The Tuckers think this is all hogwash now, though they were programmed to believe it at the time. As people age the chances of children inheriting mutant genes increases. 'We do know there are biological hazards. When you pair up those undesirable genes, something strange will pop out.'. 'Maybe it will just self-destruct,' historian Bistline says of the fundamentalist church he quit 20 years ago because of a dispute over religious doctrine and property ownership. Aleck is a geneticist who participated along with Tarby and others in the groundbreaking study of several polygamous families with fumarase deficiency in the late 1990s. . the tight-lipped adult answer, 'We dont know,' seemed woefully inadequate. lucky They are lucky if they can even move their head and eyes a little bit.'. And her ex-husband's parents, Merlin and Carolyn Kingston, were uncle and niece. . Tarby recounts a conversation he had with a member of the Barlow clan in which he tried to explain why so much fumarase deficiency was occurring among Mormon polygamists. . restricted in some polygamous sects, including FLDS groups in Colorado City, Arizona; Hildale, Utah; and West Texas, that force some of the young males to leave the communities . . . Those affected by the genetic disorder suffer grand mal seizures and often have facial feature deformities and severe mental retardation, with IQs as low as 25. . Read more: Women Who Escaped a Polygamist Mormon Cult Share Their Story. . The sisters were born into the Salt Lake City-based group and since they didn't choose the lifestyle, they decided to escape. Fear began to overwhelm me, for the future, and for my own son. . "Tarby says the disease could begin to show up in children at Warren Jeffs' new FLDS headquarters . . thus marking the first time news media reported this human and civil rights nightmare accurately since the 1850s. "Tarby believes the recessive gene was introduced by one of the community's polygamist founders. Three of his wives are his half-sisters. I think most people are made aware of the problems caused by inbreeding (a nicer word than incest) when they are still young teenagers. This nurse has a polygamous background, so does her husband. That means the number of cases likely will grow. As part of a plea bargain, Jeremy spent just one year in prison. sr. . . "An unknown number--but believed to be in the thousands--of Barlow/Jessop descendants carry the recessive gene that causes fumarase deficiency. If these couples are . Nobody, from the police to [the governor], cares that these children are abused from conception to marriage.'. "Today, six sons and two daughters of John Ortell and LaDonna have married at least 20 half-sisters, nieces and first cousins, giving birth to a family tree that twists and tangles, and, at times, withers with children born of genetic deficiencies. Evidence exists that this gene pool foments a genetic and human catastrophe. Chinese people were called stupid, and Mexicans were dirty, said Lu Ann, adding, because of their skin.. The FLDS was formed by Mormons who refused to give up polygamy. "Experts say the number of children afflicted in the FLDS community is expected to steadily increase as a result of decades of inbreeding between two of the polygamous sect's founding families--the Barlows and the Jessops. 'It's like any inbred disorder,' Tarby says. 'All of a sudden [with] this one little baby, everything tightened up and she arched her back so hard her head was almost touching her toes,' Wyler says. . Reading the ignorant responses of the polygs - particularly in the face of the evidence all around them - makes my blood boil. "Our ancestral destiny meant we might give birth to sons who would die at maturity or daughters who would carry the trait to the next generation of sons. Ethnic jokes and stereotypes were commonly repeated. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. Kingston -- the late enigmatic leader and church prophet who built the 1,500-member Kingston clan into a multimillion-dollar business empire while allowing many of his purported 13 wives and dozens of children to survive on government assistance. The Kingston clan is also known as the Davis County Cooperative. Allison, a 17 year-old ex-Kingston member says not much has changed since Lu Anns day. The knowledge that one's children are likely to be born with conditions like this one does not prevent FLDS couples from becoming pregnant; instead, they see it as a responsibility and blessing to have many children. "Victims suffer a range of symptoms, including severe epileptic seizures, inability to walk or even sit upright, severe speech impediments, failure to grow at a normal rate, and tragic physical deformities. And the graveyard grew exponentially.". 'They are functioning way below their chronological age.'. Elden continued the tradition. A fourth to half of father-daughter and brother-sister offspring have mental or physical deficiencies. . So, from the beginnings of Mormon Church history, we have LDS Elohim's hand of blessing placed upon the insidious institution of multi-wifing and forever-birthing. All of the gay people would definitely be the first to go, he said. . "All of these men have or had multiple wives and scores of children. . The first questions were about his background. . Her disobedience incurred the wrath of her father Daniel, who took her to a family ranch near the Idaho border and savagely beat her. 'Remember how Hitler was trying to breed a perfect race?' In 1999, Pauls younger brother David Ortell Kingston was convicted of taking his 16-year-old niece as wife number 15. The Latter Day Church of Christ, is considered a Mormon fundamentalist denomination by some in the Latter Day Saint movement. . and is expected to answer questions . Nearly all the Mormon founding families were relatives, so the first polygamists enjoyed relations to different degrees when the divine experiment began. Something along the lines of, to build a superhuman, if you have four or five defects to get the one good one, its worth it, he recalled. . As for its anti-government views, allegations of fraud against government entities have long dogged the Kingstons. Almost everyone here is some variation of cousin, and, until Warren was locked up and decided to put a hold on all marriages, most men and women were paired together in order to preserve certain esteemed bloodlines. : About half of the 8,000 people living in the towns are blood relatives of two of the founding families that settled in the 1930s on the desolate high desert plateau against the base of the Vermillion Cliffs. He says The Order regards homosexuality as a choice. We would cause harm, he confessed. [T]he 'Salt Lake Tribune' . "'I tried to get people to come, but nobody would listen,' says the mother, who left the group and her marriage after her sons were diagnosed with dwarfism. on a 1,600-acre ranch outside of Eldorado. ". . "'We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition,' Tarby says. They're given the utmost attention and care because the FLDS faithful believe everything in this life is a test before entering the celestial kingdom, and caring well for all of Heavenly Father's children is part of that test. Could my childish intuition that the adults and doctors lips were sealed against my questions involve family secrets; secrets relatives took to their graves rather than betray? "', "'Joseph Smith was also selecting for the "obedience gene." 'If the community gets larger, the number of people with fumarase deficiency gets larger. Since the natural male-to-female ratio is roughly 50-50, the ratio must be manipulated so that there are more females than males for polygamy to work. According to church lore, The Order came into existence when founder Charles Elden Kingston saw Jesus in the mountains above the familys settlement in Bountiful, Utah, inspiring him to create the DCCS in 1935. "Then, as generations of polygamous Kingston children have been taught, they demurred to questions about their father. . Dawna says that, when people refer to what's going on over in the Cane Beds, they say it's probably another turkey baster situation. "In 1996, the now 31-year-old Kingston mother of two slow-growing children sought explanations at Primary Children's Medical Center. "It is Moore-Emmett's belief that the LDS Church who started polygamy in this country should take responsibility and provide financial aid and other resources for those polygamous families who have been abused. Various congenital and genital defects, dwarfism, fused limbs, fingernails lacking, mental illness and mental retardation, spina bifida, and microcephalous are some of the diseases and mutations. . "Of the Kingstons, Williams says: 'There is not much you can do about them. But I do have children with other women., Asked if two women named were in fact his first cousins, Young paused, finally replying, I guess Im curious as to what youre trying to get at here.. Another of the cults teachings was that soy can make you gay, an anti-government conspiracy theory popular in some right-wing circles. [w]omen do not have the freedom to consider how often she can give birth and maintain her health. We cannot afford to neglect the possibility our ancestors practiced a form of marriage that was unhealthy and debilitating to our children, to us, and to society. . "I know these people personally.'. Carolyn Yvonne Kingston was born in 1938 in Elmo, Utah, to Charles Elden Kingston, and his first wife Ethel Gustafson, so she was the daughter of the first prophet of the Kingston Clan. "'One lady I know, she just cannot physically pick [her son] up anymore to get him into the bathtub,' Wyler says. Cases of fumarase deficiency have shown up in the FLDS communities in Colorado City and Hildale, and doctors believe that the incidence of the condition in these communities will increase in coming generations. "Farm Roots of Incest: Marriages in the Kingston clan must be sanctioned by [the] current head of the church . "A rare, severe birth defect is on the rise in an inbred polygamous community on the Arizona-Utah border, according to a doctor who has treated many of the children. Its ominous-sounding moniker, The Order, is a reference to the United Order, a quasi-utopian society proposed by LDS-founder Joseph Smith, and practiced in some Mormon communities under the leadership of early church president Brigham Young. The most common birth defects for children born of close cousins, anywhere, are: harelip, cleft palate, clubfoot, and certain forms of heart valve conditions. 'I said, "You're married to somebody you're related to. "While none of these can positively be linked to incest without DNA testing, geneticists say most of the conditions are exacerbated by incest. But that's like spitting in the ocean.'. This is a humane coping strategy devised to deal with a dilemma that devastated a woman taught from birth her only value was in the number of children she bore for the Kingdom of God. . He estimates the test would . "There is no cure for the disease, which impedes the body's ability to process food at the cellular level. . Okay, I have one legal wife, he said. The girl, who as an adult would unsuccessfully sue the clan, then walked miles to the nearest gas station, where she called the police. ", -The Prophet Brigham Young, "Journal of Discourses," vol. This is a rare disorder and medical descriptions of trisome infants are too dreadful to describe here. . _____. The Order can rightly claim discrimination by mainstream Mormonism, but this is due to its embrace of polygamy, which the LDS church officially abandoned in 1890 in order for Utah to become a state. Kollene's father, John Daniel Kingston has 14 wives, and she is the fifth of her mother Shirley Hansen's 12 children. If two descendants of hierarchical polygamy marry, the chances for genetic defects increase if the families were ever interrelated. During an interview with this reporter, Lu Ann Kingston, whose defiance of the cult led to the conviction of her former spiritual husband Jeremy, recalled that Order members saw intermarriage as a way to keep the bloodline pure., All outsiders are considered to be beneath Order members, she explained. . . Excerpts from the article "Understanding Polygamy," distributed by "Humanists of Utah": " . . "'I had never seen a patient with it,' Tarby says. Obviously, we would love to.. "In polygamy . Young declined to comment when asked if he practices polygamy. . "Frequent and powerful seizures are among the most disturbing characteristics of the disease. 'They have the authoritarian structure necessary to keep this from happening, but I don't think they have the advanced thinking,' Aleck says. . The records of the marriages sealed at the Nauvoo Temple before the general exodus to Utah in the 1840s, may be the most important ones of all; yet, these are . my question is: How come MORmON god does not get on board with His own programs? Upon the creation of the LDCJC, most members of the DCCS . "The rate at which Kingstons marry each other is 'frightening,' she says. . . . "They've got this idea that their blood is pure and that they want to keep it pure.'. Shuvrajit Das Biswas. Eventually, she admitted she had married her half-brother and given birth to three children. . "Dr. Tarby, who routinely treats fumarase deficiency children at a state-funded clinic in Flagstaff, says, 'They are funny-looking kids [with] biggish heads and coarse, thick features.' It takes maturity to face the truth, especially if the truth is painful and challenges the family tradition and religious belief structure. The renunciation of polygamy is now church doctrine, and the Mormon church has a policy of excommunicating polygamists. Former clan prophet John Ortell Kingston, who died in 1987, paid the Medicaid bills for a child born with severe birth defects after Utah investigators linked the wealthy father of more than 65 children to the baby. One of the survivors includes Amanda Rae Grant, who appeared on season two of A&E's "Escaping . On the show's pilot, the trio bring a burly security guard along as they help a woman sneak into her own home to grab belongings for herself and her two young daughters. breeding really functional? Obsessed with the purity of their bloodline and empowered by a sense of entitlement on par with the divine right of kings, the Kingstons have made incest the cornerstone of a self-serving theology that loathes non whites, fosters homophobia and abhors government authority. When it comes to racist Sunday school lessons, the polygamous Kingston clan could teach the Ku Klux Klan a thing or two. Young told Intelligence Report that his company has sold weapons, with the approval of the U.S. State Department, to governments in Europe and the Middle East, Saudi Arabia being one. 13, p. 195, "We breathe the free air, we have the best looking men and handsomest women, and if they (non-Mormons) envy us our position, well they may, for they are a poor, narrow-minded, pinch-backed race of men, who chain themselves down to the law of monogamy, and live all their days under the dominion of one wife. From the article `` Understanding polygamy, '' vol article `` Understanding,... 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