As I may have mentioned before I have a borderline obsession with apostate-Mormon polygamous cults, particularly with the one in the bordertown of Hildale, UT/Colorado City, AZ (formerly known as Short Creek) portrayed in the recent bestseller Under the Banner of Heaven*. Currently ruled with an iron grip by Warren Jeffs.
Jeffs and his priesthood (consisting mostly of his half-brothers and other bootlicking male relatives- the community is incredibly inbred, so much so that there is a cemetery for babies who have died of birth defects in recent years) have such a demand for very young wives (the number of Jeffs wives is unknown, but the most conservative estimate is more than 30, most of them married either after being taken from an excommunicated husband or as child brides of 15 and younger; the number of children is unknown as well but is upwards of 70) that dozens of young boys have been excommunicated in recent years for the flimsiest of reasons (going to a movie theater, watching a television set while in town, etc.- heresy is what Jeffs says it is). Jeffs almost never sets foot off of his walled compound (which includes the temple of his congregation) as numerous deputies and process servers are waiting to serve him with papers and possibly arrest him for a variety of charges ranging from tax evasion to child molestation and sodomy of both male and female adolescents. (Law enforcement fears entering his compound may trigger another Branch Davidian style situation.) When he does leave it is usually in extreme secrecy to check the progress of the compound he is building in Eldorado, Texas.
Anyway, some secretly recorded tapes of his sermons (made by a defector who smuggled them into the sanctuary in a hollowed Book of Mormon have recently been made public and they are absolutely fascinating. He goes on about the evils of the homosexual-Negro-drug-addict inspired Beatles music [a reference to Little Richard’s claim that Epstein offered him a percentage of the Beatles to promote them), how negroes survived the Flood through Ham’s wife, and other stuff. It’s absolutely fascinating, even moreso when you consider how total the devotion of his hardcore followers is to his every word. If you find mind control, cults, polygamy or anything related fascinating, give these a listen.
*Other good reading:
Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk, a memoir by Dorothy Allred Solomon (she adored her father, who had 47 other children, but is herself a monogamist and resentful of her family’s cult; she previously wrote In My Father’s House which I also recommend [first read it when it came out 20+ years ago- it has some of the same tales as the new one but is a different book] but it is out of print.)
Blood Covenant by Rena Chenoweth, one of the many wives of Ervil Lebaron and the assassin of Allred-Solomon’s father (she was acquitted, then told all in her book, then lost a megamillion dollar lawsuit [she was penniless- it was a matter of principal] to the Allred family)
The fluff magazine Details recently had an excellent article on some of the “Lost Boys”- male youths who have been excommunicated and turned into a modern world they know nothing about (e.g. can’t drive, have never seen a computer or a television, address black people to their face as n*ggers because they honestly didn’t know it was rude) and who have often turned to drugs, prostitution, suicide, etc… Depressing but very good article- unfortunately it’s not available online.
