Brett Chang’s Blog

Stop!

Please don’t skip this entry because the title sounds uninteresting.

I guarantee you that this is the most interesting piece of news you will read in this month.

Recently, the leader of a group of Fundamentalists Mormons (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), with member count at around 10,000, was caught by Texas local police on suspicion of child abuse, and now 400 something children were extracted out of the camp of this particular religious group.

When i said camp, I meant that they have a ranch. And when I said ranch, I meant it’s about 1900-freakin’-acres(metrics: 7km*7Km) big. It’s called “Yearn For Zion Ranch” aka YFZ Ranch. It hosted about 500~600 people including children(I can’t find the exact number from the new articles as no one seems to be able to get the correct headcount) before the police raid. The ranch is not just big, it is also fairly self sustainable with gardens, a waste treatment facility, dormitories, grain silos, generators, and even a stone quarry(!!!) to build their temple with.

Check out their ominous looking temple.

So what exactly did these seemingly harmless Fundamentalist Mormons do other than dressing themselves in those silly colonial attires on their ranch to attract the attention of Texas Rangers?

Oh, they practice polygamy. And they marry girls at 13-14 year olds to men 3, 4, 5 times older.

With all things considered — it is nothing too serious as our Chinese ancestors would’ve told you that they practiced polygamy and possibly married much younger girls — for thousands of years. Back in the days, as long as you had the money, you were free to marry as many women as you could, but the society probably would spit on you for marrying really young girls. This practice lasted up until when there was still an emperor in throne in China (early 1900’s).

So, with all these hoopla, the situation is that the children are now with social service and it is becoming a major concern for the general public. The foremost problem is, you don’t just “extract” 400 children from their homes without a solid plan. Can you imagine 6-7 year olds being separated from their parents by force?

Yes, truly tragedy.

However, if you realize that the two choices which Texas government has: one, facing the social problem of arranging 400 children with a place to live and enduring the public agony for removing them “inhumanely” from their parents. And two, send the children back to their parents, hence the ranch, and sealing their fate to play their roles in the half-insane polygamist church for the rest of their lives.

Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I suppose this is partly why the government hadn’t done anything about it until now. You don’t really build a 1,900 acre ranch to house 600 people in one day, you know.

Now, have you finished digesting all that information, yet? Here comes even more interesting tidbits — supposedly, they kick out young boys at around 16~17-year-old so that they do not compete with older men on the girls. And that’s not all, it is rumored that they have a cemetery on the ranch where they bury infants, those that were deformed or had birth defects due to several generations of marriages among close relatives.

How are those for shockers?

Suddenly, the Mormon religion, as a whole, grabbed my interest in a big way.

I think everyone knows about them as being very friendly and trying to recruit people to their church on the street, in your door steps, in social enclaves (such as Chinatowns), and even in Taiwan. However, did you also know that they were just… polygamists as a religion altogether. There were no so-called fundamentalists back in 1800’s when they first started out. Because, polygamists WERE the mainstream Mormons. As someone from a blog had commented — “in 1800’s, they didn’t hide all the way to the desert to live next to a saline lake (Salt Lake City) for no reason. They had some weirdo religion and social beliefs.”

It is not until early 1890’s, the Supreme Court decided to criminalize polygamy then the Mormons decided to “adapt” itself to NOT include polygamy in their teachings.

Talk about a farce.

Nowadays, you will hear “mainstream” Mormons denounce polygamism and say that Mormons do not practice it. That’s rather hypocritical of them, don’t you think?

There are even more interesting information about the founders of Mormon religion, but it might be too in depth for this blog entry. Maybe next time when some weirdo in some unknown town in Texas causes a raucous again then I will talk about it more.

I overheard a conversation in office today. It goes along the lines of:

Person A: “I used to work for an advertising company and my boss always hired cute Asian girls.”

Person B: “Me too! A while back I was working at a place and you could really tell that there was a trend where only cute Asian girls were being hired!”

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with hiring girls or cute girls. However, if you replace “Asian” in those two sentences with “white” or “black”, it would immediately sound strange to you, no? Wouldn’t those two sentences, although seemingly harmless and I can assure you that the people who uttered those words didn’t mean it, be rather racists?

Delving deeper, if the girls getting hired were white/Caucasian, they would just say “my ex-boss always hired cute girls”. No? There was a point to be made, unknowingly and subconciously, by the two people in my company, to show that they are “different” from the Asian girls and therefore becoming racists.

Yes, life is fickle and trying to be politically correct is impossible.