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AND SO THE LINES ARE DRAWN, AND THE LOSERS HAVE ALREADY BEEN DESIGNATED. Anyone who has any other idea other than the one that is deigned by the Obsolete Press is, quite frankly, pretty much a useless asterisk on an unread page of a book that will never be published.
So, like Rhett Butler, El Gringo Viejo joins the fight that has already been lost. While the aggrieved have been busy worrying only about themselves, the fallout of their activity and demands is already gathering up for a new and even more damaging battle. El Gringo Viejo is a bit resentful because he has never lifted his hand against any homosexual. He has never burdened an homosexual with lectures....and his thoughts about the subject have been a closed book.
We have had association on an amicable basis with perhaps nine such persons who were males. Eight of them died before the age of 50. The last one has not been heard from for several years. Another, who was from an extremely high-born, aristocratic and wealthy colonial family in South Texas, took a pistol one day and blew his "friend's" brain out, all over a wall, and went to Mexico, where he has remained in a place that pertains to some extended family members....a very pleasant and scenic and interesting place. We have heard nought from or about him for forty years now.
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As the Obama National Socialised Medicine initiative makes the consumers feel better because they know the millionaires and billionaires will finally be forced to pay their fair share and pay for everyone else's free medical services....things do not really turn out the way they sound before we vote for the bill and then begin to read what is inside of it. Mad Hatter, anyone?
Should equivilancy of homosexual unions be established with marriage as it was known, then Obamacare's Free Medical will require that insurance companies provide "free" coverage for pre-existing conditions. Such a thing is not actually "insurance" but becomes, obviously, a procedure by with the bulk of other insurers pay the medical bills of another member of the pool who was not measured by the same yardstick in terms of risk.
Once again...such a thing is not insurance...it is socialised medicine. Socialised medicine is a programme that is guaranteed to destroy the economy of every country that adopts the model, and it also diminishes the quality and quantity of service. Also, being free, it happens to be the most costly form of medical service provision, period. It is a system designed to put Nancy Pelosi in a private hospital for her face lifts...in a building with no name, while the rest of us to to the Bill and Hillary Free Medical Community Health Centre and Veterinary Emergency Intake Facility. (Closed until further notice - Republican sequestration at fault)
This is not a real problem or THE real problem, perhaps. There are very few homosexuals. Only about half of them are males, and so the HIV problem is somewhat contained in a small universe. There is another cohort, of course, which is the "urban population" that uses hypodermic injections of battery acid, Fabuloso, heroin, methamphetines, or whatrever, etc. For better or worse, those folks do not seem to top out at the actuarial Max-point. Eighty five candles are not something they are going to have to count....with luck they make it to 35 candles. We pray for the addicted babies they bring forth.
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Everything stated here is the truth. It will cause discomfort, and it will raise rancour. But the words of El Gringo Viejo have not been chosen rashly. Every effort has been made to be deferential to those of us who have friends, family members, etc. with different opinions and different orientations. The issue has essentially destroyed the Episcopal Church in America. And, indirectly, it may well have much greater cultural effect in days not far distant.
The rightwingers and traditionalists have a bit of weight to their arguments...but their milk is watery. Were it whiskey, someone came in last night, poured out half of the contents of the bottles, replaced those contents with water, and made off with the takings.
What follows is literary fiction....based on true experiences, stories told from the public record, actual observations, and information derived from absolutely unimpeachable sources. The story is an assembly of true events, told in such a way that none of the informants will need to be concerned about being "visited" sometime down the road.
NOW, HERE IS WHY THIS IS A REALLY BIG DEAL:
This is not something for the future....it is not a "what if"....It is something that is happening now, and it has nothing to do with homosexuals except in the most removed and indirect way. During these moments while El Gringo Viejo clatters on his keyboard, there is a phenomena occurring, especially in the American West, of people who call themselves Mormons who are living "scripturally".
To be very certain, these people are premeditated, conspiratorial charlatans....similar to and perhaps inter-related with the Irish Travellers....shakedown artists and thieves and extortionists deluxe. Like the Irish Travellers.... (''Hey mister! I notice you have a pretty beat up drive-way. I'm coming from a job I just finished about 9 blocks over, and I was just driving by. I have enough left over to get you started to-day. for a thousand bucks I can make this new. Yeah, give me 500 to-day and you can pay me the rest to-morrow. I'll start now, and then get the rest of the stuff, And, I'll leave the truck here overnight so you'll know I'm comin' back. My brother and one of our men, they're stayin' over at the Oasis Motel right over there, so I can walk to a hot shower. Ha..ha ....right now/ Okay, let me get started...thanks for the pre-payment.)
The Irish Travellers are cold-blooded thieves. They have a matrix of law firms throughout the United States upon whom they can call for bail intervention....should something go awry. Some OROGs might remember a white girl in a K-Mart parking lot, just a-whailing her 5 year old daughter with HARD blows to the neck, shoulders, and head. A security guard witnessed the scene and knew the girl had gone on Candid Camera in the parking lot. He detained her for the police...the police reviewed the film...and promptly arrested the girl for felony battery of a child. Within three hours, in the town of concern...somewhere in the Mid-West...an attorney from the most prestigious law firm in town came and made bail, AND obtained the right to unite for the mother. Bail was posted....and the girl and her daughter were never seen again. Her SUV was found, minus the plates...and it turned out that every possible vehicle identification number had been removed long before. After some effort, the police did determine that the vehicle had been stolen in California and "scrubbed". It turned out that the girl was a highly trained jewellery thief and that the little girl....possibly her own daughter....had been trained to be a distractor as well as a "harvester" of gold and diamond jewelry left to the busy hands of a "cutie-pie" little girl.
Now, the people to whom I will refer are worse than the Irish Travellers, and as stated before the two groups might or might not be inter-related. These people are watching very carefully the progress of the efforts to forge a legal redefinition of legal marriage. What is an institution derived from the concepts of Orthodox Sacraments, once it is secularised, becomes a Wonderland that only Alice can tell us about right now.
These people, found principally in the American West, form patriarchal pods of "committed" people. They establish what they call a family community. It is centred around one man, who is usually the oldest person in the family community. He has a "First Wife" (also known as"Queen" or "Lead Wife"). Moving away from the centre, as if by planetary assignment, are the other wives who have ranking based upon their seniority. These more common wives serve at the direction of the "First Wife". These groupings might have as few as four and as many as 20 "regular" wives to be regulated and assigned the various necessary tasks to keep the community operative (cooking, cleaning, laundry, schooling, intensive baby care, etc.). Upon that matrix, there are concubines who are brought on as these people move around...usually runaways....usually at the end of whatever rope they were coming to which the end was arriving.
If the OROG is having a pit stop at the Iron Skillet and he asks the guy to pass over the Tabasco Sauce on the counter, he might notice that in the two booths closest to the counter eating area there are three young women, about the same age, riding herd over 10 or 11 children, all toe-heads, all between the ages of late diapers to earnestly colouring the colouring sheet the waitress brought.
"It's good to see so many children who are well behaved." the OROG comments to the man.
" Yes, the girls do a good job," the man agrees.
Food is served, eating ensues, and the time come for departure of the "community" members. The OROG asks, "Are you all from around here or on the road like me?"
"It's a little of both. We're doing some outreach at one of the Reservations. So we'll be camping and meeting and then back in this area in a couple of weeks."
"Church work? Social mission?"
"Yes. We're Mormons. (one could sense that something was not quite true about that statement) We've had a long relationship with the Utes and Shoshone nations. At this point they are giving us more than we give them, I'm afraid," the man smiles personably. He points generally in the direction of those Reservations.
The women are all dressed in blue denim calf-length straight skirts, yellow pull-overs with a happy face, front and back. The children...the ones walking...all have khaki bermudas, white socks, and identical tennis shoes. They are wearing white T-shirts, also with happy faces, front and back. A convention scale last rest-room stop is executed and the people leave, smiling and waving, sad-eyed, but smiling and waving at the nice man at the counter....the OROG. He prepares his own exit, leaving a 10 dollar bill with the charge ticket and motioning to the waitress to cover the 7,96 charge...so as to avoid the long line at pay-out.
The waitress, however, motions for him to wait. Perhaps the management does not permit her to leave her station. She comes over walking fast and "shuffling" as if to imitate running, "Sorry"
"No, I thought I would just avoid the wait and let you pay me out,"
"No, it's not that. Did that man ask you for any money?" and she nose pointed to the departing people.
"No, not at all. Why do you ask?" the OROG is puzzled.
"Hang on, just one second". She went and payed out the bill, and brought the change. The OROG refused it, "OH! Thanks...I wish there were more like you. The thing is those people have been warned not to solicit out in the truck parking area."
"Soliciting?"
"Yes, yes, and yes. They've been warned repeatedly and last night the manager finally told them the next time we find them back there we are going to call the police. The solicit everything. The "ladies" ..," she made the famous quote gesture,"...they essentially are hustling. We might have as many as 300 trucks out there, so it's like a small city. While the girl is doing her business, the story is that the man and other of the girls are stripping anything of value from the trucks...chrome lug nuts, chrome bumpers, any exposed freight on flat-beds that they can carry. They're really fast, and they figure the angles on the cameras and everything. The thing is they are the only ones who are always around when the pilfering is going on. It adds up. The losses really add up. We think they've even panhandled and pilfered the regular auto area...there are 300 spaces out there as well, and they use the children for a distraction. The managers are putting in a bigger coverage system for the parking lot cameras. These people are like locusts."
"They told me...well, HE told me they were working with the Utes and Shoshone Reservations," the OROG responds with incredulity.
"Oh, yeah? Look out there." the waitress once again pointed with her nose. "Out there" was the little caravan of three, one or two year old minivans loaded with young women and lots of children, and just one toe-headed man, who looked strangely like all the children. They were turning onto the highway....but in a direction opposite to the location of the Reservations.
"But...they're going the wrong way," declared the OROG.
"That's a big 10 - 4..."
"Well, I really do thank you for the information".
About two months later, the OROG is flicking through the vast wasteland and finally settles on an article on AandE, or Discover, or National Geographic, or History.....one of those, and it is about a large extended family living in Phoenix. Thinking that it was another banal reality show (Swapping Grandmas or whatever), he stopped dead in his remote. He saw The Man.....the "Mormon"....with several women, some of whom he could recognise. And other women.....four, five, six, seven, eight, nine....ten younger women around table.
The narrative among the people in the scene, and then from the off-screen narrator, was about these people who say that they are the "True Mormons"....not "frauds" like the LDS. It is a patriarchy and involves a total of 24 people....including a hierarchy of wives, and children who are all fathered by the same man.
All the women are on complete public assistance. Some are receiving public assistance of the same kind from multiple sources. They are working an ingenious "carousel" of being the home when everyone else is absent so that she can show that she has been abandoned and has no way to feed or care for her three children.
There are three houses within two blocks, one from the other. There is a late-model Winnebago at a nicer trailer park about a mile away where the Patriarch stays. The total take, including food stamps, housing assistance, medicaid eligibility, and other "benefits"....plus the organised pilfering, shoplifting, and "finding" things of value...while at the same time stripping the rental houses...fancy rental houses....of anything that could be pawned or scrapped comes up to well over 450,000/yr USD, in pilfering cash, stamps, and welfare payments.
There is a scene towards the end of the program in which "The Emergency" is announced. That means that everyone must pack up, load up, and head for the hills. That which might incriminate and/or identify routes of flight and destinations is taken first, then anything of pawnable value, and of course, cash money. All vehicles that will be used are to leave in different directions and meet up in such and such place on such and such time and date. Of the six vehicles they have, only four will be used, and the others will be vandalised and rendered valueless....they are stolen. Within 30 minutes, all and everything are gone.
Apparently neighbours have called Child Protective Services and/or the constabulary. Children are not in school, you know. They are under discipline....but there is no pedagogy. No home-schooling, no visiting teachers. Some stupid neighbour women shouted at some of the second level wives that "You people are going to get yours to-morrow!! We know what you're up to!!"
And off they went into the darkness. Within 30 minutes, all gone. Gone...Poof. A well practised drill had been put into place and successfully executed one more time.
But soon, there will be fewer problems. The Patriarchal Family Community with one patriarch, with 20 wives and 50 unsupportable children will be found to be just another form of "marriage".....and the AFDC, food stamps, disabilities, handicapped children's SSI, Medicaid, rent subsidies from the housing authority, etc. etc. etc. all become mandatory, because these people are all married. Little difference will it make that they call themselves "Mormons" falsely. They practise no form of Christianity or any other denomination or Religion as such was understood, say in 1960. It will soon cease being a weird-world cablevision special report with the children's faces and the under-aged "wives" faces blurred out.
BUT PLEASE BE AWARE. AS THE KEYSTONE OF THE CONCEPT OF MARRIAGE AS A SACRAMENT IS WIGGLED OUT OF PLACE BY THE SELF-ABSORBED 666 PEOPLE, OTHER 666 PEOPLE WILL RUSH TO THE MARGINS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOSIS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OBLIGATORY ACCEPTANCE AND THE FREE MONEY. THESE PEOPLE ABOVE DESCRIBED ALREADY NUMBER ALMOST 10,000 ''PATRIARCHAL COMMUNITIES''.
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David Larson, writing in Spectrum Magazine, a journal of religious, philosophical, and cultural matter, observed as follows in 2008 of the events surrounding the Yearning for Zion pseudo-Mormon group in West Texas who finally refined the above scenario into an industrial grade legal welfare rip-off......IN 2007!!!! TO WIT:
I might have finally figured out why I experienced such mixed feelings while watching on television the authorities take into protective custody 416 or so children of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who lived on the Yearning for Zion ranch in west Texas. Once again, we may have done more harm than good by treating a chronic problem as though it were an acute crisis.
Not everyone agrees that polygamy is a problem. University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Gary S. Benson commented on this issue in 2006. In the United States and similar nations, he wrote:
Women choose their partners, and refuse to marry men who [sic] they do not want to marry, regardless of their parents' feelings or the ardour of suitors. In this world, a woman would not have to enter into a polygamist household if she would not want to. Would-be polygamist men would have to persuade second or third wives that it is worth it, because of their wealth, good looks, kindness, or in other ways. If she is willing to become an additional wife, why should laws prevent that?
Until sometime last week, I agreed with such thinking. But I began to change my mind as I watched what struck me as the languid forms, vacant stares and excessively measured words of some of the women from Yearning for Zion. The more I considered these scenes, the more I developed a different line of thought.
In brief, here it is: (1) polygamy tends toward extreme patriarchy; (2) extreme patriarchy tends toward tyranny against women; and (3) tyranny against women tends toward the physical and sexual abuse of children. The idea is that these tendencies are not perplexing happenstances; they are built into the very dynamics of polygamous unions.
The more wives a man has the less power they have. A home with, let’s say, six wives and twenty-four children, is likely to function more like a monarchy than a democracy in order to prevent unworkable chaos. Even an oligarchy is likely to need a very strong “Enforcer,” and almost always this will be the man. Polygamy is almost impossible without extreme patriarchy.
But this is only one part of the equation. Another is that husbands and wives in monogamous unions often foster more desirable behavior in their spouses by providing all kinds of positive and negative inducements. But a patriarch in a polygamous union rarely has to cope with such frustrating complexities. If one wife is upset about something, instead trying to understand and correct what is troubling her, he can easily turn to another. This robs all the wives of much power. They would do well to join forces and engage in collective bargaining; but apparently this rarely happens. Extreme patriarchy easily becomes tyranny against women.
Many say that polygamous households are especially dangerous places for children. Although their mothers appear to take excellent care of them when they are young, their vulnerability often spikes once the girls become sexual targets and the boys sexual threats. Outsiders often complain that the women do not provide their pubescent children adequate protection. But their feelings of helplessness are not entirely misplaced. They actually possess very little power, and this is why the abuse of their children is unsurprising. This is one of the inherent dynamics of polygamy.
We know that women do not always enter polygamous marriages as adults who exercise free, informed, and mentally competent consent. But my growing objection to polygamy goes deeper than this. It is that the inherent dynamics of polygamous unions make them tend toward tyranny against women and the abuse of children, even when this is not intended. We can count on such things happening whenever the power of people cannot be challenged and checked. Even the most admirable polygamous unions allow men too much uncontrolled power. This is the big danger.
In view of considerations such as these, I have come to disagree with positions like Gary S. Benson’s. Laws and other public policies that discourage the practice of polygamy without causing more harm than good are necessary. By laws I mean ones like those in Texas that do not legally recognize polygamous unions and deny marriage licenses to women who are less than eighteen years old, or sixteen with formal parental consent. Men and women who are convicted of violating these should receive the maximum penalties.
By other public policies I mean things such as zoning decisions, building permits, property tax codes, required school attendance, health and safety laws, welfare rules, and the omnipresence of state and federal officers of the law. It probably should not be the goal of such measures swiftly to eradicate polygamy but over time to make it too expensive in every way to practice.
For more than one hundred years, those of us who live in the United States have swung between marshalling excessive coercive power against those who form polygamous unions and a malign neglect that allows this chronic problem to worsen until it explodes in an acute crisis. We need stronger, steadier, and subtler approaches, ones that maintain constant and uncomfortable pressure on polygamists without requiring the women and children to suffer more than they already do.
It is difficult to imagine that the authorities in Texas had no idea that those at Yearning for Zion had long been breaking the law by practicing polygamy and allowing statutory rape, partly because there are only a few thousand people in the entire county. We also know that the construction projects at Yearning for Zion did not always conform to the pertinent requirements, especially sanitation and environmental protection mandates. But the authorities did very little to enforce the relevant laws and public policies. Instead, at long last, they allowed an unidentified “reporter” of physical and sexual abuse to trigger an acute crisis. The result is that we now observe hundreds of women and children tearfully moving back and forth between protective custody and the ranch.
But we rarely see the men. Why should we be surprised?
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Finally, homosexuals who really want a solution to their desire for a union should consult a good attorney, form an interlocular contract assigning what is community property and what is property apart, and assigning familiar authority, for hospitalisation, for instance, and other such matters...joint banking, etc. The Interlocular Contract of Agreement would be entered with the County Clerk (in Texas) and/or with the District Court Clerk. It would have the same points of obligation and agreement that might be found in any well-constructed Will and Testament.
El Gringo Viejo
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