Heard on the Radio, Reflections on the Verdict

With the Fort Hood tragedy dominating the news, the Raymond Jessop verdict sorta slid beneath the waves.

I was on my way to the bank this morning, and overheard on the news, as the last story (paraphrased of course) was this:

"Raymond Jessop is facing 20 years in jail as a result of being convicted yesterday in Texas for sex with a teenage girl. The conviction was a result of a raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch last year, in which over 400 children were put into foster care."

There are probably less than 2000 people outside the FLDS and Texas Law Enforcement that know what really happened and this is how public opinion is shaped. The story didn't include the fact that the children were all returned. Most people don't know the big issues that were in play at YFZ for all of us, and are still fuzzy on what happened afterward. I think Brooke Adams spoke for herself as well as others about the result of the trial when she had an anonymous man who accosted her outside the courtroom respond to the verdict with one word.

"Good."

Most people who did know about the details of YFZ were concerned with the children. When they all went back (a perception not reinforced by the above referenced news story) that was the end of their outrage. By hook or by crook a molester or 12 had been apprehended and that was good enough. Compromise tends to rule the day when truth is at stake and it seemed a fair result to most that at the end of an illegal raid, FLDS members got half their stuff back. You YFZ'ers keep your kids, we'll jail the dirty old men for the next 20 years. Nothing can ever make a wrong right, but the least you can do is try to reset things to the way they were. Such moral compromises always encourage the despot and the thief.

You want 100%? Just steal twice as much as you need. Compromise. Meet your opponent half way. How is it good that I walked through the door with $100.00, got beat up, had to dust myself off, shake hands with my assailant and walk out the door missing a tooth and only having $50.00 and him getting credit for giving it back to me? I want my $100.00 thank you.

The Washington Times - "Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That's right. Orchids."

Everything is criminalized now. From food, to sex to drugs to marriage, it's all regulated overmuch by the Government and you're doing something wrong, I promise you. Have we forgotten the Manna Storehouse? In a completely criminalized society, where you cannot hope to stay violation free, you're only hope is a valid search warrant standing in between you, and imprisonment. Anyone who has bothered to follow the few facts accumulated about Rozita Swinton's call to the Newbridge shelter knows that she guessed at a lot of details and out of several jurisdictions she called, only Texas eventually chose to believe her tall tales. We all laugh in theaters and watching TV at the pretense used by police to gain entry to places they cannot go. We cheer them on because they are the monolithic "Good Guys" and the script demonized "Bad Guys" have been getting away with too much anyway. Time to win one for the team.

If you combine too much regulation, too many personal swat teams and too little in the way of barriers to home invasion on the part of Law Enforcement, you end up with the purest form of tyranny. The laws cannot all be enforced. Many of the agencies still don't have their personal swat teams and their laws just lay there, on the books, no one enforcing them. You can TRY to get them enforced but good luck with that. Angry police officers and detectives will inform you of rules and regs they know about pertaining to harassing a police officer and threaten to come get you if you don't quit bothering them. And they can. This then becomes the selective use of law to keep you in line, not to make for a law abiding society. I have personal experience with that. A 2am obscene phone caller from out of state. I should have known when the whole YFZ thing started that nothing would happen with the prank caller. I had personal experience with a misdemeanor offense committed against me. It ended with a Gallatin County Sheriff's department detective threatening me to enforce a law against me if I didn't stop bothering him about it. It didn't stop them from sending a cruiser to my door in the middle of the night to shut up my persistent out of state harasser, that they could not shut up.

How odd that this in many ways fits the pattern exactly of the YFZ affair. Wanting to be cooperative I invited the Deputy into my home. It is only now that I remember his eyes roaming the room for an "exigent circumstance." There was none, whatever unknown misdeed I was committing, he either did not see, or didn't know about himself. I suppose if my daughter had been up downloading copyrighted music, he could have cuffed me right there.

We are all in that sort of peril. We are all at the mercy of Law Enforcement trying to make their day go easier and shut up pests, many of them from out of state, be it pranksters from Colorado, or Malcontents from Utah and Arizona or regulators from Washington DC wanting to eliminate the illegal orchid trade, or food Nazis in Ohio.

My only natural son has proved an interesting lesson for me in many ways with his various and continuing scrapes with the law. One of the most vital lessons was how LE seeks to gain control over people. At the end of one of his scrapes I had managed to guide him through the court system, getting him cleared of an undeserved felony and winding up with a correct charge that was a misdemeanor and accompanying probation to go with it.

Then I got my education. The probation officer as much as told me that he wasn't interested in managing my son's probation to keep him out of trouble, instead, he wanted to manage it so that he could catch him in another felony. Why? Because he could then control him better, if he was a felon. A felon goes back to prison, a misdemeanant does not. Alcohol consumption may be legal, pot a minor crime and having hand lotion (allegedly for the purposes of self gratification) are not that big a deal for you or I, but as terms of probation for a felon, can send them to jail for things they seemingly can't resist. Control.

In this same way police don't want to give up the small controls they have in our lives. It works to their advantage if they can just go anywhere they want, anytime and in the currently over regulated environment, if all it takes is Pinky (or Sarah) calling while watching TV to spark a raid, LE doesn't worry about what they'll find when they get inside. They know they'll find something.

"Jerry Lee Lewis had already gone through two marriages by 1957; he'd married Jane Mitcham, his second, 23 days before his divorce from his first wife, Dorothy Barton, was final. On December 12, 1957, Jerry married his third cousin, Myra Gale Brown. A lot of ink has been spilled about his close blood relationship with Myra, and the fact that she was only thirteen and still believed in Santa Claus when the pair were married. For a man from his time and place, however, marrying at thirteen and marrying one's third cousin (twice removed) were both fairly commonplace occurrences, although Lewis further complicated matters by again marrying before the divorce from his second wife was final.

Lewis didn't seem to realize that this was offensive to most urban markets (and to other countries): in fact, Sun Records' Jud Phillips (brother of producer Sam) had warned him against taking Myra with him to England on his first European tour. Jerry Lee, never one to change his mind, took her anyway. When they stepped off the plane on May 22, 1958, Lewis obligingly told the British press that Myra was his wife (although he gave her age as 15 and moved up the date of their actual wedding). His bride, for her part, told the gathering that fifteen wasn't too young to marry back home: 'You can marry at 10 if you can find a husband.' "

1957. It wasn't that long ago, I was three years old. Jerry Lee Lewis is now considered to be a bit of a rascal, a country singer, and his daughter by his union with Myra, manages his career. Now there's a pedophile for you. We too quickly forget. What is now a 20 year jail term was once commonplace and I promise you that a look back at your recent ancestry is liable to produce a similar union. Without them, we would not be here.

Now like prohibition crazies gone wild again, we have found a new vice to be shocked about. Sex with "children." On the surface it seems like a righteous cause and it's perfect because both the left and the right hate their newfound sinners, so they have no friends. The left tears at the LDS and other religions regularly and popularize their failings. The right whines about molesters and homos and wants to pull the dust from everyone else's eye while ignoring the lumber yard in their own.

What do they find? A small fundamentalist group of Latter Day Saints who have been doing what they've been doing since the religion was founded. The Right hates them. The mainstream LDS religion hates them, the Left hates them. Once you're isolated like that, you have little hope. After a year and a half of demonizing the FLDS and trying the case in the press with outright lies, Raymond Jessop, who they can't even prove committed a crime in Texas, is convicted by a jury in time to get home for dinner. Raymond's wives will not see him now for perhaps the rest of his life. His children may even be barred from seeing him. They will become doubtless members of the welfare roles. Not a single participant in the "crime" (both adults now) testified in the case. Raymond's "victim" didn't even complain.

Is all well?

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