Duggars and Kardashians

When you come right down to it, there isn't that much difference between the Duggars and the Kardashians.  Both families are large, loyal, unemployed, woefully under-educated, governed by a control freak, and have money coming out their ears.

And both families are sexually oriented, The women are skilled with make-up, wear cute clothes, sport the latest hair styles, and aren't averse to a few nips and tucks, but the Duggars groom their girls to be as sexually submissive as FLDS Mormons, while the Kardashians groom their girls to be as lecherous as Saturday night--uh--girlfriends.

The big difference between the two families is that the Duggars try to smooth over any cracks in their facade, while the Kardashians base episodes around them.

Whatever.  The Kardashians are boring, and the Duggars give Fio sugar diabetes.

Population Prediction

The way it's looking now, a hundred years from now, half the population of the country will be descended from Duggars, Gosselins, and FLDSers. Yeah, real people just aren't breeding that much anymore.

But then again, the Martians may invade and put an end to all of us.

Olio

As far as Fio can tell, the Muslim and Mormon visions of heaven are similar--they're both for men, with women as accessories.
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With the earthquake in Alaska and the wildfires in Texas, Fio is surprised Bachmann hasn't blamed them on Palin and Perry for posing a threat to her political ambitions.
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Eighty days of temperatures in the triple digits. That's almost a quarter of the year. Tell me again that the weather extremes of global warming aren't real.

Zion's Barnyard

One more thing about the FLDS and then Fiorella will let the topic drop--maybe.

The ratio of women to men--doesn't it make you think of a herd of cattle with just one bull? Of course, Jeffs was generous and allowed subservient bulls to accumulate their own small herds, but he kept the sweetest, freshest heifers for himself.

To further the bovine analogy, consider the African tribes in which wealth is measured in cattle. Using that standard, Jeffs, with his seventy-nine wives, is a modern Croesus. And with him collecting welfare checks for seventy-eight unemployed single mothers, he may be even richer.

Yes, the FLDS women are not just cash cows, but the geese that lay the golden eggs.

Eye of the Beholder

Gypsies and Travelers are reviled for their penny ante con games, while the FLDS gets away with bilking our tax dollars for millions.

Black women with eight children on the public dole are criticized for their irresponsibility, while FLDS women with eight children on the public dole receive sympathetic news coverage.

Throwing one's young teenage sons out into the world with no education and no means of support is considered child abandonment in most jurisdictions. In FLDS territory, it's the norm.

Odd how things change if you're wearing pastel dresses and "keep sweet."

Private Literature

Latest info from the trial of FLDS "prophet" Warren Jeffs is that the reason he claims the sect records are sacred is because they're meant only for God to read. Apparently the Almighty is not as all-seeing and all-knowing as we've always heard, but must rely on account books written by mere mortals . . . in English.

What a treasure trove for a the prosecutor in the case--written records of "celestial marriages," apparently even tapes of the consummation of such.

Both bizarre and terrible.

Please, Pray for Justice to Prevail

Even tending her garden, Fiorella hears something of what's going on in the world, and she's quite pleased that FLDS "prophet" Warren Jeffs is coming to trial at last. In fact, she wishes he were eligible for the death penalty.

The Mormon fundamentalists were weird enough to begin with, but, through brain washing, Jeffs has pushed them over the edge to rampant welfare fraud, flagrant child abuse, and institutionalized slavery of women. The FLDS men, beaten regularly as children, and the women, trained to be Stepford wives from the cradle on, go along with him because they don't know what else to do. Jeffs has defined their comfort zone, and its boundaries are limited to the walls that surround their compounds.

She just hopes the Texas jury doesn't pull a Casey Anthony out of the hat.

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.

Yearning for Cinema

Carolyn Jessop's autobiographical account of her escape from the same polygamous cult that spawned Yearning for Zion is being made into a movie, thank goodness. The media can present stories that affect people's thinking far more effectively than the courts and law enforcement. And it's only fair--the Fundamentalists did a real number on the press, which did a real number on the public a couple of months ago. And the cult knew exactly how to do it--use their women, as usual; this was a tried and true method: when the cult was raided fifty years ago by the state of Arizona, it used the same tactic to wiggle off the hook.

Make no mistake. These people are not Donnie and Marie. The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints are not just Amish with polygamy. They are a cult based on the sexual exploitation of women. They believe that in order to become a god in the afterlife, a man must marry as many women as possible and beget as many children as possible. Women can only become goddesses in the afterlife by their husband reaching down a hand to pull them up to heaven (where they will still serve their master). Oh, and apocalypse is near--the White Indians will slay everyone except those who are wearing special underwear, which is why all of Warren Jeff's tribe above the age of diapers wears those longjohns morning, noon, and night--yes, even when having sex.

And the women buy it all. They were born into it and raised in it and know nothing else. Their only salvation is being perfect wives. If they get sick or go insane, it is God's punishment for them not being perfect. If their husband is abusive, it is the wives' fault.

And we thought the Taliban treated women poorly!

Lyin' for Zion

I am appalled and amazed at how well Warren Jeff's minions have manipulated the press and thus public opinion. And the women, those flocks of pastel flowers, did it all.

First of all, there was the visual image. The long "prairie dresses" bespoke a time we all revere in our Hollywood-ized past, when life was simpler and Maureen O'Hara fought off rascally Indians while Grace Kelly stood by her man. Then there were the sad faces, all duly recorded by cameras and camcorders for public display. "We just want our children back," their spokeswomen said, but their eyes were crafty.

They didn't hide from us, those women. They didn't shun the media. They were in our living rooms every night. We couldn't get away from them. So we started to think about them, to try to understand them, to put ourselves in their klunky shoes--which is right where they wanted us to be.

Of course, the press tripped over its own prime ethic, fairness, and told us so much of the women's side of the story that we started liking them. And we remembered that our Constitution promises freedom of religion. And our hearts told us mothers should not be forced to deliver their children up unto to the sheriff.

At the same time, the women were screwing up the works behind closed doors, refusing to give their last names, trading name tags, exchanging their clothes and their children's clothes, anything to obfuscate their individual identities. Maybe they didn't have any.

And, as was often asked, what about the boys born into the cult? With male/female birthrates usually about equal, how could so many women end up married to one man without leaving many other males wifeless? Uneducated, inexperienced with the world, what happened to the leftovers? Apparently they get tossed out of Zion and often end up hooked on alcohol and drugs. What else do they have in their lives?

But where were the married men, the bulls in the cowpen? Nowhere to be seen. After all, they could be arrested for bigamy if their wives ratted on them. And when DNA fatherhood was proven, the state might find some way to make them support their children themselves rather than registering the kiddos for welfare, as reported by Nancy Grace.

Why did the women do this? For the same reason abused children will move heaven and earth to defend their abusive parents, pleading to return to houses of horror: because the familiar is always more comfortable than change. Besides, abused people often have the idea that they are in control of their situations, that they have somehow caused their own abuse by not being "good" enough. Come on, you've seen it on LAW AND ORDER a jillion times.

Keep up the good fight, Texas. Save the kids. And save the women from themselves, if you can. They can keep the prairie dresses and turn Amish, if they want--the Amish fully cooperate with civil law. Or they can join that Baptist sect the Dugger family exemplifies--seventeen kids, but with just ONE wife.