Closed economy

[xephyr]

One of the great things about the Eldorado scandal is that the nation gets an opportunity to really look at the Mormons. lupoleboucher, in a recent post, calls the Mormons "America's Holy Warriors". They see America as their holy land and are supremely patriotic, says he

Comments

[beowulf1723]

This is exactly the kind of thing that John Robb has been pushing as a defense against 4GW attacks on our overstretched and overburdened infrastructure. His forthcoming book will cover this in detail.

I have mentioned a couple of times on FLDS related threads on Grits for Breakfast that the fact that there are producing oil wells on property adjacent to the YFZ ranch adds a real greed factor to this whole mess. I sure would like to know who owns the mineral rights to the property. If the owner is the FLDS, all remaining purity in the State's case -- not very much to begin with, of course -- is down the toilet.

[phygelus]

The FLDS have about as much to do with the regular mormon church, which is what Lupo was talking about, as the OTO as envisioned in Liber CI has to do with the Catholic Church.

As for the FLDS "closed economy", watch for the tax fraud and welfare fraud allegations to come down the pike, if they haven't already.

[phygelus]

Oh, I RFTA, sorry: just color me at least as skeptical as the author of that article.

[xephyr]

Wow. I'm not sure the source of your bile, but I'd gently suggest that it's misplaced. I'm not personally involved, but they just don't seem like evil people. It's a little shocking for me to see otherwise rational people get so emotionally bent out of shape over rumor

[phygelus]

Ask regular mormons how legitimate they are. The lines of authority in their church don't descend that way, and the regular mormon church is not run as a commune. Mormon bishops don't have the implicit authority to schism like in traditional Christianity.

I'm suspicious because in states where similar groups get a fair amount more sympathy (Nevada and Utah) the clashes of those groups with the state generally come from those two sources. It's like, a crack house gets busted, you know what kinds of crimes are likely to have been committed there. My intent here is more cynical than bileful; I don't think the FLDS are the moral equivalent of crack addicts.

The statutory rape stuff seems to be fairly well acknowledged, and while I'm not quick to condemn them for that for reasons similar to what you've outlined in previous posts, them's the rules and they knew they were breaking them.