The Wisdom and the Moral Authority

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

“Please tell Sean that I also wish him the best. I have also followed his career and believe his personal experience has given him the wisdom and the moral authority necessary to make a real difference in making Oregon safer for our children.” –Judge Jim Fun, Washington County Circuit Court, January 24, 2007

I received this message from Judge Fun’s judicial assistant. He was writing in regard to the work I had done on the issue of child abduction since my four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon kidnapping in 1996. Each year, more than 200,000 U.S. children are abducted by their own parents, family members or persons known to the family, as in church-sponsored abductions.

Judge Fun knew the issue and my family’s case very well. In 1997, he had been the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted the 1st degree Custodial Interference case against my former wife, which came to trial nearly a year and a half after my kids had disappeared, and who were still being held incommunicado in Utah. He had noticed during jury selection that the defense referred to a Washington County LDS church roster, and that there were a number of Mormons on the jury. You know how that turned out. The Mormons stick together like the Borg. That includes both inside and outside the courtroom.

But Judge Fun was writing about what I had done since then, with that experience and with that moral authority:

The first and most important thing I accomplished was to stay alive, to survive.

I’m a writer and a blogger, so I wrote and I blogged, posting a couple of hundred pieces over the years. I had alerted and informed Senator Avel Gordly about the issue long before she hired me to serve as her legislative staff in 2003. That year, I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Joint Ways and Means Public Safety Subcommittee, and Senate President Peter Courtney appointed the Senate President’s Interim Task Force on Parental and Family Abduction to examine the issue and report its findings to the 2005 legislature.

I testified before the Task Force in 2004, describing how both the family law and criminal law systems and an order for joint custody had failed to protect my children and my family. The fact is these systems fail in non-stranger abduction cases far more often than they succeed, which explains the high numbers.

The Task Force found that the experience of abduction by any person is harmful to the child, and as abusive as any other form of child abuse.

In 2005, Senator Gordly assigned me to lead the workgroup on her landmark Senate Bill 1041. In that legislative session, I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Rules Committee and before the House State and Federal Affairs Committee as we moved SB 1041 through the building.

The bill went through ten major rewrites on its way to passage on a dramatic, unanimous House vote on the last day of the 2005 legislative session. It immediately became known as Aaron’s Law, in memory of my late son Aaron Cruz, who had died in Payson, Utah, earlier that year, a direct consequence of his abduction.

With Aaron’s Law, Oregon became the first state in the nation where child abduction creates a civil cause of action, providing kidnapping victims with new tools to see justice served, and real deterrents to abducting a child in the first place.

I’ve written extensively about the particulars of Aaron’s Law at www.blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com and www.AaronsLaw.blogspot.com

So, all this to say that many of my readers who know me through my work on issues other than child abduction and who are unfamiliar with the story of the abduction of my children may think that I might be unfair or exaggerating where I refer to Mormons and Mormonism, but I want you all to know that I am speaking from experience and with moral authority.

On Presidential candidate Mitt Romney: Pink Slips and Slit Throats

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon— Mitt Romney’s zeal for issuing pink slips to middle class workers whose jobs he’s destroying is well established by his own admissions, but his participation in Mormon throat-slitting rituals has been kept under wraps (so far) by the LDS church’s (so far) successful campaign to keep specific aspects of the highly secretive religion out of public view.

A new BBC documentary titled “The Mormon Candidate” examines the issues that are somehow off-limits in U.S. political discourse in 2012, among them the LDS practice of destroying families by requiring its members to shun those who leave the church or who speak out in opposition, and the symbolism of throat-slitting and disemboweling gestures made in secret Mormon temple practices.

Mormon temple ordinances required devotees to symbolize a knife slicing across their own throats with a finger, and the same gesture across the belly as an act of promised hari kiri if they were to reveal any temple secret to an outsider. The mumbo-jumbo litany that Mormons would chant as they made the gestures made it clear that if they got crosswise with the LDS hierarchy, they would be cutting their own throats and disemboweling themselves, and all Mormon church members would have “no contact” with them, at all, ever. In other words, a shunning would take place.

All of that inside information is available on the Web now, posted by former Mormon insiders, who aren’t making up any of it.

These two segments describe how Mormon shunnings work. The interviews include a high Mormon official denying the throat- and belly-slitting, denying that shunning takes place, and otherwise illustrating his superb prevaricational skills.

A look-alike relative of Mitt Romney discloses how his views drew a shunning that is still active, like mine. Mormon shunnings are forever, and all family members (including the children) are forced into compliance or face the same fate, with real consequences in that closed-off Mormon society.

I have written and spoken about these practices for many years subsequent to the Mormon abduction of my four children, and all along it has been difficult to convince people that the shunnings are real or that they are effective.

Mormon officials in three states were directly involved in the planning, execution and ongoing support for the abduction of my children and their forced immersion into extreme Mormonism. I have named them repeatedly, the ones whose identities have been revealed in court documents and those who participated by their own admissions:

Chris and Kory Wright, Bishop Donald Taylor, Bishop David Holiday, Steve and Gina Nielson (now Ben and Gina Foulk), Relief Society President Evelyn Taylor, Cynthia Anderson, Anthony Micheletti all had criminal involvement in the kidnapping. Then there were the tier of Mormon court officials, including three Mormon judges who had the distinction of also being my former wife’s former divorce lawyers in three of her four divorces, so far. Their roles were to see that all the Mormons in the criminal conspiracy and the image of the LDS church were protected, and they did this using all the judicial powers available to them.

As in the current Presidential campaigns, people are reluctant to criticize other religions, even a belief system as notoriously wicked and contrived as Mormonism. The British do not seem to have that odd American hangup.

See for yourself in these two segments, now available on Youtube.

The Mormon Candidate, pt 4 of 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLRzdeKEEII

The Mormon Candidate, pt 5 of 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TvQij0OoM&feature=relmfu


Three cheers for the BBC!!!

On Passing a Mormon-Abducted Child's Birthday, and the Rites of Spring

By Sean Cruz


Portland, Oregon—

In nature, Spring is a time of renewal. The awful weather Winter brings is fading, the days grow longer and sunnier and a new generation emerges. It is a time for optimism, for looking forward, and for many a season of fruition beckons, fulfilling family milestones, school graduations, marriages and new adventures.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is a story about the sacrifice of a young girl’s life in order to suit some pagan agenda, to satisfy their belief that a horrible criminal act would please a Deity with whom they imagined they had a special relationship.

Which reminds me of the Mormons who kidnapped my children, and of that awful first Spring.

My late, kidnapped son Aaron’s birthday is March 21, and his was the first of my four children’s birthdays to pass by after they disappeared on February 12, 1996, on their way to concealment in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in Utah.

There would be no more birthday celebrations for the Cruz family once they entered Utah. We would never have contact on a birthday or any other family day ever again, once the Mormons had gained control over their lives.

I would fight to locate and regain contact with my children through four jurisdictions in three states, all while counting the days, each day, living one day at a time, day after joyless day, hopeless days on end….

So I missed my son’s birthday, that first birthday some six weeks after the beginning of the kidnapping (abductions are continuing crimes, meaning the crime continues until the abduction ends with the recovery of the victim), and I know it broke his heart.

This was a clear sign of the cruelty of his Mormon kidnappers. They knew they were breaking my children’s hearts, and they did this time and again.

The Mormons feel a need to separate the world into its “Members” and everyone else, and they run a very sophisticated operation to keep people from leaving their church.

The most common reason the Mormons lose converts is to family influence, so they have developed techniques to carve families apart. Some are subtle, but others are fundamental, such as forbidding non-Mormon parents from attending their Mormon-convert adult children’s weddings.

Once they were taken to Utah, my children did what they had to do to survive. Some succumbed to the coercion and inducements. Aaron did not, and my other children had to watch him suffer for years, all while growing up with their own tormented, confused feelings. And they would suffer together through their mother’s 3-Mormon-stepdads-in-3-states wedding spree.

It is not only this time of the year that I think about Aaron’s birthday, or those of my surviving, still-abducted children. The feelings are very long-lasting, and seem to last the whole year, year after year.

I’m working on those renewal feelings, and making good progress, with the help of my friends….

And while I’m thinking about Aaron right now, Natalia, Tyler and Allie are also in my heart. Your birthdays may be far away on the calendar, but I can feel them from here.