Big Love: Romney, Bush & The Mormons
By Suzan Mazur

"As for George Romney, governor of Michigan . . .The Romneys still live in the predominately Mormon community of Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua , the Stake in that part of Mexico, 5,000 people live there. It is located some 18 miles west of Casas Grandes in a beautiful valley filled with apple orchards. There are now 3 million Mormons in Mexico and they have a goal of 30 million by 2020. Their missionaries are literally everywhere. There were also still some of the Hatch family at Colonia Juarez just a few years ago."
-- John Hart, Religion Writer

"I have to admit that as a Mormon, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman - and a woman and a woman..."
-- Mitt Romney at a political roast in Boston March 2005.

Aside from HBO's Big Love series generating big laughs at the expense of tens of thousands of women and children who languish in polygamy cults up and down the Rocky Mountains as American Justice looks the other way -- the show is believed designed to clear the air for a successful 2008 US presidential bid by Massachusetts Republican governor Mitt Romney.

Romney is one of the most prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which says it has banned polygamy. So far, however, Romney has not made any public remarks condemning the widespread practice. He has instead joked about it.

So does Romney have the stuff of national leadership? Do we actually want a man as president who jokes about polygamy but fails to champion its demise, knowing how polygamy continues to ravage his own Mormon people?

It will be fascinating to watch Romney's presidential campaign maneuvers. Perhaps he will even attempt to distance himself from the LDS church as D.P. Sorensen satirizes in the Salt Lake City Weekly . Sorensen jokes that he and Mitt were missionary (and drinking) buddies and that Romney has now made him his fiduciary third party, putting "his testimony into a blind trust". What that would mean in terms of media questions to Romney about religion is anybody's guess.

However, even Romney's Hollywood good looks do not conceal his fundamentalist leanings. For instance, he has recently announced that he opposes the 1973 Supreme Court's decision Roe v. Wade on abortion. Meaning he will play to his Mormon base in a presidential election.

As we know, the Mormons helped to push Bush II into the Oval Office through campaigning, cash and the legal savvy of Latter-day Saint Timothy Flannigan (the father of 14 children), who organized the Bush v. Gore argument and was rewarded with a White House counsel appointment.

While Mitt's mother may have been an MGM film actress, Mitt's Y chromosome comes from his father, the late Michigan governor George W. Romney, who was born and raised in the Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico polygamy colony between the New Mexico and Texas borders. (One account cites his birthplace as nearby Colonia Dublan.) Ancestry of Mitt Romney



Polygamy has long been illegal in Mexico, apparently even during the Mormon exodus there following the LDS church manifesto banning polygamy. It is unclear exactly how today's Mexican polygamy law reads.

Child advocate Jay Beswick, who for many years lived near the fundamentalist Mormon polygamy epicenter of Hildale, Utah-Colorado City, Arizona (Big Love's Jupiter Creek) says: "There's something on the books. Canadian polygamy author Debbie Palmer's investigated it. She said it's not enforced."

Beswick says there are about three million Mormons in Mexico right now. He cites religious writer John Hart who says the goal is 30 million by 2020.


Romney family now in Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua. - source desertexplorers.org

At the moment it looks all uphill for Romney in a bid for the White House precisely because of his ties to the Mormon Church and its scriptural embrace of polygamy, not to mention the Church's system of unaccountable tithing. Ten percent of each Saint's annual income (no questions about where it comes from) goes to the LDS treasury to remain a fully active member. This pool of money has enabled Mormons as a group to gain an economic edge in this country with few noticing. Romney's tithes to the LDS treasury as a result of his years in investment banking would have to be cumulatively substantial.

For an excellent read about how the Mormon money works see Sally Denton and Roger Morris: The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America:

". . .as a handful of insiders knew, a special private plane began leaving Las Vegas every Monday morning for Salt Lake City, carrying to the LDS headquarters millions of dollars earned and tithed in the city."

There are also Romney's ties to the LDS chuch school, Brigham Young University, though the Romney Institute established in his father's name.

And then there is the question: Will Romney pledge to cut LDS deadwood from America's intelligence community? The Mormon church's connection to the FBI and CIA are by now notorious. J. Edgar Hoover started the FBI with Mormon agents because they could keep a secret not because they could necessarily get the job done.

I recall one icy intel fellow grilling me in the Provo, Utah courtroom prior to one of the sessions at the Tom Green bigamy trial. Pretty obvious who he was, but I sensed he hadn't seen much of the world aside from his missionary work in Scandinavia.

Author Alex Schoumatoff expands on the LDS-intel link in his book, Legends of the American Desert:

"One afternoon in the summer of 1983, I sat in the VIP gallery with two fidgety men in their thirties and an old man, who turned out to be William Casey, then director of the CIA, and his Secret Service guards. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recruit heavily from the Saints, who make ideal operatives because they are extremely patriotic and have an aptitude for surveillance technology."

Thus, it is no coincidence that Bush's incoming FBI Director Robert Mueller moved Darwin A. John, the LDS church's Chief Information Officer fairly quickly into the spot of CIO for the FBI. John has since left the FBI CIO spot, but continues as an adviser.

The downside of such compromise is apparent when, Warren Jeffs, a fundamentalist polygamist Mormon leader (FLDS) with a $50,000 reward on his head for sexual assault on a minor not only has not been seen for four years, but has recently built another polygamist compound, this time in Custer, SD -- adding to existing cults in UT, AZ, ID, TX and BC.

Neither Romney, nor Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt -- the former governor of Utah -- has publicly taken George W. Bush by the hand and rubbed his nose in the polygamy problem nor visibly put pressure on the FCC to pull the Big Love show from broadcast.

And how about LDS notable General Brent Scowcroft, as foreign intelligence adviser so concerned about Bush II's adventures abroad but not a whisper about the polygamy tragedy at home?

LDS celebrity Orrin Hatch, who also ran for the US presidency on the Republican ticket, has even entertained the FLDS polygamists in Hildale, playing the piano while assuring them that their lifestyle is okay with him. The long-time chairman and now ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has never brought a serious session on polygamy to the committee during his many years in charge.

Romney knows exactly how tightly the lid has been fit to conceal the polygamy problem -- locally, on the state level and federally. On the local level, the twin towns of Hildale-Colorado City, for instance, are organized as the United Effort Plan (UEP). UEP is "unofficially" represented by attorney Rodney Parker.

According to Jay Beswick, Parker represented both the now-unseated Hildale polygamist judge Walter Steed and convicted Colorado City polygamist cop Rodney Holm. Parker is with the law firm of Snow, Christensen and Martineau, which also represents the State of Utah. Rodney Parker is also the registered agent of the FLDS Corporations and Twin City Academy, Inc. in Hildale; all the above in good standing in the State of Utah.

Parker previously served in Bush I's administration as Associate Deputy Attorney General "on the immediate staff" of the Deputy Attorney General of the US in Washington, D.C.

Harold G. Christensen, Counsel at Snow Christensen, served as Deputy Attorney General of the US in both Bush I's and Ronald Reagan's administration. Martineau's official biography reveals that he was born in the Colonia Juarez polygamy colony where Mitt Romney's father grew up.

That Mitt Romney has publicly joked about polygamy instead of citing that 170 countries of the world now recognize polygamy as a human rights violation under the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women -- a document the US has signed and is morally bound to -- we can only assume means the status quo's okay with him as well.

We don't need more criminal negligence in the Oval Office. Meanwhile, the beginning of the end of Mormon polygamy starts with the cancellation of its glamorization on Big Love.

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LDS Church -- Mexico Drug Money Connection?
By Suzan Mazur

"When a Mexican bishop declared that drug traffickers often donate to the church, shock waves ran through this predominantly Roman Catholic nation not because the news was a surprise, but because admitting it was tantamount to confessing that nothing, not even God, is sacred when it comes to organized crime in Mexico. Provoking an uproar were Bishop Ramon Godinez’s comments to reporters that donations from drug traffickers are not unusual and it’s not the church’s responsibility to investigate. He argued that the money is “purified” once it passes through parish doors."
– Lisa J. Adams, AP, 10/5/5

Big: http://img.scoop.co.nz/stories/images/0705/42c183dbaee734f540ea.jpeg

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a presence in what is now Mexico since the 1870s. Some of those early polygamist Mormon settlers of Chihuahua's Colonia Dublan and Colonia Juarez – where Mitt Romney’s father George W. was born and where some Romney family still lives (George somehow ran for US President in 1968) – returned to Salt Lake City at one point bringing marijuana with them. The blood atonement and drugs cocktail of Mexico's polygamist Ervil LeBaron family would haunt the Mormon culture in years to come.


Big: http://img.scoop.co.nz/stories/images/0705/4fdc3a32e770a24d37d3.jpeg

But while the LDS church now forbids the use of marijuana and other intoxicants, it does not ask whether drug profits might be the source of the 10% annual income donation all “temple worthy” Mormons must pay the church. And it’s strictly between the LDS church and God as to how much money is in the church treasury as well as how it is spent. So with the countries of Latin America coming into their own as narco-economies in the mid 1980s, it is particularly curious that the Mormon Church began stepping up its proselytizing there, particularly in Mexico.

Beginning in 1985 and until 1990, the LDS membership doubled, from 302,000 to 615,000 in Mexico. Sources place the current LDS Mexico membership at between 1 and 4 million. Here's the breakdown cited in Utah's Deseret News (Hunter/2000)

1980 -- 241,521
1985 -- 302,000
1990 -- 615,000
1995 -- 735,000
1999 -- 783,000

The Graduate Center, City University of New York presents other significant Mormon statistics. See… American Religious Identification Survey

Alex Shoumatoff visited Colonia Juarez in 1997 researching his book Legends of the American Desert.. He said the following:

"Colonia Juarez was the birthplace of the politician George Romney. It was a flourishing enclave of imported America, frozen in the fifties, with two-storey brick houses and fruit orchards. . ., whose wholesomeness was becoming eroded by narcotrafico; dealers, some of them wayward Saints, were building big houses in the neighborhood."

In their book The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America , Sally Denton and Roger Morris have noted that the LDS church has in the past not been averse to accepting dirty money:

“. . .as a handful of insiders knew, a special private plane began leaving Las Vegas every Monday morning for Salt Lake City, carrying to the LDS headquarters millions of dollars earned and tithed in the city.”

And there have been numerous reports by residents and observers of Hildale-Colorado City, the FLDS polygamist colony straddling the Utah-Arizona border, that over the past 20 years the Colorado City airport, which was built with Fed millions, has served as a Mena, Arkansas type transit point for drugs, drug money, guns as well as trafficking of women.

Just north of the Grand Canyon and a short hop from the Mexican border as well as Vegas, it replaced the unpaved airstrip that served planes going all the way back to the 1960s, long before it became Arizona’s “1992 Airport of the Year” run by Ladell Bistline, who has since fled the FLDS cult following the redistribution of his wives. What does all this say about widespread church/state criminal activity?

Who are Mexico's LDS members? A seeming cross-section of Mexican culture -- merchants, restaurant workers, shippers, farmers, security personnel, bankers, government officials, etc.

But with the Mexican economy awash in drug money, how can narco-dollars not be a significant part of LDS Church Mexico tithes?

We also know that the Mormon Church has a long history of feeding personnel to the US intel agencies, the CIA and FBI – J. Edgar Hoover started the Bureau with Mormon agents. Alex Shoumatoff in his book, for example, recounts running into Bill Casey in the VIP gallery of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City one afternoon. That means there is a good chance monies pouring into church coffers could also be black budget earmarked:

“One afternoon in the summer of 1983, I sat in the VIP gallery with two fidgety men in their thirties and an old man, who turned out to be William Casey, then director of the CIA, and his Secret Service guards. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recruit heavily from the Saints, who make ideal operatives because they are extremely patriotic and have an aptitude for surveillance technology.”

And as I’ve noted in previous stories, when Robert Mueller took over as FBI Bureau Chief, he moved Darwin A. John -- the LDS church’s Chief Information Officer for more than a decade -- into the FBI CIO spot.

Some hard questions need to be asked about the so-called fastest growing religion in America and its former bishop, Mitt Romney, now running for US President as a follow-up to George W. Bush. Are you listening Sharpton and Hitchens?

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gyrofry posted:
is it fair to smear an entire religion for having adherents with unsavoury affiliations?

Fairness has never mattered

gyrofry posted:
is it fair to smear an entire religion for having adherents with unsavoury affiliations?

this.

and i think i saw a quote inside a quote inside the article quoted too, dawg.

and something about "only women and children" suffering under the patrilineal harem structure. the suggestion there is suffering insinuates that an indifference or enjoyment of such a thing is the stuff that distinguishes the men from the boys.
'
also terrible overuse of the term "polygamy". daddy says george soros has slaves tell robots to write like that so more other robots can understand the serial terminology which causes them to express preset outrage or gesture feelings or some crap.