Zero Chance: Power of Love...Love of Power - Softcover

Williams, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438983964 ISBN 13: 9781438983967

Publisher: AuthorHouse, 2009

Synopsis

When religion and family turn on you, what is left? This is the amazing story of a young man willing to do whatever is necessary to maintain a relationship with his children. After growing up in a polygamist family and life-style, Jason Williams is given zero chance for salvation from the leaders of the FLDS. His wife and children are kidnapped from him and he is instructed to have nothing to do with them. Instead of giving in, read the true story of how Jason took on the FLDS leaders and saved his children.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ZERO CHANCE

Power of Love ... Love of PowerBy Jason Williams JM Williams Anthus Williams

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Jason Williams with JM and Anthus Williams
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4389-8396-7

Contents

Foreword by Lane Blackmore................................viiI. Dear Jason.............................................1II. The 'Crickers'........................................6III. The Williams Clan....................................15IV. The Little Kid with Thick Glasses.....................24V. Aunt Dread.............................................30VI. Civil War.............................................38VII. Suzy Q...............................................48VIII. Keep Sweet..........................................54IX. I Heart You...........................................61X. Two Sparrows...........................................69XI.. Frank and Earnest....................................79XII. Two for Rulon........................................85XIII. Bobby...............................................91XIV. Dixie Dreams.........................................100XV. Nightmare.............................................110XVI. Warren: No Peace.....................................121XVII. The Monsters We Defy................................128XVIII. The Puppet Master..................................138XIX. The Big 'D'..........................................146XX. Battle Lines..........................................153XXI. Kingman..............................................163XXII. My Boys.............................................172XXIII. Ten Million........................................180XXIV. Blackballed.........................................191XXV. The Light Clicks On..................................201XXVI. Yearning For Waco...................................213XXVII. The Moose is Loose.................................221Afterword by Suzanne Johnson..............................225

Chapter One

DEAR JASON

The cold January rain ran in rivulets down my windshield. Sitting in my car outside the Post Office, I stared down at the letter my wife had mailed to me after she kidnapped my two little boys. The darkness made it hard to read, but I needed answers. I knew I could trust no one in the community to give them to me. I was not just dealing with my wife Suzanne. My wife would never steal my children from me; she would know the things that might make me do. Tears of rage and frustration filled my eyes. I sobbed in the car, relieved it was raining. Now passersby could not see my grief. I knew if I made an angry demonstration, it would not help me see them any sooner. Suzanne had my boys; she held the power, for now.

I had to play this cool. Gather in my emotions. Act smart. A come-apart would ruin my relationship with my children. I would play this out. I would be patient, knowing this would not be a sprint. It was shaping up to be a drawn-out and grueling marathon. Glancing at the letter, I could hardly focus on the fragments of sentences. Choking back tears, I read again the note that changed my life forever.

I sat, helpless, stunned, wondering whether I would ever see those boys again. This was not like my wife. Suzanne wouldn't use phrases like "him who holds the keys." Or "I have put myself in the Prophet's hands." She wouldn't even write "I wish you the best." Instead, two weeks ago, she had written "I [??]? you, baby." And now here she was using lines out of the sixteenth century? Whoever was behind this, it was not my wife.

My wife did not steal those boys. It was the religious leaders of the community I was once part of who were screwing with my family. I had to act fast, or Kyle and Jay would disappear. This sect had refuges in Salt Lake City and Canada. I had heard of children disappearing into some other family and of fathers despairing of ever finding them again. I had to stop this.

That church had grown arrogant and greedy. They were used to people giving up and giving in, because they made life just damn hard for them. But I was just as stubborn as they were. This time they had broken the glasses of a kid who wasn't afraid of bullies.

But I was caught in a dilemma. How could I challenge what I believed? What did I believe? I believed in the FLDS church, and I had since I was a kid, which was what made my belief possible. I don't think an adult can convert to the FLDS.

That's why they wanted my kids, while they were young, so they could start the process, just like they started it on me when I was young. I grew up believing entirely in what the "Prophet" said. Then I was forced to watch the maliciousness of my benevolent church, and I realized the incompatibility.

Most of my family expected me to obey. My father had been through the same thing with his wife, and twelve of his children, but his protests were like a whimper in a hurricane. They failed. He lost his kids, and he was finally, sadly, reduced to accepting it. I knew that I was going to try to talk Suzanne into coming back. I was going to try to find my children, peaceably. But, failing that, I was determined to start a cyclone of my own.

My dad shared empathy for my situation, but he wasn't likely to come to my aid. There were a couple brothers who were long on support but short on means. I had a lot of poor relatives who would lend a sympathetic ear, but that was it.

Many members of my family were linked to the church in various ways, and the FLDS is very good at convincing people that salvation sometimes depends on betraying the ones you love most. Even now, there were some members of my family trying to convince me that my own salvation would involve sacrificing my will and abandoning my sons.

I knew my own mother, for example, would resent anything I did in the way of protest or retaliation. Her attitude was that I should meekly submit. The "Prophet" was never wrong. It was this kind of attitude that gave the church its formidable power.

My parents' position made my predicament difficult, because the concept of the infallible "Prophet" went back a hundred and seventy years. Any objections to the words of the "Prophet," or even the title "Prophet" had its consequences. I knew any protest at this point would bring the full brunt of Rulon Jeffs power, money, and influence right at me, and any friend or associate who stood by me. I had seen it before, and I had no illusions about what this man could do. Still, no one was going to push me around.

This man wielded a frightening power in the minds of the people. The peculiar belief held by this church is that all women and children belong to the "Prophet." He could assign them to men he favors, and he could reassign them to men he favors more. He could take the wife away from the husband and "give" her to someone else. He could take the man's children, and shuffle them around, like playing cards. Pimps dream of this kind of power.

Chapter Two

THE 'CRICKERS'

The "Prophet" was a powerful figure in the Short Creek community. The people living there have been suspicious of the outside world. You cannot change a century and a half of isolation and fear very easily, but that was what I faced. It may not seem like much of a foe to those who are unfamiliar with the workings of the FLDS, but it is no easy thing to challenge generations of cultural indoctrination.

This cultural indoctrination started in the early 1800s, when the Mormon Church was founded. They endured a good deal of prejudice from their neighbors, and ultimately, under Brigham Young, they gathered their belongings and trekked across the plains into Utah, which at the time was still being contested militarily as part of Mexico.

The old-school Mormons were a lot like the FLDS today. They practiced polygamy and communal living, and believed in a "one man doctrine" which held that Brigham Young was a prophet, seer, and revelator, the same way that Warren Jeff s is viewed as the "Prophet" by the FLDS today. In both cases, it is a bit of a faulty appellation, since modern prophets seldom, if ever, prophesy.

The Mormons adhered to their biblical social practices for some time, despite federal attempts to quell that type of cohabitation. In the 1880s, many followers of the LDS faith were jailed because the Edmunds Tucker Act made polygamy illegal. Church members and property were severely impacted by the aggressive enforcement. Then finally, in 1890, the LDS church formally renounced polygamy in a bid to achieve statehood. Polygamy became a felony in both Utah and Arizona. Even though the Edmunds Tucker Act was eventually repealed, it didn't affect these two states because of specific anti-polygamy language in their Constitutions.

There were a lot of sects who splintered away from the Mormon Church so they could still practice polygamy and communism. In the 1930s, one such group established Short Creek and billed it as a safe refuge for covenant people. There the "true" Mormons flourished in the desert, away from any competing ideology and the watchful eyes of the government. For a while it remained a ward of the LDS church, but eventually they were excommunicated en masse for refusing to sign an oath declaring the LDS Church President a prophet. Now the LDS church excommunicates polygamists as a matter of course.

Polygamists have always been something of an embarrassment to mainstream Mormons, because people, unaware of the intricacies of history, tend to equate the two, even though it is a matter of public record that Mormons have been strictly monogamous for over a century.

Because of the embarrassment though, there were anti-polygamy crusades that took place on several occasions, including a small state raid in 1935 and an FBI raid in 1944. The raids made the Short Creek inhabitants even more close-mouthed and isolationist than before.

The largest raid occurred in 1953, when Arizona's Governor Howard Pyle launched a sting into Short Creek, arrested nearly every adult male inhabitant, transported the women to hospice in the southern half of the state, and actively sought adoption for the minor children. My dad was there, very young at the time, and had to experience being put up to auction with his mother and siblings in a Phoenix Greyhound lobby and sold-literally, sold for the substantial welfare check, with people checking his teeth and testing his musculature like a miniature slave child.

After the men were released on plea bargain, they returned to deserted homes and streets, a community entirely emptied of its inhabitants. It took two years of legal battles at an immense cost, but at last, every person was returned to the community. Governor Pyle suffered intense scorn for the crusade and eventually lost his bid for re-election because of it. The resultant paranoia and general distrust of outsiders in the Short Creek area pushed the group further into the shadows of the Tumurru Mountain Range. They changed the name of the town from Short Creek to the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

Because of these raids, a rumor had circulated that the place was due for an anti-polygamy raid every time the last two digits of the year could be added to make the number eight. There had already been one in '35, '44, and '53, and we were due for another one in another nine years. However, 1962 came and went, as did 1971 and 1980, so at last the rumor died down. Interestingly enough, the state of Texas raided the Yearning for Zion compound in El Dorado in the year 2008.

At the time the FLDS church was not really a church-it was just considered to be a group of informal leaders who met in one another's basements to argue theology. It was never organized into a legal entity until 1987, when certain civil disputes forced the "Prophet" Rulon Jeff s to formally found the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

During the same period, a business trust, the United Eff ort Plan (UEP), was founded. It was an instrument of Mormon communism, a corporation that held the property of all the residents of the Short Creek area. The trust was controlled by the FLDS church, which meant that the "Prophet" had the right to dictate who was allowed to dwell upon it. The UEP caused me a wide variety of problems over the course of my life. Sometimes I would assert that UEP was really just an acronym for the Ultimate Evil Powers.

I was born into this area and grew up thinking most of the peculiarities had come directly from God. That sort of thing was taught to me since the day I was born. Many people I meet wonder how I could accept some of the ludicrous conditions and styles. Many who read this book will probably consider me to be among the dumbest of fools. Our problem was that we were only aware of how we fit into our narrow existence. The reason why it works is because the believer adapts to an idealistic quality of being childlike.

The secret to a cult is to capitalize on this -the follower's ability to believe whatever you tell them, and then you add a patriotic or religious fervor that declares an unquestioning belief is an ideal to strive for. It is hard to break away from a cult like the FLDS because it actively works to keep you in the mental state of a child. There are people in that area who go their entire lives without ever evolving beyond the vulnerable psyche of an eight-year-old.

Really, for the first twelve or so years in that church a child has no reason to doubt what is taught. We couldn't judge or weigh the evidence because we had no standards of meter against which to compare them. As I got older, and more integrated with the rest of the world, I started to wonder about the nature of the religion I was part of. Stephen Colbert said in his book that the secret to figuring out whether or not you're a member of a cult is simple: if you're wondering if you're in a cult, the answer is yes. For me, the answer was most certainly a yes, loud and resounding.

The other phenomenon was the evolving nature of the men who led-when I was a child the FLDS was nowhere near as crazed as it is today. The path to insanity is noted more clearly from a distance than in the midst of it.

The FLDS congregation is a group of very frightened people. Warren Jeff s, and those who came before him, have done their best to capitalize on that fear. There were all manner of terrors to navigate when these leaders spoke-the fear of hell, of the apocalypse, of anti-polygamy law enforcement, of losing one's family and home, of corruption and apostasy, of the influence of Gentiles. The Jeff s regime fed off this fear until they successfully transitioned the group away from a council of leaders and toward a one-man demigod. As fate would have it, I was among the first people to publicly gouge a hole in the Jeff s narrative, and for that, they tried their best to run me down, like an asphalt roller in pursuit of a field mouse. I was expected to forever be a fossil.

Thankfully that battle didn't come until I was more prepared to fight it. For the first part of my life I was fairly well-integrated into the FLDS society, and I didn't realize how odd it was. First, the look: if we were to be God's people, apparently, we were supposed to look very, very strange. We had a look that was a hundred and fifty years old, so that it could match a lifestyle the same age.

The women in the community wore nineteenth century prairie dresses, heavy hiker boots, and opaque hose. When I was younger the dresses were allowed some variety-calicos with flowers and embroidery for example, or pastel colors, or a ribbon or some other piece of fl air. In the early days of Mormonism, a pioneer named Eliza Snow had developed a fl owing pantsuit for modest women to wear-however; it never really caught on with the 1870s fashion divas. Here in Short Creek, the thing was not formally banned, but was considered far too modern wear for a church that was trying its hardest to resist the passage of time.

After the church fell into Warren Jeffs's hands, he became the personal style icon as well as the "Prophet." Pants for women were banned. He demanded the mid-calf-length dresses, outlawed embroidery and required the dresses to be of sturdy fabric in one solid color, such as blue or brown or a dull pink. In many cases the girls were expected to wear blue jeans underneath their weighty dresses. To top it off , he outlawed variations on hairstyles, so that the French roll Victorian pompadour became an obligation for the faithful.

The men were a little luckier in their required garb, in that they could sometimes blend in with people in other areas, especially in the winter, when longer clothing was more common. They were obligated to wear nondescript blue jeans in a straight cut with a long-sleeved flannel shirt. This was intended to cover the full body underwear that was handed out as pseudo sacred temple raiment and became mandatory undergarments for every member of the FLDS church, including small infants.

Twenty years ago or more, the Short Creek polygamists affectionately referred to Salt Lake City polygamists as Lakers; they were, in turn, labeled Crickers. Ever since then, the people of the Short Creek area have been known by the colloquial term, Crickers, or, if not a current follower, ex-Crickers. The name Cricker has since been adopted as a derogatory epithet among locals, along with the term plig, short for polygamist. In short, as of the writing of this book, I am an ex-Cricker plig kid.

In the FLDS, marrying more than one woman is considered a commandment, one which the highest degree of glory in heaven hangs upon. Therefore, whoever controls the assignment of women decides which follower is a candidate for salvation. That's a lot of power in a mortal hand, and so it became essential to kiss up to the "Prophet" in order to get as many wives as possible.

Warren Jeff s always taught that a man had to have at least three wives to get to heaven, and the more wives a man has, the closer he is to heaven. Warren Jeff s himself, by the time he was arrested, had over 70 wives. This meant that for every wife he had beyond the required three, he was preventing someone else from being saved. As far as I was concerned this meant that he wasn't being charitable, even by his own ridiculous standards, let alone the standards of the poor women who were forced to be shackled up to him.

And they were certainly forced into their marriages. The idea of placement marriage meant that the "Prophet" could arrange a union between a husband and wife, who didn't meet one another until a few days before the wedding, or in many cases, moments before the ceremony. It is a shotgun wedding in that the bride-to-be is brought up to fear that objecting to the marriage meant inviting a curse from God, because God was guiding every action the "Prophet" took.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ZERO CHANCEby Jason Williams JM Williams Anthus Williams Copyright © 2009 by Jason Williams with JM and Anthus Williams. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438983964
• ISBN 13: 9781438983967
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240