By Sean Aaron Cruz
American home-grown
religious extremism isn’t always about Muslims and jihad, and the violence the extremists inflict on their victims
does not always involve bombs, bullets or bloody knives.
What they do have in common
is a slavish belief that they are answering to a call higher than what either
civil or moral authority allows, utterly beyond mortal law.
They share this core
conviction that they are doing what The Man Upstairs (aka God, Allah, Joseph
Smith, and by other names) wants them to do.
And there is nothing quite
so satisfying as getting over on someone who has insulted one’s Big Religious
Deal and whom one doesn’t like personally.
My baby girl Allie (Alexis) Cruz made these five drawings one
day in August 1995, when she was 7 years old and just 6 months before she
disappeared into Utah in a
Mormon shunning/kidnapping along with my other children: Natalia, Tyler and
Aaron.
I found them just this morning in a box that I haven't opened in
a long, long time.
My mom and I would often watch Allie draw and color and create
actual stories while we talked at the kitchen table in my three-generational
household. All we had to do was supply the paper and assorted supplies, and
Allie would sing and tell us her stories while she worked, often for hours at a
stretch.
Each of these images corresponds to the story she wound out for
my mom and I, inventing characters and conversations, talking and singing all
the while she colored and drew, and she made these five pictures in a single sitting.
Allie especially loved to draw horsies, and her scenes and
stories were always clever and lively, full of sunshine and happiness, and more horsies….
Our home was our castle, and it was a place where she and her
horsies were safe, while the dramas surrounding her mother’s marriages and
divorces took place….
Allie began exhibiting this talent, this creative impulse that
had to be expressed, when she was four, and I have those drawings also, to be
published on another day, but this is her book of five pictures, made on our
kitchen table that day in August, just about twenty years ago.
While my mom and I were watching Allie make these very drawings,
Mormons in three states were planning the abduction, intent on separating my
children from me.
I had told them, these members of the Battle Ground and La
Center, Washington LDS wards, years before, that I wanted their church
influence out of my family, and that I did not like what they were teaching my
children.
But my ex wanted to put these Mormons in charge of educating our
children, and they were determined to take them and keep them forever, hidden
in Utah.
These Mormons felt that I had insulted their big white church
(they all carry that persecution complex), and maybe I had, you be the judge.
I had told them that they were like the Borg, if the Borg were
all white and ignorant; that the Book of Mormon was full of nonsense; that
their baptism for the dead rituals was just so much busy work; that there never
were any golden plates, and I’m pretty sure that we disagreed over some other
fine points of doctrine and plain common sense, especially that Kory Wright
character in Vancouver, who was the architect of the kidnapping, using his
leadership position in all three states.
He’s a Big Deal in the Mormon Church, an executive with a Mormon
debt collection company, Columbia Ultimate, based in Vancouver, Washington, with lots of Big Church Embarrassment
potential.
So there was Kory and Chris Wright, the principle Mormon jihadists, and in Battle Ground there was also Connie and Barry Dunford and the Mormon bishop Donald Taylor. The group of Mormons organizing the kidnapping/shunning came to include
church leaders in Hillsboro, Oregon, also,
but I would not learn that until after the fact.
Later, I learned that Mormon Relief Society President Evelyn Taylor and Bishop David Holiday organized the "taking, keeping, and enticing" my children from Hillsboro, Oregon, a Class B felony good for up to five years in prison.
So they made their own plans for my children, while Allie made
these drawings for my mom and I, and my other kids played out in the yard. I was my mom’s sole
caregiver at the time. She had been medically fragile for many years.
Once my children were sequestered in Utah, being moved from
place to place, Mormon households and motel rooms, the drawing ended, as did
every other part of normal life for all of us, my children, my mom and myself.
Allie’s creative spark was snuffed out, Aaron fell into suicidal despondency.
The Mormon Wall went up, my kids hidden behind deserts and
mountains, the Wall protecting all of those involved in the abduction from
public scrutiny and legal consequences.
The Mormons had and have their victory, permanently severing my
family.
My mom died four years later without seeing or hearing from her
grandchildren again, and my son Aaron is dead, all in their service to the LDS White Man in Charge. God‘s favorite hangout and Number One
Confidant lives in Salt
Lake City, you see.
A cheap price to pay, in the eyes of a religious extremist.
No blood, bullets or bombs…it’s as if nothing happened at all….
Nothing at all….
Nothing happened at all….
Now, twenty years later, I can photograph the life we had
together, expressed in Allie’s drawings
and stories in high-definition color and post them on the web, and there is
nothing the Mormons who kidnapped my children can do about it.
I will be my children’s father forever, and I want to make that
clear to everyone who had a piece of this action.
You are in it forever too.
And I am coming for you....
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