How polygamists game welfare to support their extra wives and illegitimate children

At the Green Room at Hot Air, Angela Lash’s piece, “The True Cost of Polygamy,” reviews Jon Krakauer’s book on Mormon polygamy Under the Banner of Heaven. Krakauer explains how polygamists have their own version of the Cloward-Piven scheme:

“To avoid prosecution [for polygamy], typically men in Colorado City will legally marry only the first of their wives; subsequent wives, although “spiritually married,” to their husband by Uncle Rulon, thus remain single mothers in the eyes of the state. This has the added benefit of allowing the enormous families in town to qualify for welfare and other forms of government assistance. Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.

More than $4 million…flows each year into the Colorado City public school district – which, according to the Phoenix New Times “is operated primarily for the financial benefit of the FLDS church and for the personal enrichment of FLDS school district leaders.” Reporter John Dougherty determined that school administrators have “plundered the district’s treasury by running up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on district credit cards, purchasing expensive vehicles for their personal use and engaging in extensive travel. The spending spree culminated in December [2002], when the district purchased a $220,000 Cessna 210 airplane to facilitate trips by district personnel to cities across Arizona…The federal government built a $2.8 million airport that serves almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community.

In 2002, seventy-eight percent of the town’s residents living on the Arizona side received food stamps. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest of Mohave County, Arizona, receive just over a dollar in services per tax dollar paid.

“Uncle Rulon justifies all that assistance from the wicked government by explaining that really the money is coming from the Lord,” says DeLoy Bateman. “We’re taught that it’s the Lord’s way of manipulating the system to take care of His chosen people.” Fundamentalists call defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and regard it as a “virtuous act.”

Oo-oo, child, things are going to get easier

Via my dear friend, Jenny, The Bloggess, a couple of days ago I found the blog of a young lesbian who is in seminary on the ordination track to be a Lutheran minister — thus the name of her blog, Emm in Sem:

Gay marriage isn’t revolutionary. It’s just the next step in marriage’s evolution. [She links an article in The Washington Post.]

This is a great article.

That I’ve seen sixty times before.

I love my partner. I love our life. I love how far this country has come, even just in my short lifetime. I love reading these articles and knowing that there are straight allies and open LGBT brothers and sisters who are going to bat for us and our rights.

But I also am so, so sick of having to make these arguments, and to see them made.

Me, too, but I have to say that I’m over the moon that Emmy is able to be openly lesbian AND studying for the ministry.

After a bad break-up in 1976 I was celibate and ex-lesbian for almost eight years. Then, in the spring of 1984, I had a therapy session with John Gray, before his Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus fame, and he tried to persuade me that my being a lesbian was caused somehow by my upbringing. Which I finally realized was a ton of hooey. And not too long after that, I came to such a sense of groundedness and clarity about being a lesbian that I knew no one ever again could persuade me that I was wrong, or sick, or perverted, or anything but good and true. And I realized that the very worst thing I could possibly do with my life was to envy the dharma of another — that is, to try to be someone I wasn’t: straight. A few weeks later, I met Margaret.

So, Emmy, remember that the modern movement for gay equality began on Oct. 6, 1968, with the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church by the Rev. Troy Perry — not with the Stonewall riots in June 1969 — so we are building on a spiritual foundation. The most revolutionary things you can do are to nourish your faith, your love of God, your devotion to Kristi and to light the way for others to come out as gay AND spiritual. The more we have people come out and claim their goodness and wholeness in their spiritual lives, their families, their jobs and their communities, the sooner things are going to get easier. Please count me as a member of the “visible, public community of allies” you need and are creating.

P.S.

Emmy, the Left is comprised largely of the groups evangelical Christians have run out of the Right: gays, women and Jews, all of whom are better served by the fiscal conservative policies of the Right. Do come back and learn about fiscal conservatism because it seems to me that a considerable amount of the hostility toward gays from the conservative world is aimed at Leftist fiscal policies that gays embrace. It’s worth your while to learn how to tell whether are people are furious about gays as gays, or gays as gay AND socialist.

P.P.S.

Emmy linked a piece at HuffPo that asks, “Is Evangelical Christianity Having a Great Gay Awakening?,” and it is worth the click to learn the answer.

DOJ argues marriage is federal

I came across the following from MetroWeekly linked at Instapundit’s — it includes the link to the PDF of the DOJ’s brief and I encourage you to read the whole thing (boldfacing mine):

Today [1/13/11], the Department of Justice filed its defense of the Defense of Marriage Act in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in a single filing for both Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. United States. This past July, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro ruled that Section Three of DOMA — which sets a federal definition for “marriage” and spouse” — is unconstitutional.

The government announced in October 2010 that it planned to appeal the rulings.

In its defense of the 1996 law, the government today stated:

DOMA is supported by rationales that constitute a sufficient rational basis for the law. For example, as explained below, it is supported by an interest in maintaining the status quo and uniformity on the federal level, and preserving room for the development of policy in the states.

Is it my imagination or aren’t “maintaining the status quo” and “preserving room for the development of policy in the states” paradoxical objectives?

Also, if you really, really, REALLY believe in federalism and leaving whatever isn’t stipulated by the Constitution to be regulated by the states, then doesn’t that mean you do NOT pass a federal law to thwart state laws you disagree with?

I love Sarah Palin — may God bless and protect her always

I love Sarah Palin — love, love, love her. I respect her. I admire her. I am in awe of her ability always to call forth the highest and best in everyone, as she does in this speech, which is all the more inspiring considering the viciousness and insanity of the attacks on her and her family by the Left — Allahpundit notes that death threats against Gov. Palin are at an all-time high.

For better commentary than I can come up with right now, I direct you to Moe Lane, Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ addressing objections to Gov. Palin’s use of the expression “blood libel,” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air (along with transcript of the speech), and Ace.

Should gays be accepted in the conservative movement? Or, Ryan Sorba, I challenge you to …

… prove you are not sexually attracted to men by agreeing to the simple test Charlotte used on Trey in “Sex and the City“: a few postage stamps from a roll of stamps stuck together in a circle around your flaccid penis to reveal states of tumescence (because of the perforations between stamps, they will tear easily in the event of an erection) in reaction to photos of naked people doing it. Once the stamps are in place, I can arrange for you to view very explicit gay pornography — I’ll have some variety because I don’t know your tastes — and then very explicit straight pornography. I expect we’ll have our answer with the first test.

I am inspired to issue this challenge after reading part one of what is slated to be a three-part essay debate between David Swindle, editor of NewsReal Blog, and anti-gay self-promoter Ryan Sorba, on the question in my headline, “Is Ryan Sorba a closeted gay man?” Wait, no, on the question, “Should gays be accepted in the conservative movement?”

When I view the conservative movement I see it as being comprised of four ideological groups gathered in a tent so large that two of the groups have mutually exclusive goals:

  1. Fiscal conservative, social liberal
  2. Fiscal conservative, social conservative (when OUT of power, fiscal promises dominate; when IN power, social vendettas dominate and the majority of fiscal promises are scheduled for the indefinite future, aka, in your dreams)
  3. Libertarians
  4. Social conservative, fiscal liberal — for some reason, this group is usually shy about announcing its full identity and prefers to style itself as “compassionate” rather than liberal.

I have a sneaking suspicion it is the dominance of groups 2 and 4 in the conservative movement that is responsible for government growing even when conservatives are in power.

Oh, and by the way, why aren’t we having a debate about whether group 4 should be accepted in the conservative movement, on account of their being anti-liberty and pro big government — in other words, not conservative?

Where was I? The bottom line is that Ryan Sorba is looking to promote himself in time for CPAC next month in order to advance his career by witch-hunting gays. I am 57 and came out 39 years ago in 1972. I have seen Sorba’s type before. I feel no obligation to pretend to think anyone as obsessed as Sorba is with denouncing gays and anal sex is straight. So — Sorba, it’s time to rise to the challenge and put your man parts where your mouth is.

P.S.

If you are unaware of what sparked this debate, the Family Research Council recently announced it is withdrawing from participating in CPAC next month because the gay conservative group GOProud is co-sponsoring the event again this year. Ed Morrissey explains the whole story at Hot Air.

P.P.S.

Greg Gutfield makes some excellent points at Big Hollywood — the big laughs are there, but the following sets them up:

Ryan believes that, homosexuality is a “sometime behavior,” and he quotes a gay he agrees with, cut and pasting: “…human sexuality is fluid and flexible…The concept of gay and lesbian identity may be nothing but a social construct.”

So I guess he believes the same: that sexuality is “flexible,” and we choose our orientation.

Which makes me wonder, when did he first choose to be straight?

And did he choose to be straight, only because it’s acceptable by conservatives?

Apparently multi-tasking is not my forte

I apologize for being away for so long. I am working on a couple of projects that require my full attention AND that I take better care of myself. If I were to try to keep things lively by reviewing other people’s work and linking it here, I would almost certainly find something I would just have to write about well into the wee hours of the morning, which would make me too exhausted and foggy the next day to do my work.

Once I have accomplished what I need to do, I will be back to writing regularly. I am in this for the long haul.

However, I would love it if some of my gentle readers were to explain to me the economic theory of fiscal conservatism of cutting spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security INSTEAD of increasing prosperity by all the means fiscal conservatives favor, such as simplifying the tax code, reducing corporate income taxes, eliminating the estate tax, making America energy independent through nuclear energy and drilling our own oil reserves, making America a profitable place to manufacture goods, securing our borders, ending birthright citizenship, refusing all government services (except prison or deportation) to illegal aliens and confiscating all the property owned by any illegal alien (for the same reason bank robbers don’t get to keep the money just because they got out of the bank before they were caught). We have ALL the best ideas on how to increase prosperity. Why aren’t we doing that FIRST?

After all, one of the first things you learn in science and math is that you must set the problem up correctly in order to solve it. While it looks like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — the so-called “entitlement programs” — are where the big money is for cutting the size of government and the tax burden, it seems to me that we are walking right into a trap where we make the Left look like Santa Claus and Obama gets another term before we can explain how we’re not really the Grinch that stole Christmas. After all, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are programs to care for the disabled and elderly — people who either are past their working prime, or who are too disabled, sick or frail to work at all. They are not freeloading or shirking. It will be very reasonable for them to ask, “What will become of me if these cuts are passed?” and then to run right into the arms of the Left.

In my opinion, the correct way to set up the problem of our national debt and the deficit is to start by implementing everything we know will unleash prosperity. THAT’s how we expose the Left as the Grinch. (Note to liberals: the Progressive/socialistic planned economy that Obama and the Democrats have been establishing destroys liberty and prosperity.)

Here’s an example of how important it is to set a problem up correctly. Gas prices have shot up in the last few weeks and a commentator on CNN yesterday claimed the reason is global competition. This seems plausible, is guilt-inducing and appears to validate the green agenda. However, it is the green agenda that has ensured that we have not been tapping our own oil reserves or building nuclear reactors so that energy will be cheap and abundant. Our economy and lives would not be in the control of other nations to the degree that they are if it were not for the green agenda.

When a burden is too heavy, your options are to reduce the size of the burden to what you can carry, or to increase your ability to carry the burden. Just imagine how people would rally to fiscal conservative policies when they see their salvation in them! If only we were talking about all the ways to implement our policies that empower and prosper everyone! And yet, what are our newly elected fiscal conservative leaders doing? Talking non-stop about how best to shuck the burden of the elderly and disabled in order to demonstrate their financial prudence by their willingness to inflict pain and sacrifice … on other people.