Gnawing at Zion

Back to the Mormon fundamentalists, the ones at Yearning for Zion. I just can't help gnawing at that bone.

It isn't just the women who are abused. Everyone is, except the man at the top, the "Prophet," the guy who supposedly receives direct word from God on everything from marriages to underwear to work assignments. It's very feudal. Even a man who's squirmed his way politically up near the top, can have his whole life rearranged in a second--his income confiscated, his wives and children reallocated to other men, his eternity damned to hell.

And people go along with it-- because they think it's right and correct and true, that banning the color red (because red is God's color, according to Warren Jeffs) is pious, that killing all the pets is God's will, that throwing 400 boys out of the only life they've ever known will get everyone else into heaven.

How do these people support themselves, you ask. Where do these people get their money? From us. They specialize in "bleeding the beast," as we are called. They get Social Security payments for women they designate as "single mothers"-- women who are actually bigamous, tri-gamous, hundred-gamous wives--and their many, many children. And they buy businesses with this money and sell services to us--with their children and workhorse wives doing the grunt work.

And, at the same time, they consider us as the enemy, the damned, not just because we have tried to disrupt their lives, but because we are different. How odd--they do not accord us the same tolerance that we seem hellbent to extend to them.