Book 12: Escape

Escape

Carolyn Jessop with Laura Palmer

Broadway 2008

 

We're told that America we're the home of the free. Right now people are living in slavery.
We're told that this is the land of the brave. The system is refusing to stand up to this slavery.

Cowards are keeping women and children slaves, not only physically, but mentally.
Women and children are being systematically phsyically, emotionally, and sexually abused by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The FLDS.

I can't say what needs to be said any more than Jessop and Palmer have said in Escape. All I can do is implore you to read it. It can be had on amazon for absurdly cheap. It's well-written, well-paced and frighteningly gripping.  Stranger than fiction? No. Strange doesn't even begin to cover it.

It's frightening. Absolutely horrifying.

Don't just read "Escape."
Don't just have your heart broken, like mine was.
Don't just feel the outrage, like I did. 

Do some research. Read up on these fucking people and what they've been accused of. Read up on forced marriages and polygamy. Read up on the teachings of the FLDS.

Where do we draw the line when it comes to religious freedom? We draw the line when the free exercise thereof hurts people. And this is seriously fucking some people up.

Polygamy should be a choice, not a sentence.

I'm a big advocate of abstaining from religious teachings or indoctrinations until someone is 18. Then they're free to choose to do whatever they want. I know this is impossible to do in closed communities like those described in "Escape," and that's part of the reason I advocate it so strongly.

If you were 18, and had lived a completely secular life, and one day someone told you that an invisible man in the sky was about to blow up the planet, and that a guy named Joseph Smith had read all about it from some magic rocks of which nobody knows the location, you'd laugh at them.  If then they told you that you would be tortured forever if you didn't shut yourself off from society, agree to have your daughters married off to people they didn't even know as young as 14 to men as old as 80, you'd call the cops.

The only way you would think that this was a good idea was if this nonsense was crammed into your skull while it was still soft.

Fear, Obligation and Guilt (FOG) are the three most effective tools for emotional and psychological manipulation.  Keep that in mind when you read "Escape" and consider the teachings of the FLDS. Consider how cleverly these three manipulators are wielded. They destroy the hopes and desires of women in these polygamist communities, and ruin the lives of children.

Writing this, I am finding it difficult to focus. The injustice and the brutality is too much for me to think about.
I had chosen some excerpts to share. As terrible as they are, they can only be really appreciated in the context of Jessop's story as a whole.

They're frightening on their own, but they're part of a much more terrible narrative that the emotional side of me wants to shut out as impossible. I can't imagine someone living through that kind of hell. I don't want to imagine that it is taking place in my home state. 

I don't want to think that today, while I am in a stable, loving and rewarding relationship with someone I will happily spend the rest of my days with, there are thousands of people locked into a hell on earth through absolutely no choice of their own.

I hate to think that people are being forced to sell the only life they have for the promise of a better deal after they're dead. I hate to see people so mired in superstition and ignorance. 

It makes me sad for humanity. It makes me sick.

Polygamy is a felony in the US.

Policy makers don't make a move on these institutions of mental and social captivity because they don't want to look anti-freedom. People are being tortured and enslaved while they bicker about turtle fences.

Law Enforcement doesn't want to make a move because if the polygamists are conviced and sentenced, the system will be flooded with thousands of brainwashed children without parents.  The system is not equipped to handle that kind of flood.


What do we do?

We begin by exposing this absurdity to the light of critical discussion and open inquiry.

You can have all of the compounds and communities and crazy beliefs you want. But as soon as it becomes destructive and regressive, then you have no place in our society.


You can the FLDS side of the story at www.truthwillprevail.org

If even half of what Jessop says is true...

...what a nightmare.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ssYXu3qcS8&feature=related