To Become a Media Whore, or NOT to Become a Media Whore...

That IS the question…

So I have always felt that my family has been a good example of plural marriage. We don’t have the big, shiny house. We are also not picture perfect. There are arguments. (Even a few LOUD ones.) But we are generally happy. (Although we are starting to learn that being a parent to a teen is much different than being a teen.) Everyone gets along. Martha loves Temple. Temple loves Martha. And if course everyone loves me.

That is the reason that we did the show to begin with. It works for us. Don’t ask me to tell you how or why it works for us. But it does.

And since we are a good example of plural marriage – and not remotely dysfunctional – I decided to do the show. To be an example to people of how plural marriage works, and that we are all not what people think of when they think of polygamy.

Flora the Tweaking Scarecrow did an article this week in Phoenix’s New Times that featured her scrawny form hidden behind a car door with the message painted on it – “Polygamy is Abuse”. Really. Maybe she should also have other obscenities like “Mexicans Are Lazy”, because such statements are equally false.

But I digress…

After we did the first show, I knew that there would be other offers. Deep down, I knew that I could provide a voice for plural marriage. It is something that I feel driven to do.

In the last couple of weeks, I have been approached by a couple of different production companies – one in the UK and one here in the States – both wanting to do something similar.

I don’t know. I’m hesitant. Not because I am afraid to get my name out there as a polygamist. I have no fears or qualms about that at all.

This whole thing caused embarrassment to my extended family. It roused their deep-rooted paranoia to have the media on the “Land”. Even the people I affiliate with religiously disapprove. There are even some in my family (mostly teen daughters) who are angry with me for doing it.

Usually I don’t give a crap what other people think. But when it’s your peers and your family… you do.

So I have the delightful task of deciding if I want to continue what I am doing, what I am driven to do and piss off or alienate everyone around me. Or kowtow to what everyone thinks I should be doing and stay hidden and safe.

What would you do?

Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk

Please help this person, who will be participating in Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk. You never know what a difference it can make.

In case the link doesn't work:

http://www.the3day.org/site/TR/Walk/SeattleEvent?px=1693228&pg=personal&fr_id=1300&et=Lob8mzbPtlctF19j3sDpLA..&s_tafId=85002

Our Living Conditions - Conclusion

In the summer of 2001, I was still working as a social worker for the state of Arizona in St. Johns. My dad came by one day and picked me up for lunch. We went to Corky’s – the one and only burger joint in this small town. He had retired from his government job, and I think he sensed that the end was near for him.

“When I die, the responsibility of seeing that the Family United Order continues is going to fall on your shoulders,” he told me.

I didn’t want to think about it. Who wants to ponder the death of a loved one?

Still, a year later he was gone. He had asked that he be buried on the “Land”, and so we set aside a family cemetery plot within yards of my house and buried my father there.

Scarcely had we lowered his body into the earth that my dad’s “friends” let their true faces show. There were some that said that we were not a “real” United Order, because the only people that belonged were family members – never mind that the Order now had almost 20 people.

There were others that said that – with the death of my father – our Order was left without any who held the “fullness of priesthood”. My father had received his “second anointing” – or he had attained the highest degree of the Mormon hierarchy. Thus he was qualified to preside over a United Order. But now that he was dead, there was no one “qualified” to lead our United Order. Or so it was pointed out to our family.

So the obvious solution to me was, “Fix this then.” My suggestion was to administer the second anointing to me, or one of my brothers, so that our United Order could continue. But that wasn’t the point of other men demonstrating out that our family was leaderless. They pointed out that our family was leaderless… so that they could step in and become the leader.

My father was not a wealthy man, ever in his life. And yet I was amazed that other men coveted what he had – his land, his family, his priesthood calling, etc.

One man brought us a “master plan” that subdivided the Land into streets and plots for houses. This man also proposed to my mother on several occasions. He tried to take us under his wing and mentor us, but became frustrated when my brothers and I resisted his efforts. His words to a couple of my friends were, “The death of Ted Jessop was the best thing to happen to this people. I’m going to go down to Arizona and take the bull by the horns.” The “bull” in this instance being me and my brothers.

People have always done me and my brothers a disservice. My father was a charismatic figure, and so they assumed that my father had such an influence over us that we had no minds of our own. So with my father gone, they thought they could swoop in and replace my dad. They were wrong. My father taught me to think for myself. I shot off a strong letter, telling these men to back off and leave our United Order alone.

But without my father there, the United Order did start to wither. Part of it is my fault. My dad asked me to make sure that it continued. But I got bitter. I got angry that I had bit back my own needs, and what did I have to show for my effort? I was in my thirties with nothing but a rundown trailer, a bunch of broken cars, and ubiquitous credit card debt accompanied by accrued interest.

The United Order came to an end…

Since, I have recognized that I have failed. I realize that it is a part of Mormonism that I am not living, and I would like to live it again. But I always feel constrained, because I know that – because of misconceptions – I lived it incorrectly.

I have a small circle of friends – young men like me in our late thirties or early forties who have been studying United Order. In our studies, we have read authors like Frédéric Bastiat who has shown the purpose of law – to protect us in our freedoms. Nothing more. We realize that the abuse of power has not consumed only our nation’s political leaders, but the leaders of Mormonism as well. The mainstream Church’s leaders are corrupt. But so are the leaders of Mormon fundamentalism who have used their priesthood callings to lord over the lay members, using priesthood ordinances and wives as an incentive to control men. They use the United Order to suck people’s money and land from them. Look at the United Effort of the FLDS – what a joke it was. Look at all the people in Pinesdale, Montana – and other places – who are forced from their homes on priesthood properties because they don’t tow the proverbial party line.

We have also studied Ayn Rand in great detail – particularly her book “Atlas Shrugged” that shows the follies of socialism and the parasitic mentalities it develops. I like Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but I think that the pendulum swung a bit the other way with her. There is no room for charity in her paradigm, and I think that we can all agree that Christ was the perfect example of charity.

So we have come to a conclusion of what the United Order isn’t – it isn’t communism. It isn’t socialism. Freedom – in all of its aspects is tantamount to a prosperous society, and that includes free enterprise. There must be no force, no compulsion, and there must be private ownership.

I still am working on what United Order is. I believe in the Law of Consecration. But how do you implement this without creating a sort of religious fascism? When I have these answers, then I will be ready to live it again. But until then…

So anyway, I draw this little tale to a close about how the reporters found a man with his two wives and many children living in a rundown little trailer out in the middle of nowhere.

Most Enlightening Video I've Seen

Someone sent a link to me on Facebook. I have long been a fan of the rock group Tool. They are a thinking man's metal group.

This was my response to the video:

This was awesome. I have this Tool album, and it has been one of my favorites. I didn't realize how deliberate all of it is.

I saw an interview with Maynard on TV where he admitted that they studied Templar geometry. Interesting. They are one of the metal bands that is actually into occult philosophy for real, and not just for theatrics.

I guess one can say that all music is mathematical - Pythagoras said so. But it is nice to see musicians that actually use music as, well, a "tool". There are some techno musicians, like BT, that use the same methods.

It makes me laugh at all of the Mormons - some of whom we both know - who say that there is no enlightenment or spirituality in rock music, even metal. I have found strength in even some of the most seemingly satanic metal bands. Well, maybe not Venom, but certainly Tool.

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7CZIJVxFY

Now go and enjoy:

"Dear God" - Slideshow of Moroni's Family

So I made this while I was sitting there thinking of my family, while I am on the road.

The song is "Dear God" by Avenged Sevenfold. Typically, AX7 is a hard rock band, but for some reason the last track on their latest album was a country song.

Our Living Conditions, Part 6

Sorry about the delay. I will continue my story about my experience with United Order…

So for most of the years that Martha and I spent in the United Order, we shared a small single-wide trailer with my older brother and his wife. It was mostly alright, but it can be a little trying to share a home with someone else.

For instance, Martha’s cleaning standards were not up to my sister-in-law Sarine’s standards. I now believe that Sarine was obsessive-compulsive. When Martha would clean, Sarine would go behind it and re-clean everything, and then complain to her husband that Martha was not cleaning things well enough. This was the cause of a few arguments that I can think of. But Sarine was so demanding that Martha and I wound up spending most of our free-time away from home.

Martha’s parents had just moved to Arizona to join up with us, and we wound up spending the night on their living room floor as often as we could. Anything to be away from Sarine. Now, in saying this, I should say that Sarine could complain about a lot of things about Martha and I; I’m sure that we were not the best of roommates, either. But it got so bad that we spent most of our time at my in-laws.

After several days of sleeping on the floor at my in-laws, we returned home to find that our bedroom was covered with a layer of mold spores. Sarine, in her neurotic behavior, thought that there was not enough moisture in the house. So while we were gone, she kept a big pot of water on the stove, boiling constantly.

While we lived there, I had an ongoing and silent fight with Sarine. She kept the water going constantly. I thought it was a waste of propane and water. When I would walk by in the kitchen, I would switch off the water. She would walk by and switch it back on.

With us gone, Sarine and the boiling water won out, and we came home to find our room – our blankets, the walls, the closet - covered with mold. We tried to sleep there, but it was too bad. Little Sophie started to get sick.

So we moved back out into the living room of Martha’s parents.

Martha’s family originally had planned on moving out to the “Land”. They financed an old 1973 doublewide and moved it out onto our property. But when they got out to Arizona, the no-electricity thing was too much for them. So they rented a house in town. As a result, the double-wide sat on our property – the two halves exposed to the weather – for over a year.

After the whole mold incident, my father-in-law decided to give us the trailer. We just needed to pay off the loan. The first step was to get an appraiser to look at the trailer. It was so old and in such bad condition that it appraised at “zero”.

Nevertheless, we were gleeful to have a place of our own. We paid off the loan, hired a crew to set up the trailer and, in 1999, we moved in. Our whole married life, Martha and I had never unpacked. We had kept most of our belongings in boxes in storage units. I can’t tell you what a feeling it was to unpack for the first time, to have a room just for the kids.

The trailer was a piece of crap. But I loved it, because it was mine. And I shared it with no one. For a couple of weeks, anyway…

A polygamist man I knew had a young wife that needed a place to stay. So we moved some mattresses into our living room (that had no furniture anyway) and that’s where our kids slept. The young plural wife moved into the spare bedroom, and we got to listen to them giggling and tickling each other every other night. I was promised rent that I never got.

In June, 1999, a young lady named Temple decided to live with us for a couple of weeks to see if she was interested in “coming into my family”, as we say. The mattress on the floor in the living room became hers while she stayed there.

While there, she got to experience the whole family meeting together and eating together at my parents’ house.

A few months later, Temple married me and moved in permanently. Between the time she visited me and the time she married me, there had been a schism in our United Order. The after-dinner dishes became an issue. Typically, since we were eating at my mother’s house, all of the ladies (on a rare occasion the men) would pitch in to clean up and wash the dishes.

But on quite often, there were some of the moms who would feed their kids and then clear out without lifting a finger to help with the after-dinner chores. (Guess who?) So my mother got upset and prevailed on my dad to change it so that every family ate dinner at their own house.

I disagreed with the decision. But the complaints of the women won out, and by the time Temple joined the family, we were eating separately. We still traded “cooking days” – that is, we still rotated a cooking schedule where dinner was cooked for everyone. But now, it was distributed like some “Meals-on-Wheels” program and everyone ate at their own home.

Temple observed what I feared. She told me, “You were more united when you were all eating together. I could sense it. Now I sense that you are all less close.”

That was the decline of our United Order. I will explain more in the next post…

Ice Storms, South Carolina & Super Bowl

Okay, sorry I have been offline for so long. I have been in kind of a funk lately. But I will repent of that.

Anyway, to give you an update, I was offered a job in Columbia, South Carlolina, remodeling a hotel.

It is always hard for me to leave my family, but the way the economy is going, I said goodbye to my wives and children and left last week for "Back East" with some relatives.

The problem is - we decided to travel right at the time when one of the worst ice storms in the past 100 years hit the Midwest.

We hit Amarillo at the tail of the storm, and the roads were ice for the rest of the way. The photo above is Checotah, Oklahoma (home of Carrie Underwood.) Oklahoma was totally unprepared for the storm. I live in a part of Arizona that gets snow occasionally. When we get a skiff of snow, we have a fleet of snow plows patroling the highways. I saw three snowplows in Oklahoma - three! There was three inches of ice on the roads, and we counted 16 cars that slid off the highway.

By the time we got to Kentucky, the roads were pretty clear, but the trees were so laden with ice that most of them were bending at the trunk, literally. It looked like icicle hell. The storm took down 8,000 power lines across the state, leaving most of the state in darkness. It was eerie driving down the Bluegrass Parkway, seeing entire towns without lights. The only light was the glow of Cincinatti in the distance.

I stayed with some friends in the Appalachians of eastern Kentucky. Then on Sunday morning, my brother came to pick me up, and we went to South Carolina. It was a beautiful road. We took some back roads through the mountains (talk about switchbacks!)

We arrived in Columbia just in time to watch the Super Bowl. I like Pittsburgh, since I worked there for several months in 2007. But I live in Arizona, so I had to root for the Cardinals! What a close game!

The ironic thing - I competed with the Super Bowl. "Forbidden Love: Polygamy" aired at 7PM on TLC - at the same time as the Super Bowl! So I doubt that very many people saw it. I didn't find out until this evening.

Dawn Porter also posted on her site that the episode is available on iTunes, for any interested. Just type in "Dawn Porter", and the show should come up.

So, if anyone wants to talk to me, I will be in South Carolina for the next month, or so. So far, I have discovered Bojangles. They love their fried chicken here in the South.

(I will be finishing my "Our Living Conditions" bit this week. )



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