The Next Waco (part one of an irregular series)

Whatever it is that causes charisma, Warren Jeffs, the fugitive Prophet of the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints (FLDS) Church, seems to have isolated the antidote.

Jeffs is a lanky nebbish who looks a bit like Rick Moranis, minus the raw animal magnetism that makes the "Ghostbusters" actor an icon of rugged masculinity. Or something.

Audiotapes of Jeffs' sermons reveal that he has a speaking style known to mainstream Mormons as "General Conference Cadence": A droning monotone that is either hypnotic or soporific, depending on one's taste.

Despite these disadvantages, Jeffs is regarded as God's surrogate by more than 10,000 followers living in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, an isolated community sitting athwart the Utah-Arizona border. The community is run as a theocracy (actually, a sacerdocracy -- a regime ruled by a priestly caste) in which there is no distinction between the church and the government. Several generations have been raised to make the "prophet"'s will their law.

The community is polygamous and severely endogamous, a combination that reportedly has resulted not only in widespread incest but also the propagation of incapacitating birth defects (owing to the limited and stagnant gene pool) and, allegedly, the quiet practice of infanticide to dispose of children deemed too deformed to live.

Tragic as all of this is, it would be of little public moment were it not for the fact that the FLDS ruling elite is subsidized, by both state and federal welfare agencies, in amounts estimated to be as much as $30,000,000 a year. (Many of the relevant details can be found in the fascinating independent documentary "Banking on Heaven.") The subsidies come not only in the form of welfare payments to polygamous "wives" -- each of whom is considered a single mother under the law -- but also to the FLDS-controlled police department and school district.

Members of the FLDS community, apart from those at the pinnacle of the priesthood/political leadership, do not own property. Their homes are owned by an economic collective called the United Effort Plan, which is controlled by Jeffs and his fellow oligarchs. Jeffs claims the right to seize and re-assign both property and wives (from the FLDS perspective, I just repeated myself) as he sees fit. The FLDS church teaches that women can only be "exalted" in heaven by becoming child-bearing polygamous wives, and male "priesthood holders" must have at least three wives in order to ascend to the highest rank in celestial glory. Thus Jeffs' supposed authority to arrange, re-arrange, and nullify "celestial marriages" is perhaps the most fearsome power he wields over his adherents. In recent years Jeffs and his privileged associates have narrowed the competition for potential wives by expelling many supposedly rebellious young men -- known now as the "Lost Boys" -- from the Hildale/Colorado City community.

By controlling the community's productive assets -- particularly the children, who represent a huge revenue stream in the form of welfare subsidies -- tithing and other donations from members expected to "consecrate" their wealth to the church, and the subsidies received from state and federal welfare programs, Jeffs and his cronies control (according to Arizona state legislator Buster Johnson) cash assets of nearly a half-billion dollars.

In November 2003, FLDS leaders purchased a tract of land in El Dorado, Texas, where the church began to build a temple modelled after the one built by Mormon founder Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois. In what has to be considered an ominous development, news accounts began referring to the FLDS settlement in El Dorado as a "compound" -- a term generally used to describe any edifice housing any group that finds itself on the receiving end of a Federal paramilitary assault.

Another grim portent is found in the fact that the degenerate race-baiting hustler Morris Dees has added Jeffs and the FLDS to his roster of "extremists" worthy of federal surveillance. Reports are circulating about Jeffs being protected by a retinue of heavily armed followers willing to kill and die in the defense of their prophet -- a plausible allegation, of course, and one that enhances the unmistakable tropism toward a Waco-style denoument.

In 1953, the Arizona state government conducted an armed raid on the border-straddling Mormon polygamous community, which at the time was called Short Creek. More than 100 men were arrested, and 236 children were seized from their homes and taken into state custody. The spectacle of polygamous families being torn apart proved to be a political disaster for Arizona Governor Howard Pyle: Many mainstream Mormons in both Utah and Arizona, nearly all of whom had polygamous ancestors (some of whom were only recently deceased), saw unsettling continuities between the raid on the FLDS and similar incidents in Utah's pre-statehood history, when polygamy was described by Mormon prophets as the only true order of marriage (and monogamy was denounced as a perverse and unnatural arrangement).

Memories of the Short Creek raid are kept alive in fundamentalist circles as an illustration of the unremitting hostility of the apostate "Gentiles" who surround them. Children raised in that tradition are trained fully to expect that someday they will suffer persecution similar to that visited on their ancestors, and that they should be prepared to seal their "testimonies" with their blood, if necessary.

The worst conceivable outcome would be a violent federal crack-down on the FLDS that results in mass bloodshed. It is unconscionable for women and children to be treated as they are in Hildale/Colorado City. Tragic and repulsive as this situation is, it would be utterly unsustainable without government subsidies, as well as the passive support that polygamists receive from the Mormon-dominated political culture in Utah, as well as the heavily Mormon political class in Arizona.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times about a decade ago, Gordon B. Hinckley, Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which could be considered the "Mother Church" of the dozens of polygamous Mormon offshoots, seemed to allude to those disavowed kindred sects when asked about the anniversary of the Waco holocaust.

After duly invoking the concept of religious freedom, Hinckley observed: "Now we get these fringe groups, we know, Waco or the [Jim] Jones group in Guyana. We don’t get involved with them. If the law chooses to take care of them, that’s the law's basic right. We simply plow our own furrow and go forward." (Emphasis added.) It's doubtful that Hinckley and his associates would be unduly troubled were the "law" -- meaning the State -- to "take care" of the FLDS "problem" in a suitably violent fashion.

The "law" -- meaning the State -- has helped cultivate the FLDS tragedy. But so has the mainstream Mormon Church, which piously insists that Mormon polygamists who read the same scriptures (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price), practice the same rituals, and trace their pedigree to the same founder, Joseph Smith, aren't "really" Mormons.

"There is no such thing as a Mormon fundamentalist," sniffs the LDS Church's public affairs department, displaying the reflexive dishonesty that is the PR industry's stock in trade. Perhaps the official Mormon view is that the FLDS and other polygamist groups are the product of spontaneous generation, rather than functioning as control groups of pre-1890 Mormonism before the religion began to alter its practices and professed beliefs in order to be more palatable to a "Gentile" world the church had once abhorred.

Deprived of its political support and welfare subsidies, the FLDS movement would quickly dissipate, although the sub rosa practice of polygamy would continue throughout Utah and the "Mormon Corridor" (the Rocky Mountain region also known as the "Jello Belt"). This wouldn't reverse the tragedy that has been visited to generations raised in the FLDS cult, of course. Breaking up the financial power base of Warren Jeffs and his co-conspirators would liberate those now suffering beneath that regime without leading to a sanguinary federal assault that would easily eclipse Waco.

But for any progress to be made, the mainstream Mormon leadership is going to have to own up to its history and doctrine (polygamy is still enshrined in Mormon scriptures as God's true order of marriage) and use its considerable influence to support the peaceful emancipation of those living in Hildale/Colorado City. I am not optimistic.

Onward, Statist Soldiers!

The glad tidings have resounded from the talk radio minarets and Mega-Church madrassas of the Bushi'ite Right: All praise our Dear Leader (peace be upon him) for his bold and noble act in "protecting" San Diego's Mount Soledad War Memorial.

A more honest description of Bush's act would be: Staging a federal land-grab in order to gain a transient political advantage and continue the process of sanctifying the Warfare State.

On August 15, George Abu George signed a law transfering possession of the Memorial, with its 29-foot-tall Latin cross, to the federal government, using the power of eminent domain.

Accordingly, many of the same supposed conservatives who have been in high dudgeon over last year's Kelo decision -- which authorizes local governments to use eminent domain to seize property for commercial purposes -- are cheering themselves hoarse over a federal land grab staged for purely partisan purposes.

The effect of the Mt. Soledad Land Grab, explained a wire service story, was to take a "17-year parochial battle over the memorial" and transform it into "a national cause for supporters and foes of religious symbols on public property." Which is to say, it's yet another instant wedge issue, in addition to being a potentially disastrous precedent for federal seizure of contested local properties and landmarks by whichever political faction happens to be temporarily in charge in Washington.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders insists that because of the transfer, "our federal government [will now] take the lead in preserving the integrity of the memorial against all those who would alter this key part of San Diego's history...." Sanders has also described the Memorial -- built in 1954 -- as part of the community's "fabric."

Neither Sanders nor any other defender of the Soledad Land Grab has explained why Washington is a more suitable custodian of San Diego's local traditions than, say, the municipal government. Granted, the city has fought an expensive 17-year battle against the ACLU, for which harassment lawsuits of the sort filed against the Memorial are quite profitable. But placing this issue in the hands of the Feds means an inevitable appeal to the Supreme Court.

This is a result entirely in keeping with the ACLU's long-term agenda, which is to destroy federalism -- diffusion of political authority among numerous compatible branches of government, with most power exercised locally, under the authority of a written constitution -- by making a federal case out of every exploitable local grievance.

It is to the ACLU's great advantage that its chief opposition comes from Republican-aligned activists who are either too dense to understand the strategic consequences of their actions (the kind of folks who consistently lose at tic-tac-toe), or too cynical to care.

It's also significant that control over the monument was transferred to the Department of Defense (sic). The pious effusions of Republican activists about preserving a Christian symbol notwithstanding, the purpose of this memorial -- now, although not necessarily at the time of its construction -- is to exalt and glorify the Warfare State and its leaders, not the Sovereign God from whom our liberties have come.

"Today is a great day for America's veterans and the San Diego community," exulted Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California), author of the land-grab bill, after Bush signed it into law. Enactment of his legislation "sends a clear message that America appreciates and respects its military men and women."

Appropriate as it is to pay respects to those who have died in the service of our nation -- however unworthy may have been the political leaders under whom they served -- the message of the Cross is rather a different one.

It has never been proper to use the Cross to sanctify the Warfare State. Today, however, as George W. Bush presides over daily blood sacrifices to an idol called Global Democracy, such mis-appropriation of that sacred symbol has officially achieved the status of an abomination.

What This Is All About

For those who have found their way here, greetings! This forum will serve as a revival or continuation of "Will Grigg's Birch Blog," which has met an untimely and unwarranted demise.

Consigned to an inauspicious and inaccessible corner of the web, the Birch Blog has been condemned to a slow death through suffocation.

News of its passing will be greeted with the rending of garments and howls of anguished disbelief ... or not. I know that there will be at least a few of you, who -- brows furrowed in puzzlement and eyes brimming with unshed tears -- will ask, "Why did this happen?" I honestly can't answer that question, which isn't the same as saying I can't answer that question honestly. If and when I learn the answer to that question, I will share it with you immediately. Suffice it for now to say: The ways of the public relations priesthood are dark and inscrutable, and very rarely pleasant.

The name of this forum -- Pro Libertate -- is also the motto inscribed on the Wallace family crest. Yes, as in William Wallace, whose namesake is my oldest son, seen in the lower left-hand corner of the family photo (six years old at the time). Next to him is the radiantly lovely Korrin, aka the Sun Around Whom I Revolve. Seated in the place of honor on her first birthday is Katrina Antigone. Curled within the shelter of his father's left arm is Jefferson Leonidas, not quite three years old at the time of this celebration. Next to him is Isaiah Athanasius, four years old and precociously camera-conscious. Not pictured above is our youngest, Sophia Faith, born almost exactly one year later (January 25, 2005).

It is my intention to use this forum for the unexpurgated defense of individual liberty under God's law, and unstinting opposition to everyone and everything that threatens it. I will also, from time to time, dilate upon other subjects of interest, such as music, literature, physical culture, and -- particularly -- religion. As I have said before, I reserve to myself the right to become more intelligent on any subject, and recognize that I have literally everything to learn. Which is why I not only invite feedback, I demand it. This alone represents a dramatic change in format from the Birch Blog, a forum in which no reader feedback was allowed.

The blogosphere is supposed to be interactive: I tell you what I think, and you do likewise. As the Lord said through Isaiah: Come, let us reason together.