My Memoir:
Part 19-E:
Esther LeBaron Spencer, Me,
 And More Perils of Polygamy

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An important question for leaders:
‘Am I building people,
Or building my dream
And using people to do it?’
John Maxwell

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I left off in

MY MEMOIR
Esther LeBaron Spencer, Me,
 And More Perils of Polygamy
Part 19-D

Saying:
The secretly arranged marriage my Uncle Ervil LeBaron
had manipulated me into
wasn’t at all like I had fantasized marriage would be —
not at all how I’d romanticized matrimony
and the meeting of my future husband would come about.
Instead, I didn’t look forward to being married … to Homer Babbitt.

Why did God want me in a marriage that seemed so lackluster and a deal buster, is another question I would have asked myself if, as a brainwashed, controlled adolescent, I felt free to ask crucial questions that concerned me, my well-being, and my future.

But in my upbringing there were few respected boundaries, let alone rights. I was simply to do what I was told to do and NOT ask questions: Children were to be seen, not heard. 

I was also taught that “When your leader or parents speak, your thinking has been done!” At age fifteen, I had been threatened by my father with a severe beating simply because I had finally dared to respectfully ask him, “Why?”

Nonetheless, I was disappointed that the desire, love, and passion I’d expected there would be wasn’t there when it came to marrying Homer. I’d been enamorated with a guy before, a number of times. And this wasn’t it!

I felt locked in with no way out because I had to do/wanted to do what “the Prophet” said God wanted me to do. Nevertheless, I wished something happening so this marriage wouldn’t happen. 

Ervil was going to have Homer and me marry sans dating and sans me even knowing the guy, let alone being attracted to him!

It blows me over, now, to think my unscrupulous uncle would care so little about me and my needs and feelings that he would use priestcraft to manipulate totally naïve, trusting, special me for his own power and financial gain — would pretend he stood as God to us people, got revelation for us, and could, therefore, tell me who I was supposed to marry — without even bringing my parents in on it!

He was using me and his people 
 As though we were sheeple —
Human pawns in his hands,
Here to fulfill his plans —
As though nobody mattered but him!
Er-Vile was E-Vile–
Full of sin! 
He’s left his repercussions
Ever reverberating throughout my life
Since then. 

Evil Ervil had everybody duped.
But I fail to see why all those who raised him and/or grew up with him
and knew him well (his mother, my mother, her brothers, and their friends such as Homer)
didn’t see and prevent what Ervil was doing to the sheeple in his fold.
By doing nothing and looking the other way,
these people basically condoned Ervil’s evil.

Uncle Ervil knew the most important thing in my sixteen-year-old
Mormon fundamentalist female mind was:
Who am I supposed to marry? When?
And how can I best serve and help build up the kingdom of God?

He knew this because that’s what he and I were both born and bred on. Ervil knew the woman’s whole purpose in life, in Mormon fundamentalism, was to marry the right man — as revealed to her by revelation — and to serve God or “The Work;” i.e., “The work of God/ Building up God’s kingdom on earth.”

There were already many polygamist men in the LeBaron cult who had gone to my father asking permission to marry me. It had been going on for the whole two years since my family moved to the LeBaron colony in 1960 when I was only fourteen!

Daddy had turned down most of them, using the pretext that I was too young. Nonetheless, it made these spurned courtiers dislike my father more than they perhaps already did. At the very least, being refused permission to court/marry me hurt their feelings.

Nor did my uncle ErVile care in the least how I felt about it. I was just somebody for this sociopathic, psychotic monster and master manipulator to use for his own gain, vain purposes, and glorification.

Continued in:
MY MEMOIR
Esther LeBaron Spencer, Me,
And More Perils of Polygamy,
Part 19-F

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In the following video, Producer Rebecca Kimbel,
one of my aunt-in-laws, is interviewing her niece Donna LeBaron Goldberg,
one of my many first cousins and my Uncle Verlan’s many daughters.
Donna spent a good part of her young life growing up in Colonia LeBaron
where I spent over eight years of my life as a child and young adult.