Mass Hysteria in Eldorado Texas

Eldorado must be near Waco

Everybody saw it on TV and the Internet: "heroic" federal law enforcement officers "rescuing" hundreds of young women from the "compound" of a "polygamist sect" in Texas, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Church, to the unanimous applause of the media hairspray set, and with no one to speak for those the government had singled out. Again.

It made me think of 1969, when I was appointed a district officer for the Toastmasters International Youth Leadership Program. I duly publicized the program, arranged for a meeting room at World Savings & Loan in Lynwood, California and conducted one meeting there. I would have had many more, except that one functionally illiterate security guard decided that I was hosting "young communist meetings", and that ended the program. I had become a victim of mass hysteria—at the time, the accusation that ended all dreams and aspirations was "communist".

When the "communist" label quit working, the government and their media lackeys—or vice versa—were pressed to come up with some new, indisputable accusation by which their enemies could be easily vanquished without trial. Thus we saw the vicious 1993 attack by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminally misnamed "Hostage Rescue Team" on the Branch Davidians for "child abuse" that was never proven—and in fact was repudiated by local law enforcement officials. The one girl who testified to abuse before Congress later recanted her story.

This is not the first massive raid on the FLDS. It happened before in 1953, in Short Creek, Arizona, now known as Colorado City. The raid resulted in the expense of thousands of Arizona government man-hours and millions of taxpayer dollars. Even without the Internet, word spread of the government's abuses in that case, and sympathy turned in the direction of victims of those raids, which led to the end of the career of John Howard Pyle, the Arizona governor who insisted on the raid. See Kidnapped from that Land by Martha Sonntag Bradley, the story of a young girl who was taken into "protective custody" in the incident.

It's important to understand that the Branch Davidian raid was carried out on the "strength" of a perjured (criminally falsified) affidavit, and that no warrant was ever presented before or during the government assault. History now repeats itself in the Texas Bible Belt. An alleged phone call from an alleged abused child was used as the excuse to issue search warrants for the entire FLDS community, the herding of all the women and children (the count is over 500 at this time) like animals, and the confiscation of all cellular telephones from those who remained. The government claims child abuse, I claim religious intolerance typical of many areas of the South, particularly Texas.

These holier-than-thou Texans accuse their victims of polygamy, which in the past was not just a part of the Mormon faith, but of the entire Judeo-Christian community. (The correct expression, by the way, is actually "polygyny", since none of the women in these cases ever seem to have multiple husbands.) Solomon, King of Israel, and other biblical figures practiced polygyny. According to Wikipedia, Hebrew scriptures document approximately forty polygynists, including such prominent figures as Abraham, Jacob, Esau, and David. Even Martin Luther condoned polygyny in certain circumstances, saying he could not "forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture."

Complaints against the FLDS also include arranged, or involuntary marriages, another practice which—whether we like it or approve of it, or not, today—dates back dozens of centuries in Western Civilization, most commonly in royal families, and is still a part of other "advanced" civilizations as this is written. How many of us know an Indian student or professor who (like Apu in The Simpsons) went home to visit his family, only to be saddled with a wife he didn't want?

Lastly, and most effectively, the government attacks the FLDS for the ages of the girls being married. Such an attack sidetracked the career of rock star Jerry Lee Lewis, when British tabloids exposed the age of his second wife Myra (she was 13, and Lewis' first cousin). A little research reveals that Priscilla Beaulieu was pretty young—14—when she began dating Elvis, and Shakespeare tells us that Juliet, the better half of the most famous of all fictional couples, was also 14.

Although we do not necessarily condone such practices—forcing anybody to marry anybody else violates the Zero Aggression Principle, as does the involuntary consummation of such a marriage—they are certainly no reason for the FLDS to be singled out by the jackbooted thugs. The charges leveled at them are the same as those of which the Branch Davidians were accused. There is no more reason to take them at face value in 2008 than there was in 1993. In such cases government is the demonstrable liar and mass-killer. The same cannot be said of its victims.

Report here






"We Never Make Mistakes": Government Agencies, Banks, Bill Collectors all know the mantra of the bureaucrat

Our second youngest daughter, now a mother in her early thirties, suddenly has a problem not with one government agency, but with at least two, and potentially many more public and private bureaucracies.

Maybe it has something to do with her zodiac sign. Maybe she violated some arcane tabu. But she has run into "We mever make mistakes" before. The first time its was with a bank which had not properly credited a deposit to her account ; When she complained, she was told "We never make mistakes." Because Debbie has a hard head, a hot temper and the vocabulary of a fishwife, she finally intimidated the bank into checking the transaction, and they admitted the error. Now she faces the problem again.

Yesterday, she tried to file her income tax return electronically. On the electronic filing system, she was required not merely to list her social security number, but her date of birth. The IRS rejected the return on the grounds that she had given a false date of birth. In fact, she had given her correct date of birth, May 21, as recorded on her birth certificate. But the IRS insisted that she had been born on May 24.

She asked if the IRS could correct their information if she sent them a copy of the birth certificate. No, she was told, because the IRS was acting on information from the Social Security Administration. Her Social Security Account, which she had to provide this same birth certificate to apply for, listed her birthday as May 24.

So she called the Social Security office and asked them to correct the error they had made. She was told that she would have to come to the office with her birth certificate and her driver's license and wait in line to discuss the problem. Since it was their mistake for putting an incorrect date into the computer, she asked why she sould miss work to correct their mistake.

The answer was, "We can't correct the mistake." Having typed in the wrong date, the Agency was forbidden to make any changes to the original information. The only way that SSA could inform the IRS of her correct birth date was for her to come in and apply for a new Social Security card, opening a new account. This promised even more problems.

Given the time lag between applying for and receiving a new social security number, she will not be able to file her income tax return electronically. Next month, when her driver's license is due for renewal, she faces problems from the DMV for having a social security number different from the number in DMV's files. She will have to go to her bank and her employer to change her social security number there. And whenever she retires, she may find that she has no record of payments into her social sedurity account for all the years she has worked prior to 2008

But the bureaucrats never make mistakes, and when they do, the problem is yours, not theirs. "We never make mistakes" should be ranked with "The Check is in the Mail" and "I'm from the government, I'm here to help you." on the list of great lies.

Report here



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)