Pt 20-F: Ma, Pa, Me, and Polygamy on-the-down-low

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Notes from a Chat Site:

“Narcissists make me melt down and cry like a child.
It is a remarkable trick Narcissists pull.
They are petty and acquisitive — and have no scruples.

They value themselves by how much they can
steal from someone else through cunning, manipulation,
or simply believing they are entitled:
‘What is mine is mine; what is yours is mine.’

They get you to give up the goods with
some very clever lies and manipulations.
They are conmen, plain and simple.
Sooner or later, inconsistencies emerge,
but even the most educated mind can be towed under.
I have reached for help, and there is never anyone there.”

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Taking up from my last blog, My Memoir: Part 20-E: Ma, Pa, Me, and Polygamy On-The-Down-Low:”

When my amazing Mummy became disillusioned with her brother Joel LeBaron’s Mormon fundamentalist cult and Mormonism too, she and my sister Mary joined Rev. Moon’s organization for some time. Mary told me: Mumma even married Rev. Moon as one of his wives.

Later on, both Mummy and Mary left The Moon Organization — The Unification Church. That took some doing! But after that, Mummy was a desperate dummy: She returned to the doomsday Messianic Mormon cult in which her brother Joel LeBaron had been “The One Mighty and Strong” prophet. But Joel had died years earlier. I guess she’d had another one of her revelations? Or was waiting for “the prophet Joel’s” successor? Or a “successor” Mummy could believe in had laid claim to the position by then. I was long gone so don’t know all the details.

I only know how difficult it is to have nothing but the abyss to wake up to every morning because you have lost your faith, direction, and purpose — your explanation that gives meaning to life. This helps explain why, historically, most people, when they leave one cult, end up in another.

In a world where we don’t know where we came from, why we are here, or where we’re going, desperate people do desperate things. At best, we prove who we are by who we are not. For example, “We are God’s chosen people,” so we are not “the wicked world.” Or: “We are Christians so we are saved “– and so on and so forth.

My sister Judas (pseudonym) who died in 2012 at age sixty-four due to a brain tumor and ALS (ALS: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – Signs and Symptoms | Muscular …), was never one to mince words. She explained Mummy thus: Though quite gifted intellectually, somewhere along the line, all Mother’s marbles rolled to one side and got stuck … never to get unstuck!

Judas, herself, had joined the LDS or mainstream Mormon church a number of years after she and her husband Hector Spencer* left the LeBaron cult and Mormon fundamentalism. Her marriage to Hec, when she was 18 and he around 42, started out as a polygamous marriage — again, totally orchestrated by Mother.

That’s one of the problems with religious polygamy: It leads to manipulating especially the young girls’ lives because they become pawns in a huge power play whenever men can have more than one wife — not to mention, it leaves no wives for the young men in the cult. They, too, are pawns in the hands of the authoritarian, totalitarian, theocratic leaders: Sadly, they’re often simply used to help support their father’s many wives and children!

Mother had good qualities. But her belief in Mormon fundamentalism and her weakness for wanting popularity and power, coupled with the faults and temptations inherent in mandated polygamy, taught her to believe she was doing God, her daughters, and the priesthood holders a great service when she placed them — her ten bright, beautiful, talented young daughters  — as polygamous wives with the most prestigious men in the cult, namely older married men she liked and wanted to please and gain favor with.

However, Judas’s marriage she arranged with Hector, so he could enter “The Principle,” soon became monogamous: His first wife, a mainstream LDS Mormon, divorced him immediately when she discovered he’d secretly taken a plural wife — 24 years his junior, no less! What’s worse, he couldn’t even support her and her children worth a darn, let alone a plural wife and her children.

Judas and Hec’s marriage lasted about twenty-three years before it crumbled: Judas had begun to rove. Around age 40, she fell in love with and married her Mormon boss, owner of a successful Real Estate business in southern Utah. At 56, he was fifteen years her senior. “But he’s young in comparison to ‘that old bag-of-bones’ Hector,” she told me. “Hec’s going on 66 now!“

To add to the drama, her new husband left his first wife — though they had been married in the Mormon Temple — to marry Judas in the Mormon temple! (Talk about a marriage made on earth!)

Let’s tell it for what it was: My sister Judas took another woman’s husband, whatever the justification. And, of course, she couldn’t do it alone. All’s fair in love and war? But being raised in orthodox Mormonism certainly affects one’s values and actions, even after one has “escaped polygamy” — as in the case of my sister Judas — the perennial Judas. But she explained it thus: “My marriage to Hector was arranged. I was never really in love with him. But I definitely experienced true love in my second marriage!”

As for my now-deceased sister Mary Spencer, she was married at the tender age of 15 as the second or plural wife of a much older man, Siegfried Widmar — another catastrophic polygamous marriage arranged by Mother, although Daddy may have colluded.

But Siegfried totally abandoned my sister Mary and their three darling little sons when she became ill with a life-threatening bone marrow disease brought on by radiation poisoning due to fallout from the H-bomb testing, tests that took place in the Nevada Flats area close to where my family lived in St. George, Utah when Mary was a baby.*

As regularly happens with polygamous marriages where the plural wife was a freebie, deprived and poorly educated child-bride Mary was left to raise her three little boys all by herself.* No financial support whatsoever came from Sigfried! What’s worse, he never even visited his precious fatherless sons when in the United States — where Mary fled after she left the Mexico LeBaron cult!

Once again: Whenever there is an abundance of something, it’s not much appreciated — an abundance of wives and children, in this case. (By this time, I don’t know how many more wives and children Sigfried had acquired. He was an important man in the cult. He had even become the leader of one of the cults that split off from Joel’s sect after Joel was killed by his competitive brother Ervil!)

Mary told me even our own mother became a plural wife (for a while) of HER ex-husband, Siegfried — despite how “Sig,” her Ex-son-in-law, had abused and abandoned her/Mary and her three sons/ Mumma’s grandsons!! (Polygamy breaks down all barriers and boundaries, in some people, in the name of “having a priesthood head,” if you’re a woman.)

Sadly, Mary died alone in a Utah hospital of cervical cancer on October 6, 2017, one month before her sixty-ninth birthday. The last I knew, she was a fervent follower of Marianne Williamson.

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• Hector Spencer was the Bishop of the LDS Mormon Church in Colonia Dublan when he left the mainstream Mormon church to join the LeBaron cult around 1964. He was close to Mother’s age and was one of the pals Mother and her brothers grew up with there in the Mexican Mormon colonies.)
  

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• Mother proudly left Mary outside in her baby carriage so she could watch the radiation clouds from the H-bomb tests as they floated overhead because we people living in the area had been propagandized to believe we were lucky to get to see history in the making — lucky to be living in the area where we could see these radiation clouds passing overhead!
  

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  As it turns out, “these lovely clouds” were radiating all the grass and alfalfa the cows and goats ate — among other foods and things — later to be passed on into the milk and milk products babies and others ate. (We are what we eat ate.)

  Check out this radiation-poisoning of the people in our area that started, say some, in 1951 (some articles I read say it started at least by 1945 — and I believe that is more like it):

• DOWNWIND FROM THE BOMB – The New York Times
  

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• I believe Mary was around 19 or 20 years old when Siegfried dumped her and her/his three little boys. At the time, Mary was lucky if she had five years of formal education. It’s amazing, therefore, what my sister survived and achieved in the years to come, despite her life of abuse, poverty, deprivation, illness, heartaches, and more.

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(Continued July 5, 2018: “Pt 20-G: Ma, Pa, Me, and Polygamy Parasites

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** NOTE: The following Essay by blogger Bruce Holt posted here by permission:

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