gets you in to heaven. Remember that:
1. Man belongs to the prophet [and apparently the prophet changes according to death and the next megalomaniac quick enough on the draw to take his place]. In this case, since 2002 when his daddy died, Warren Jeffs is the prophet.
2. A woman, says self-described prophet, should concentrate solely on her husband, praying each morning, “I want to do your will, Father, through obeying my husband or my father or my prophet.”
3. Women are encouraged to give birth once a year [this is, of course, great for body, mind, and population control].
4. You cannot reach the highest levels of heaven without having at least three wives [this is insanity, but, hey Brigham Young said it].
5. No one marries without the prophet’s permission, and you are subject to his whims.
6. There is no television or movie viewing, and no listening to music.
You get the idea. A man with a huge ego, a very small heart, and carte blanche to further sweep his brainwashed community into the folds of his unsavory manipulation. We’ve seen it all before.
But what struck me first was just how upset I was with the women, the mothers who allowed their minds to deflate, to subject children to the perversities of one tall, acne-riddled, pallid, scrawny little male—a scrawny little man accused of repeatedly raping his 5 year old nephew. Subject themselves to the fancies of a scrawny litte man who would say in a 1995 lecture that the only way for womanly happiness is by allowing “her husband, a faithful man, rule over her.” A pathetic and ignorant little man who proclaimed that “through the Negro race, the devil has kept evil alive.” A little nothing of a man who talks big invective…and travels with an entourage larger than Busta Rhymes’s, surrounds his compound with surveillance, and must pay a dear retainer fee for his lawyer to issue statements such as, “Warren is charismatic. He is an intellectual. He is not crazy…he is trying to meet the expectations of God.”
And then I wondered about what kind of man would allow this scrawny pedophile to forcibly remove his own family from him—and give them away to another man? What kind of man allows that?
Not a man.
Just another moron.
And all the while this travesty of human rights was in full swing, the travesty of justice was commensurate in their scrawny little towns.
So the next time someone ribs me about Louisiana crime and corruption, I will laugh the requisite laugh. Then I’ll tell them, Hey, have you heard about Colorado City, Arizona and Salt Lake City, Utah? They’ve harbored police who would rather throw “rebellious” FLDS women into mental institutions than enforce the law. They would tip off their pedophile leader (now on the Top Ten Most Wanted list) to save him from facing the law. To save them from facing him and—gasp!—risking not getting into heaven with their interchangeable families. How about that for insidiousness? I think I’ll take my corruption in the open, thank you.
Some of these children will escape their torment; others will be subjected to it until they awake from their own stupor—which may never come. It is painful to see repeated the same old habits attributed to brainwashing and abuse. I think that more of these women are capable of using their minds, hearts and, yes, their animal instinct, to tell them what they’re doing is wrong for their children and for themselves.
So, Happy Mother’s Day. I wasn’t going to allude to it because I’ve been pretty tough on these mothers. But, even though I never much cared for the Hallmark-stamped holiday, my mother did—and since she’s not here anymore, I owe her a nod. Besides, Mother’s Day was created in the early 20th century to pay homage to someone’s dead mother.
Thank your mother for everything she’s done for you—especially the part about not raising you in a cultish sect.
And don’t forget her the rest of the year either.