The Jeffs family is moving into Minnesota. Warren Jeffs is still in prison, but his brother is buying land up in the northern part of the state, an hour’s drive from Canada.
A leader of a notorious religious group that preaches polygamy and marriages involving children has relocated to Minnesota and is buying land.
Records obtained by KARE 11 show that a company in which Seth S. Jeffs is a “Managing Member” recently purchased 40 acres in a remote area near the Superior National Forest west of Grand Marais.
“If past behavior is indicative of future behavior, they would bring people to start a religious colony,” said Alan Mortensen, a Utah attorney who thinks Jeffs may have moved to Minnesota to avoid a lawsuit alleging that he allowed and witnessed the ritualistic rape of a young girl.
Mortensen has filed a civil lawsuit in Utah accusing Seth Jeffs and other leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) of participating in “religious sexual rituals with underage girls” involving Seth’s brother Warren Jeffs, the group’s so-called Prophet.
Jeffs also has a house in Bloomington. Let’s hope the lawsuit that has been served on him convinces him that he can’t hide out here.
And yet they can charge Assange with espionage.Seth Jeffs and every other adult male in his creepy cult needs to go to jail.
Grand Marais is a perfect location for quacks!
At least the aquatic avian type.
The FLDS claims to be the One True Religious Cult and the one that Mormon god on Kolob likes the best.
In Realityland, they have caused enormous problems for everyone around them and especially for everyone in the cult.
.1. One big problem is with extensive inbreeding, leading to near fixation of a serious recessive gene, fumarase deficiency.
From the article:
75 to 80% of people in Short Creek are blood relatives of the community’s founding patriarchs, Joseph Jessop and John Barlow.
Children born with fumarase deficiency are either severely retarded among other problems or frequently die soon after birth.
For this and other reasons, in the FLDS heartland along the south Utah-Arizona border, there are cemeteries with thousands of dead babies.
.2. The cult knows they have a problem now and they are trying to deal with it by designating the few noncarrier males as “seed carriers” and breeding them to noncarrier females if they can.
The women and girls don’t get a say.
It’s ritualistic rape to try to undo their first biological mistake.
Polygamy has a problem.
If one guy gets a dozen wives, 11 men are going to get zero wives.
They are surplus males and potential competition for the leaders who got all the women.
So, they discard those males.
These boys are poorly educated and not socialized to deal with the outside world.
That is why they are called lost boys.
It’s no different then dumping a litter of kittens off on the side of the highway in the middle of the night.
Who ends up dealing with the boys and their problems is…the outside world.
I can see that northern Minnesota is going to have a lost boys problem in a few years.
Let’s just hope they don’t dump their unwanted boys off on the side of the road in the middle of winter. Or fall and spring considering it is Minnesota.
They won’t be lost boys for long, they will be large, oddly shaped blocks of ice.
The FLDS claims to be the One True Religious Cult and the one that Mormon god on Kolob likes the best.
In Realityland, they have caused enormous problems for everyone around them and especially for everyone in the cult.
.1. One big problem is with extensive inbreeding, leading to near fixation of a serious recessive gene, fumarase deficiency.
From the article:
75 to 80% of people in Short Creek are blood relatives of the community’s founding patriarchs, Joseph Jessop and John Barlow.
Children born with fumarase deficiency are either severely neurologically disabled among other problems or frequently die soon after birth.
For this and other reasons, in the FLDS heartland along the south Utah-Arizona border, there are cemeteries with thousands of dead babies.
.2. The cult knows they have a problem now and they are trying to deal with it by designating the few noncarrier males as “seed carriers” and breeding them to noncarrier females if they can.
The women and girls don’t get a say.
It’s ritualistic rape to try to undo their first biological mistake.
There are also graves in the desert and canyons surrounding the FLDS heartland.
They aren’t marked and no one knows who is in them and how they got there.
No one from outside the FLDS anyway.
The state of Utah knows this and doesn’t care enough to worry about it.
They just say it is not illegal to bury unknown people in unmarked graves out in the middle of nowhere.
Actually it is, but that sounds better than, “It’s the FLDS, who cares.”
I can see that northern Minnesota is going to have to deal with things they can’t even imagine right now.
Excuse me, I need to go scream into my pillow.
Not precisely on topic, but I just found out that a man on the board of Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon stepped down after being convicted of “inappropriate contact” with a 14 year old girl. He was then reelected to the board in Tuesday’s special election, and stepped down again. The school said that if he hadn’t stepped down voluntarily, there wouldn’t have been anything they could have done about it.
raven: the traditional method is to have a convenient little war. That solves the polygamy problem in two ways: lots of your own men die, and you can enslave women from the neighbouring county.
Thankfully, FLDS don’t have the political strength to pull that off.
I seem to recall that King David in the bible did something like a war to get rid of the husband of a woman he wanted.
It wasn’t as hard as it seems.
In the last century the polygamists in Utah fought wars among themselves.
I once tried to count up the dead bodies but gave up. It was a lot but no one really kept track or cared all that much.
One guy alone killed around 25 people, most of them his own relatives.
Wikipedia Ervil LeBaron ” It has been estimated that more than 25 people were killed as a result of …”
The FLDS shows in a nutshell the worst traits of religion. Reading @raven’s posts and just a look at the Wikipedia-page leaves me quite helpless. I am German, and even if our state (polity/German: Staat) is far from perfect, I imagine that it would deal with this problem in a better manner.
As far as I am aware, Germany and many other European states have more authority or at least more means/mechanism by law to deal with religious cults. In the US, the idea of “freedom” is taken to another level, especially the freedom of religion.
Do not get me wrong, people should be free to worship, should not get persecuted and harmed. Freedom of religion is and should be a universal human right. But there should be limits to what they can do to others, especially to children.
The FLDS shows how the freedom of religion can go awfully wrong. These women – girls! – are raised (one can safely say “indoctrinated”) to be obedient second class people, to be used sexually by often much older men, who have a great number of “wives”, like (I am provocative) a collection or even “herd”. The “lost boys” show that males are also among the victims of this gruesome, patriarchal cult.
This exemplifies how the freedom of religion gone to extremes hurts people – takes freedom away.
There should be an open discussion in the wider society about religion, early teaching of children (which can take the form of religious indoctrination) and freedom in general (e.g also in matters of gun ownership).
Because the freedom of e.g. “patriarchs” in religious cults is the servitude and utter “unfreedom” of the people they raise as their “underlings”, mostly the women in their “community” (who are in my eyes much akin to sex slaves, sorry).
The (in my eyes, I admit on not being an expert) US obsession with “freedom” leaves conveniently this dark side out. Those people who suffer in the shadows of “religious freedom” – be it from being deprived of a proper education; getting brainwashed into “loving” the cult that oppresses them (often just by fearing the modern world “outside” that they are utterly unprepared for); having to live in a hierarchy that is quite against their human dignity and the rights that they could enjoy in wider society; lack of opportunities; being unable to make decisions about their own lives – those victim a are too often ignored.
The US is proud of being so open towards religion, granting maybe more freedom to religious “communities” than any other state. I think this is the wrong approach.
Personal freedom should weigh much higher than religious freedom, which seems to always give great power to “community” leaders, who tend to misuse it (surprisingly often for sexual purposes – many “religions” seem to be thinly veiled sex cults, which is of little surprise to me, since mainstream religion is obsessed with the female body and sexuality).
Many US-Americans are against the state and fear “overreach”. Granted, it is good to be critical and vigilant, it is necessary to make sure that the state is as beneficial to society as possible. A state should be fair and democratic, allows participation to all, e.g. gives the opportunity to vote and stand for election, is as transparent as (in Realpolitik) possible.
I am rather pro-state (European style states) and cases like the FLDS are one reason why.
Human beings will always have to give up some of their freedom in one way or another. Life in society, the need for e.g. protection, makes that a necessity. I rather give up a little piece of my freedom to a well-functioning, beneficial, social etc. state than to a “community”, religious (most of them are) or otherwise. Why? Because I also GAIN freedom in that process, it is a “give and take”.
Most “communities” (in which one is often “born” into) tend to be rather against individual liberties, against equality of men and women, often against LGBTQ-people and against critical and independent thinking in general. They tend to prefer indoctrination over education (even the best “communities” tend to draw a line that one cannot overstep, tend to police which thoughts and information is “allowed”). They tend to be hierarchical, too.
“Anti-state” propagandists like to paint a dark picture, bringing up only the worst failures of the state throughout history. In their “narrative”, (I am a bit polemic here) every state is a Nazi-regime in disguise, oppressive, secretive, sinister, run by a privileged clique of “leaches”. “Anti-state-ists” instead promote either total individual freedom (an ideology that I think is absolutely unrealistic and would lead to a dog-eat-dog world – till it ends in some kind of oligarchy) or some glorified “community of communities”, assuming that people will than fare better, participate more directly, have more say. That, too, I fear is unrealistic.
The weaker parts of our society, the minorities, e.g. LGBTQ-people, women, even the poor, are better helped and have more freedom in a benevolent, social, “anonymous” state. As “cosy” as the word “community” sounds, as nice as (spiritual) religiosity may be in its best form, the state is best suited to garantee personal freedom, personal development, opportunities, in short: a better life for most people.
The FLDS show the worst outcomes of the rule of “communities”.