Utah, Fundamentalist Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints, Warren Jeffs discussed on Thank God I'm Atheist
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Oh, I am not gonna say, hey, the phrase that I really want to say right now, Davis. But I do appreciate you. I'm gonna keep saying that. All right, stick around, there is more show coming up. So Frank. Dan, I made you watch a show that I was already watching. Well, you were going, yeah, but no, no, no, wait. When I first brought it up to you, you had not watched any of it. Right, but it was on our queue. We were going to watch it. This is a Netflix documentary called keep sweet prey and obey. And it is about the FLDS, the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, under the leadership of Warren jeffs, and it is cuckoo bananas. I tell you what, you know, you and I are pretty well informed Frank about this stuff. We live in the state where they originated where from a religion that is cut from the same cloth if wildly altered since the breakup away. But my God. Even I was shocked at certain things. Yeah. They were, they were a little kooky with how far they took things, weren't they? Were and probably still are. I mean, they're definitely, I think they've dwindled in number, but they still exist. Yeah. You and I have both separately been to short creek, which is their which used to be their stronghold town on the border of Utah and Arizona. Yes. Down in the middle of nothing, and it's an interesting place. If you drive around the town and there are two cities that make up the short crick and Utah's do say crick, not creek. The short creek area, there's Colorado city, Arizona, and what's the Utah one? He'll tell. Hilda, Utah. And if you drive around it, whoo, what you see is really big, badly built houses, frequently behind 7 foot tall, like opaque walls. Yeah. It's compound land. Yeah, well, that's where they went. And I didn't realize that there had been sort of an exodus in the early 2000s. I was more of that part of the story. Yeah, they were sort of scattered around. They stayed in northern Utah for a while. And then they decided that they needed their own place, and boy did they find it. They just took over this tiny little area. Well, I think it had already, it had always been kind of a polygamist town, right? They didn't just invent the idea of let's go to short creek, right? Right. As polygamous. It's just such a remote area. That there I'm fairly confident there had always been some polygamous presence there. But yeah, you're right. It hadn't been much of a town. It was much more just a little compound of some kind. Yeah, a couple farms, whatever. And then yeah, they had the fundamentalists had sort of just always been up in suburban Salt Lake or Salt Lake City itself. Yeah. And I had always heard that estimates of like 50, 60,000 polygamists and Salt Lake valley. Huh. And obviously that's not how many people moved down there, so there's still a lot up here. If the numbers have held, I mean, I drive around a lot, and I do see in certain parts of the valley. Obvious polygamous houses. Yeah, and you can, and also you can, you know, you go to Costco and you can you know when there's four older women all with their hair done the same way in all in dresses of a single solid color fabric. Yeah. And then, you know, 30 children running around with them. And they're clearly shopping for 1100 humans. Right. For dinner. For that night's dinner. They shop every day. It's kind of absurd. It's a lifestyle that I'm glad I'm not living, but it's fine for them. But what's not fine? Is holy shit everything? Yeah. Everything about their lives is not okay. And boy, it just shows you how when you push things to the logical extreme, it just becomes crazy. Yeah. Things just go nuts. I highly recommend this documentary. It is great. It's well done. And each episode is what a four parter for four episodes. And each episode just, you don't think there's room to ratchet it up further. Yeah. Well, they do. It just gets, but I mean, but the big things that we're talking about. So things that we knew about were, the giving away of underaged girls to overaged men. Yeah. We're talking about like, you know, a 14 year old girl being given in marriage to a 50 something year old man, or older, like the story of the one woman in the film, who was married to ruling jeffs, Warren jeffs. Father. In his final years of his life, and he was like in his 80s or something. So gross. And they go into detail of wedding night and it's not cool. Like super gross. But she was with and it's interesting how they talk about the times when ruling jeffs was still in charge. And those were sort of the good old days. Right? Yeah, his son made it worse. How is this possible? Literally 14 year olds. Well, and there are also stories that people, and this show mentions it, but didn't focus on it much, they would kick young men out of the community. Yeah. I remember. For anything. And they kicked them out when their teens, they have no education, exactly zero education, they do not know how any of the rest of the world works. They know they have no money, but usually no construction. So they know how to build things. They know how to build bad looking homes. But almost no skills almost they have nothing and they are just thrown ejected from the only community they've ever been allowed to know. Yeah. Into the insular community. Yeah. No TV, they don't know what the rest of the world looks or smells like. Yeah. And the reason is because there ain't enough girls to go around. Yeah. Of course they're not, yeah. There's a math problem when every man wants 5 women. Yeah. And so, and so there's, but the whole cruel ejecting of them. That was a worn Jeff's thing. In prior times, they just sort of allowed that to sort of sort itself out. Right. Still not cool. You know, but now the thing that I thought was bizarre while watching it for me was, you know, I mean, this is obviously very foreign to our religious experience even though it's an offshoot of mormonism. But at the same time, very like I understood it. I did what was going on. And it's not just because of exposure to like the news and having some awareness of a lot of these incidents and how they were being reported at the time. No. It literally there's something very Mormon..