Boydshake

Sometimes, when I consider moving on from this blog to something else, I look at the number of hits the blog has received. The number just keeps increasing. It passed thirty thousand a few weeks back. I know that actually successful blogs get that many hits in an hour, but seriously…I don’t really know even 3,000 people. The little attention junky inside me gets excited as the numbers go up.

Boyd K Packer (President of the quorum of twelve apostles for the LDS church) has something to say about men getting excited:

“There is, however, something you should not do. Sometimes a young man does not understand. Perhaps he is encouraged by unwise or unworthy companions to tamper with that factory. He might fondle himself and open that release valve. This you shouldn't do, for if you do that, the little factory will speed up. You will then be tempted again and again to release it. You can quickly be subjected to a habit, one that is not worthy, one that will leave you feeling depressed and feeling guilty. Resist that temptation. Do not be guilty of tampering or playing with this sacred power of creation. Keep it in reserve for the time when it can be righteously employed.

One of you, perhaps, has not fully understood until now. Perhaps your father did not talk to you. You may already have been guilty of tampering with these powers. You may even have developed a habit. What do you do then?

First, I want you to know this. If you are struggling with this temptation and perhaps you have not quite been able to resist, the Lord still loves you. It is not anything so wicked nor is it a transgression so great that the Lord would reject you because of it, but it can quickly lead to that kind of transgression. It is not pleasing to the Lord, nor is it pleasing to you. It does not make you feel worthy or clean.

There are ways to conquer such a habit. First of all, you must leave that factory alone long enough for it to slow down. Resisting is not easy. It will take weeks, even months. But you can get the little factory slowed back to where it should be. “ – Boyd K Packer General Conference Priesthood Session, October 2, 1976

There is a bit of cold water thrown on my party when I notice how many folks get to my site by searching for pictures of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus or for the phrase "little Titis". The internet is a vast and immature place where viscous banal information is the undertow washing people onto its far-flung shores.

I should get with the program rather than ignoring it.

So…here is a picture of Boyd K Packer singing Kelis’s megahit: “Milkshake”.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks. -- Alistair Cooke 

Fifty-Cent Gas

Last September Gordon Moon was indicted for failure to report sexual abuse of a child. It looks like he is going to trial, and he faces five years in prison.

Sexual abuse of children is probably one of those things where if there were good ways of gathering statistics about it then there should be good ways of making those data zero. To compare severities and frequency one has to compare reports and news stories. For instance, at the same time the 43-year-old Gordon was being indicted a 40-year-old man from Vernal Utah (a VERY small, VERY rural, town near where I live) was sentenced to five-years-to-life in Salt Lake County for repeatedly raping his teenage daughter on a farm in that county. The story got very little news attention.

Gordon Moon is a prominent member of a small community in Duchene country. Duchene County is famous for oil shale. Gordon was on the school board,  a bishop, and a smiling star in a sage-brush dynastic family. It is actually in his role as a bishop that he ran afoul of the law.

It is strange to compare severities because doing so appears to diminish one event over another. The case Gordon failed to report was that of one teenager having sex with another. This sounds so much less severe than the Salt Lake Farm Incest (SLFI) case. However, the girl in the Gordon case felt “terrorized” by her abuser, and his family. One of the things we must keep in mind is the effect on society the criminal act has. Follow-on abuse and terror are certainly aggravating factors in any case.

Gordon had allegedly counseled the victim to: “think about what (the boy) is going through, and I don't need to start telling the cops or anything because he's already going to have to go through a bunch of repentance and all that stuff”.

Sentencing is also a poor way of judging severity. There are often disclosures and plea bargains that can reduce both sentences and charges. In the SLFI case it came to light that the defendant was re-creating a family dynamic he had learned as a child. When the SLFI defendant was 22 his father stopped raping his sister; his father had been at it since the SLFI defendant was 15.

The way I read the story, and stories in the local paper sometimes have to be translated from clusterspeak, the SLFI defendant father (SLFI-Dad) had raped SLFI's sister continually from the time she was 11 until she was 18. At 18 SLFI-Mom found out about it and she went to the local bishop (I think there are only something like 20 families in Vernal, but I’ll have to look that up) who then called in SLFI-Dad who fessed up. SLFI-Dad was then excommunicated from the LDS church.

So, you see how severity can be a difficult thing to determine? To me the whole SLFI thing sounds like a rejected script for a “The Hills Have Eyes” sequel. I will admit to not only having watched “The Hills Have Eyes 2”, but owning it on DVD; the SLFI script sounds like it might even have worked better than what they settled for.

Gordon attempted to silence the victim that came to him for support. Instead of listening to their bishop the victim and her family went to law enforcement. Vernal (Which is a small city in Duchene County) may be almost 1,000-times larger than Vernon, but it is still a small enough town where everyone knows the identities of its accusers. The stress the already-abused Gordon-accusing family is experiencing is unimaginable to most big-city folks.

The story comments the internet has washed up are undoubtedly only a taste of the humid vitriol dripping from the foul breath of local accusers; many of them may not be literate enough to stoke internet flames. What needs to happen before healing can really begin in that brave family? In the SLFI-Dad case the abused girl was simply sent home to silently handle her situation. According to Gary Searle, chief deputy attorney for the Tooele County Attorney’s Office that resulted in a whole lot of healing.

“There have been things that have happened in the family — healing, those kinds of things — which have gone on and they were looking for a result that would allow them to move forward rather than in a typical sex abuse case where the family’s looking for some serious punishment,” Gary Searle, chief deputy attorney for the Tooele County Attorney’s Office.

Perhaps Gordon was only thinking of the healing process for the girl that came to him. Perhaps he knew that silence is a better salve for injury than justice, or at least it sounds that way.

SLFI-Dad was sentenced this week to 15 years in prison, and given $30,000.00 in fines. That is only about two years in jail and $4,000.00 in fines per year that the SLFI-Dad abused his daughter; sounds lenient to me. All but 180 days and $1,500 were suspended. That is less than a month per year, and a little over fifty cents per day for the abuse. I don’t think that would cover the gas money required to even attempt a seven-year stint of most misdeeds.

No charges are even being considered for the SLFI-Bishop.

So Gordon’s real crime may have been in simply being unsuccessful. If the girl had just gone home and shut her mouth then eventually his problem would have gone away.

Church of the First Born

When I state that I am of two minds when it comes to polygamy I become intrigued by the idea that bipolar disorder might make bigamy legal. Then the latest news delivers some tidbit of information that causes me to realize that I don’t have the option of choosing at which times I view polygamy as either unobtrusive adult play or sickness.

I really want to picture polygamy as a bunch of consenting adults engaging in what consulting adults should engage in; namely whatever they generally want. There is something that is particularly interesting about the concept that two or more people might reach a consensus on shared responsibility and mutual pleasure that goes against the grain of cultural norms. That kind of experimentation is what could result in a better future for our species.

Then I read some news story. The latest concerns the conviction of a couple of the leaders of one of the many polygamist sects in Utah. Geody Harman plead guilty to raping Terrill Dalton’s 15 year old daughter at his command. Terrill, who apparently goes by the name "Holy Ghost” when it suits him, was convicted in March, with the help of Harman’s testimony, of raping this same daughter when Harman was done with her. The rapes occurred over the mountains from where I live in the high-density Salt Lake City suburb of Magna. Dalton and Harman’s sect is called “the Church of the First Born and the General Assembly of Heaven” and elements of it can be found all over the west.

Polygamists in the Mormon tradition are child-raping incestuous criminals who use social structures to avoid lawful society and prey upon the weak. Not a month passes when there is not a report of abandoned children, girls beaten almost to death for not marrying some old man, rapes upon rapes, monetary misdeeds, and other incredible behavior. If these polygamist “communities” were gangs or the mob their actions would fit more comfortably into the context their names suggest. Because we name the communities after the sexual activities of their male members they sound less criminal.

The state of Utah is especially poor at discovering and prosecuting the crimes against humanity that these groups perpetuate. This is because the history of the majority church in Utah established child-raping incestuous activity as a pathway to righteousness. Though I’m sure the majority of the LDS church would like the child-raping-incest crimes to stop they would prefer them to simply go away under the blind eye of their concerned ignorance than actually do anything about it. Every time a prosecution of a child-raping polygamist hits the news it is a reminder that the exalted prophet of god and founder of the Mormon Church was convicted of child rape (admittedly not in an acceptable trial) and tarred and feathered for his crime.

It is impossible to be a Mormon and not accept the child-rape-incest style of polygamy on some level. The standard line is that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young’s child raping was “consistent with the time”. I guess the idea is that in the early 1800s child rape was accepted, and that we should accept it as OK. Slavery was also OK in the USA in the early 1800s.

Mitt Romney is probably going to be the GOP candidate for president of the USA. In his famous speech where he addressed being a Mormon candidate (6 December 2007) he said: ‘My faith is the faith of my fathers - I will be true to them and to my beliefs.” Mitt Romney’s grandfather was a founder of the “Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times” a group that “escaped” to Mexico to perpetuate their child-raping incestuous activities there. Eventually, after Romney’s father George had left the sect, they dissolved into a rampage of murder theft and arson.

The name of the group that emerged victorious from the anarchy that befell Romney’s Church of the Firstborn was called the “Church of the Lamb of God”.

It is difficult to say how much the original “Church of the Firstborn” influenced this year’s “Church of the Firstborn” child-abusers. There is an understandable shroud of secrecy covering the organizations. It is impossible to tie Romney to this new crop of child rapes by anything other than his own words. His grandfather was a sustaining member of one of the craziest of “polygamist” communities and Mitt Romney maintained in a carefully-worded speech that he “will be true to them”. I’m sure he meant it in some acceptably mainstream and not in a child-raping-incest-fueled way though.

The “Church of the First Born and the General Assembly of Heaven” is one of many loosely-associated sects. They get their name from a bible quote:

"But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks." – 12 Hebrews 22-25 NIV

The reference to “Mount Zion” makes this passage especially attractive to Mormons. The use of the name today consistently implies the Mexican break-away sect and its founders. They are considered great men by those that can overlook their child raping incest as simply a cultural norm associated with the time.