Ever since the FLDS raid in 2006, and the media calling the FLDS “fundamentalist Mormons” (a term the Church itself came up with in the 1940s to describe the offshoot), the Church has been eager to monopolize the term “Mormon.” It has asserted that, in the interests of resolving public confusion, the media should only ...
The Salt Lake Tribune has posted some of the audio recordings of Warren Jeffs instructing women on how they are supposed to have sex with him. I’d say “enjoy” but, well, that just seems inappropriate. Views: 837 ...
Apparently Warren Jeffs is back in the sadle… He is now warning President Obama and other politicians that they must let him go and free his people, OR ELSE!!! (free from government oversight doesn’t carry the same gravitas as free “from slavery) The “else”? Ambiguous references to “great destruction in Illinois” and “great storms” throughout the ...
My book club recently read Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer. Despite my interest in all things mormon, I did not recommend this book to my group. I had read it before, and found it frightening. The Lafferty murders were especially heinous (to my mind) and disturbing on many levels. Other book club ...
I’m not sure why, but an idea has been floating around in my mind the last couple of weeks. I’m not usually in the mood to help a religious group survive, but I figured this thought was worth putting into the public domain for criticism at the very least. The FLDS have a pretty serious ...
A real one this time!! (It’s not just me pretending to be a primatologist, as in my primatologist looks at the mathematical community post.) I was reading along in the book Parenting for Primates (which I discussed here and here), and I found that the author (Harriet J. Smith) devoted four full pages to the ...
The Dallas Morning News reports that CPS is unable to properly house a mother with her new born baby: “This woman has been removed from the birthing center with a brand new baby boy and is now sitting in the offices of CPS because they don’t have anywhere else to put her,” Ms. Matassarin said. ...
Carolyn Jessop puts the protest of FLDS mothers into perspective: I had eight children in 15 years, but I did not know what a miracle it is to be a mother. I had no way of knowing the deep gladness mothering gives. I didn’t know because in the FLDS, great emphasis is put on breaking ...
After the recent comments in chanson’s thread, I decided to copy this post from FLAK. I am interested in finding out what it is about the raid that people are so passionate about. I will state my theories below my proposal. And – as chanson did in one of her recent posts (on her blog;), ...
In light of the sensationalist press coverage of Mormon fundamentalism, the LDS Church is eager to disassociate itself from more traditional forms of Mormonism. Whatever the historical and theological relationship between mainstream and fundamentalist Mormonism may be, there is, of course, a big difference between the LDS and the FLDS churches: The LDS Church submits ...
My first reaction on hearing about the Texas raid was “Finally, the authorities have stopped ignoring the abuses committed by the polygamists!” Yet the more I hear about this story, the more reservations I have about it. The state took several hundred children away from their parents and put them in foster care on the ...
To help answer this question, a Deseret Morning News article asks (my brother) John Hamer for his analysis. John is a historian specializing in the various scisms within the restoration movement and is the co-editor of Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism. In addition to clarifying this issue, John gives some reasonable analysis regarding ...