. Faced with the forced marriage to an uncle, Rugg left the Kingstons. Early polygamy was rife with incestuous and eugenic ideas and practices as well. As a symbol of their renunciation of worldly goods, the outer clothing contained no pockets in which possessions could be carried, although later an inside pocket was provided for the sanitary measure of carrying a handkerchief. "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. . living in Colorado City and Hildale are blood descendants of the Barlows and the Jessops, says Benjamin Bistline, a lifelong resident of the area who has published a book . . [15][16] The Grand Jury was described as "The polygamist hunting Davis County Grand Jury" by the Ogden Standard-Examiner in 1959. . "These groups are white supremacists and inbreeding is an essential doctrine in keeping the bloodline pure. . Had these defects clumped in my own family as it seemingly appeared to me? Consanguinity is a reason why families bear children of only one sex--all sons or all daughters. "Tarby says the disease could begin to show up in children at Warren Jeffs' new FLDS headquarters . Mormons can now see why American citizens passed laws intended to stop polygamy, a relic of unwise prophecy, laws continuously disregarded in Utah, a state controlled by the Mormon Church, if they will only look. and councilmen.' 'Children should not be victims of such programs.'. . "Gradually, I realized the practice of polygamy, especially in Mormondom, might be a prescription for genetic disease. They have no movement. She says her parents, Merlin Barnum Kingston (John Ortell's brother) and Joyce Fransden, were uncle and niece. 'I don't know how many who die within the first two or three years that we don't even ever know about. "Yet, Aleck says, some children are more seriously affected by the disorder than others. During a recent interview with the Intelligence Report, Jessica Kingston, a former member of the secretive, Salt Lake City-based cult and a star of the A&E reality series "Escaping Polygamy," remembered, when she was 12, her Sunday school teacher coming into class with a bucket of water and a vial of black food coloring. 'I said, "You're married to somebody you're related to. They can't sit up. ("Doctrine & Covenants," Section 132, verses 55, 62-63), "Joseph Smith also testified an angel with a sword came to him many times and commanded him to practice polygamy or else he would lose his life. Lucky was the first to die in my generation. . it is the only popular religion there,", -The Prophet Brigham Young, "Deseret News," 6 August 1862, "This law of monogamy, or the monogamic system, laid the foundation for prostitution and the evils and diseases of the most revolting nature and character under which modern Christendom groans, . Re: Polygamy's Patriarchy-Poisoned Bloodline: The Genetic Catastrophe That Has Sprung from Joseph Smith's "Divine" Breeding Program of Mormon Mutation . Surely, there were too many deaths. (The Church lost its authority to give covenants.) But residents who are aware of fumarase deficiency fear that the number of children afflicted with the disease will indeed increase. By 1935, his followers began to move to Bountiful, Utah, intending to live under a United Order communal program as defined by Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants. "Every person carries some lethal genes. . Re: Polygamy's Patriarchy-Poisoned Bloodline: The Genetic Catastrophe That Has Sprung from Joseph Smith's "Divine" Breeding Program of Mormon Mutation . . Eventually, she admitted she had married her half-brother and given birth to three children. For instance, Quinn writes, '[O]ver 20 General Authorities were married to such lesser known wives.' Therefore, to keep the bloodline 'pure,' the Kingstons intermarry--half-brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews, and so forth. Elden theorized that living the law of consecration was still required, and he set forth to establish his own united order organization. 'In the meantime, the taxpayers have to pay the bills. . 'Escaping Polygamy' Star: My Dad Hid My Mom's Cancer Medicine - Us Weekly . [Andrea] Moore-Emmett [author of 'God's Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Mormon and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18 Women Who Escaped'] contends that [in polygamy] incest, statutory rape, torture, physical abuse, forced marriages, and trafficking of girls is rampant. "With no other options available, more FLDS families will be faced with the difficult burden of caring for children suffering with fumarase deficiency. Isaac Wyler, a former FLDS member who was excommunicated from the church . A Kingston Family Primer. All went bareheaded and barefoot. 'Her body tried to miscarry many, many times.'. "With a well-thought-out plan," Hope After Polygamy explains, "she was successful; the judge granted her emancipation when she was 17 years old. 'They are totally helpless,' he says. Then he scooted away, smiling, aboard a plastic toy car, his feet smacking the sidewalk. 'So often when you have an uncle-niece, or half-brother-sister, you have a situation where abuse is going on,' Jorde says. They ought to be ashamed of such conduct, and the still fouler channel which flows from their practices; and it is not to be wondered at that they should envy those who so much better understand the social relations. The stage was set for the appearance of the rare disease when their 12th child, Martha Jessop, married her second cousin, John Yeates Barlow, in 1923, according to LDS genealogy data and Colorado City historian Ben Bistline. . Jeffs is following a long-established practice -- started by Smith 170 years ago -- of excommunicating those who do not strictly adhere to church leaders' commands. . Children of the latter variety, he says, 'can't crawl. Escaping polygamy and the Kingston clan: Whistleblower Mary Nelson on In fact, the leaders of the Co-op just seem to be getting richer and the poor get essentially ignored. I do not know what we would do if we had only one wife apiece. . Carolyn regularly worked at and tended . breeding really functional? "[44] Members claim they have been broadly and unfairly targeted by authorities for the negative actions of a small few. . . . . . "What was going on in my Utah pioneer family? "Of the Kingstons, Williams says: 'There is not much you can do about them. "Fumarase deficiency is caused by a lack of the fumarase enzyme, an essential component in a biological process called the Krebs cycle, which converts food into energy within each cell. Or was it true no one knew the answers, because they could not be known, because no one wanted to know? 'There are people that have married their nieces, people who have married their aunts,' he said. . . . Click to reveal . "'You don't want to jump to the conclusion and say all of these are the result of inbreeding,' he says. "While none of these can positively be linked to incest without DNA testing, geneticists say most of the conditions are exacerbated by incest. Kimball. . ", (Bruce, R. McConkie,'Mormon Doctrine,' 2nd ed., under "Plural Marriage" (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, Inc., 1966], p. 578) "Community historian Ben Bistline said most of the community's 8,000 residents are in two major families descended from a handful of founders who settled there in the 1930s. . Such a system was commenced by the founders of the Roman empire. The adoption of children among family members sometimes disguised sterility. Survivors of Utah's Kingston clan sue for a slew of crimes against "The few dissenters in the community say the serious genetic problems that are beginning to surface are an indication that the closed FLDS society could eventually collapse. Tarby asked them to bring the girl to him for an examination. The Latter Day Church of Christ,[1] is considered a Mormon fundamentalist denomination by some in the Latter Day Saint movement. . The groups, whose members believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, are offshoots of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. [21] Over the past 25 years, many members have become college-educated and live in middle-to-upper-middle-class homes throughout their communities. Doctrinally, members of the LDCJC try to adhere to the teachings of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. . "'The kids that I have seen have terrible seizure disorders and developmental delays,' says Dr. Aleck. [30] This practice lasted only a short time and was abandoned sometime before 1940. [37], The Kingston family and other members of the LDCC have faced two lawsuits, one in 2006[38] and another in 2022[39] accusing members and the organization as a whole of sexual abuses, including pedophilia and underaged marriages, within their membership. . . "John Ortell Kingston was the first Kingston to experiment with incest, marrying and bearing children with two half-sisters and two nieces, according to numerous ex-members of the clan. The Genetic Catastrophe That Has Sprung from Polygamy "Farm Roots of Incest: Marriages in the Kingston clan must be sanctioned by [the] current head of the church . . Over the past decades, the Kingston Group has maintained extreme secrecy while developing an extensive cooperative system, with wealth in at least 50 corporations in Utah and scattered across the West. [Mormon] [h]istorian B. H. Roberts, notes an eugenic attitude regarding polygamy: "'It was in the name of a divinely-ordered species of eugenics that Latter-day Saints accepted the revelation which included a plurality of wives. . . "Her book . Lesser known children hidden in families sympathetic to polygamists might remain ignorant of their genetic kinship. What Happened to 'Escaping Polygamy' Star Ava AKA - Distractify Initially, she tried to conceal her marital relationship. Lawsuit accuses polygamous Kingston Group of child marriage, rape Desert Tech Ownership Warning : r/longrange - reddit . Video unavailable This video. "Fumarase deficiency began to manifest in the community when three sets of Joseph Smith Jessop and Martha Moore Yeates' great-grandchildren married each other. Why is this? "'I had never seen a patient with it,' Tarby says. . . . "By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah. "Rather than polygamy being about religion, Moore-Emmett believes that many polygamous marriages are about sex and power. 100 years later, eugenics is a discredited science, yet some followers still believe. [32] He was arrested and pleaded "no contest" to the charge of child abuse and served seven months in jail. ", (Greg Burton, "When Incest Becomes a Religious Tenet: Practice sets 1,000-member Kingston clan apart from other Utah polygamous groups," in "The Salt Lake Tribune," 25 April 1999, at: http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy25.html And her ex-husband's parents, Merlin and Carolyn Kingston, were uncle and niece. "The clan's other numerous incestuous couplings among consenting adults . This is the equivalent of a religious rationalization for the practice of incest. [14] Some of their secrecy might be attributed to a fear of arrest for living in plural marriages, as had happened in 19591960 when being investigated by the Davis County Grand Jury, which some members claimed was organized by LDS Apostles Mark E. Peterson and Spencer W. [40] In 2009, the then-Attorney General of Utah, Mark Shurtleff, claimed that child marriages within polygamous societies in Utah, such as the Latter Day Church of Christ, had "effectively stopped". Indeed, regardless of facing crushing federal government opposition to polygamous inbreeding, true-blue Mormons remain convinced that you can't keep a good man of God down To them, polygamy will be coming back some day, with sizable numbers of the faithful flock confident that its eugenic genetics will return by order of Joseph's Jesus. We recall that Joseph Smith made no effort to implement the law of consecration while in Nauvoo (see D&C 105:34). [43] Responding to child marriage allegations in September 2022, the organization told The Guardian that "current policy prohibits plural marriage for members under 18" and "once an individual has made a decision on who to marry, members are encouraged to seek the blessing of their parents, family and/or church leaders, but to say that one individual chooses or heavily influences who will marry who is entirely inaccurate".