On Faith, Religion, Mormonism and Presidential Politics

By Sean Cruz


Portland, Oregon—

The candidacies of Mormons Mitt Romney and John Huntsman have put the issue of religion on the Presidential debate stage, which is where it belongs.

The President is the nation’s Decider-in-Chief.

We should be concerned with all of the factors that will influence the future President’s decision-making. When the candidates identify a particular school of thought, worldview, religion or set of beliefs as central to their lives, then the public should vet those aspects. This is no place to grant a candidate a pass.

It’s one thing to have faith in a given creation story or adhere to a given religious tradition. It’s another thing entirely, however, to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that a person rapped a stick on a rock and the sea actually parted, or a story about golden plates, the Lost-Tribe-of-Israel origins of Native Americans and real rocking, talking angels. Do we want a Commander-in-Chief who is convinced that any of this is factual?

If the next Decider-in-Chief has crazy beliefs in his or her head, we need to know about it. Does the candidate believe that God drawls in his or her ear? Like George W. Bush? Have we forgotten how that worked out already?

(sound track: The Who: “Won’t Get Fooled Again!” is playing right here)

I don’t much care what church they do or do not go to, but I do want to know--long before election night, long before the anointed one ascends—if they are spending way too much time in an imaginary world, measured in cubits. That’s not the problem-solver I want to see in the Oval Office.

The Mormon church is powerful, enormously wealthy, highly secretive, and amounts to about 3% of the US population. These are well-established facts that have nothing to do with the theology of the sect or its relationship to Christian points of view, or with the First Amendment, for that matter.

Mormonism is controversial for many reasons, not just whether it meets the dictionary definition of a cult or is a bizarre form of polytheistic Christianity, or for its polygamist and officially racist recent past.

One of those reasons is the Mormon practice of shunning, and how Mormon shunnings are enforced, which speaks to how the Mormon Church operates as if it were a cult. That’s a different issue altogether, and should be part of the discussion.

Another issue is the position of women in the Mormon Church and in the Mormon worldview. All of the higher positions in the church organization are reserved for men only. Mormon women belong in the home, not the workplace. Mormon women and girls are expected to be subservient to men, and are trained to be “meek and mild” as part of everyday practice.

I would never vote for a candidate that had this set of beliefs, not for any public office.

One of the issues that stood between me and unwelcome Mormonism in my family story was the status of its women and girls. I did not want my daughters to grow up believing that their roles were to be subservient to men, or my sons to believe that either.

If your child marries into the Mormon church, you can say goodbye to any plans you ever had to see your child’s wedding. You will be forbidden participation, an outsider to one of the most important events in your life. That is official Mormon policy, and it is enforced without exception. Voters need to be clear on this.

The Mormon notion of the family unit and the church’s willingness to sever families based on their membership status or fidelity to hard core Mormonism should be part of this public policy discussion, as the candidates debate their notions of family values, an essential component of each of their platforms.

My four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than 15 years ago. This is the story of a Mormon shunning.

Mormon officials in three states conspired to abduct and conceal my kids in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in order to immerse them in a completely Mormon environment, despite an order for joint custody. And they got what they wanted, too, although it cost the happiness and then the life of my son Aaron.

Oregon's landmark 2005 kidnapping law is named "Aaron's Law" after my late son Aaron Cruz, who died in Payson, Utah from long-term medical neglect, emotional abuse and abandonment. Aarons Law (Senate Bill 1041) is designed to remedy several common failures of the criminal and family law systems in preventing and resolving cases of child abduction.

Aarons Law provides abduction victims tools to hold their abductors, and those who provide financial, planning or logistical support to the abduction, accountable financially, including religious organizations that engage in shunning, like the Mormons, like the Mormons who abducted my children.

With Aaron’s Law, Oregon is the only state in the nation where the abduction of a child creates a civil cause of action. The law recognizes that the abduction of a child by any person is child abuse, as serious as any other form of abuse.

The provisions of Aaron’s Law arise from the failures of both the criminal and family law systems in the interstate kidnapping and concealment of my children, but these failures are commonplace, with more than 200,000 cases of parental and family abduction taking place in the United States each year, and increasing numbers of children disappearing into foreign countries forever.

Personally, I’m glad Romney’s in the race. The more people understand the ins and outs of Mormonism, the more will reject it. Bring it on, Mitt! You too, Mr. Huntsman. I didn’t buy the story about the golden plates, so your church destroyed my family. Now let’s talk about who you hypocrites really are.

Every candidate for public office has the right to believe whatever he or she believes, to belong or not belong to any religious organization. That is guaranteed by the First Amendment,

But the public does have a legitimate right to know the specifics of those beliefs, and to vote accordingly with a complete set of facts.

There is far too much at stake in the election of a President to give the candidates a pass on such a fundamental part of their character and how they view the world, particularly since they express such strong feelings about it. Let's talk it all out. There's plenty of time. I've waited for 15 years.

Fundamentalist Mormon Warren Jeffs and LDS Hell on Earth

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Mainstream Mormons may not grow their own child brides like Warren Jeffs, but Mormon zealots can be just as dangerous, and a non-Mormon has little chance to find justice in Utah (read Mormon) courts.

My four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than 15 years ago, eventually suffering life under a series of three Mormon step dads in three states.

My late son Aaron Cruz died in his mother’s empty house in Payson, Utah, from “undetermined causes”, and a phalanx of Mormon lawyers hired by 5^th-husband Ben and Gina Foulk, who now live a country-club, Rotary life in El Dorado Hills and Cameron Park, California, are determined to keep it that way, with the circumstances of his death unknown and uninvestigated.

My son Aaron Cruz is memorialized in Oregon's landmark anti-parental-and-family-kidnapping Senate Bill 1041 "Aaron's Law", passed in 2005.

Oregon is still the only state in the nation that offers its children this level of protection from parental and family or other non-stranger kidnappings. Under Aaron's Law, taking any abducted child out of the state of Oregon creates a civil cause of action, and you should really think hard about how you want to protect your child from abduction by religious zealots, your ex or any other criminal.

Nightmares of an abducted child, Terri Horman and the Casey Anthony trial

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Some minutes after I woke from the nightmare this morning, I wrote some lines while the memory was still fresh. I’ve had several hundred of these since my four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than fifteen years ago, but there was something about this one that felt different, and it took some time for me to put it together….

This, I came to realize, was the first nightmare to trouble my sleep since the conclusion of the Casey Anthony trial, the young mother who couldn’t find the time to report the disappearance of her 3-year-old daughter Kaylee, whose skeletal remains were found months later, her lips and nose duct-taped shut, packed into a plastic bag and dumped by the side of the road.

What was different about this dream was that where my ex-wife Gina Foulk was in it, she had that emotionless Casey Anthony/Terri Horman demeanor, was indifferent to the fact that a small child was missing, although clearly unhappy with the inconvenience resulting, and aggravated at the notion that she might be thought somehow lacking in her role as a mother, an epic of pathological self-absorption….

Nicole Kidman had that look, too, in two of her movie roles: To Die For, and The Others. She was a dead ringer for my ex in those movies, almost like she’d studied scenes from our lives, watched home movies, in preparing for her parts.

Seeing the images of Kaylee Anthony over the course of the search, arrest and trial was always painful for me, and I never lingered on any of them or the horror story itself, but it was always there, has been there since July 2008, when Kaylee’s grandmother contacted the police and the media took an interest….

I saw my baby girl in every one of those pictures of Kaylee Anthony…so many memories triggered…Allie was a week past her eighth birthday on the day the Mormons took her away from the father who loved her, and set her on a path of three Mormon stepdads in three states. Memories of her early childhood were still very fresh.

These are the lines I wrote earlier this morning:

“Nightmares of an abducted child...struck early this morning....


“Sometimes they are focused on a single child, sometimes all four...


“This one was about Allie, missing with her mother for days in the dream, and I was reporting this to the police, over and over...feeling all the shock and horror...over and over...desperate...talking to the police, over and over...then I woke up, exhausted...and the nightmare is real....”

In actual fact, when my four children disappeared from Oregon in February 1996, they were driven more or less directly although by a circuitous route to the home of Mormon zealots Chris and Kory Wright, somewhere in the mountains east of Ogden, Utah, who had been in on planning the abduction for months beforehand.

While all of their friends were in school and safe at home, the Mormons were shuttling my children from place to place, knowing that they were violating a joint custody order that had been in place for five years, which is a serious felony, worth five years in prison, but infrequently and very poorly enforced.

The statute of limitations expires on these crimes after three years, even if the child is not recovered. Try to make some sense of that reality….

My children never recovered from the trauma academically or emotionally; and, of course, Aaron is dead, left behind ill and alone in that crappy little Mormon town on the edge of the desert, Payson Utah….

Years later, after many fruitless online searches, one panned out… I located kidnapper Kory Wright right here, where he works at Columbia Ultimate in Vancouver:

https://www.columbiaultimate.com/about-us/management-team.aspx

I counted coup….

But today my thoughts are still buffeted by this most recent nightmare…and that look in these eyes….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/contact.nxg

…the look of pathological self-absorption, epic…. You would never know there was a child in distress from these people.

Mormon abduction, self injury and lousy medical care

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Self injury became an issue for me when I learned that my son Aaron had been cutting himself with a knife during his captivity in Utah, the victim of a Mormon abduction, his despair and loneliness so intense that he would carve deep wounds into his beautiful arms, like the girl in this story in Indian Country Today:

“When she was 14 years old and living in a boarding school in Arizona, Alex Exendine cut her forearms with everything from broken mirrors to scissors to cope with her grief. The Lakota teen from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation had lost her best friend to a brain tumor, and the grandmother who helped raise her died shortly after.

“’I was so lonely,” Exendine told the Rapid City Journal. “I just never thought anyone understood how I felt.”

“Now 19, Exendine shared her struggle and how she overcame self-injury with Indian leaders and medical experts at the self-injury prevention conference "Wakanyeja Ihawicakta Pi, Looking Out for Our Children: a Cultural Learning Opportunity on Self-Injury Prevention” in Rapid City, South Dakota from May 12-13.

“Exendine told the Journal that her internal suffering and bottled feelings led to physical self-harm. “I felt like I had no emotions anymore,” she said. “I started cutting and I’d at least feel something.”

I first saw the knife-wound scars on my son’s arms while he lay comatose in Payson, Utah, in 2005, stared at them for much of the five days he lay there unresponsive. And then the doctors pronounced him dead.

They looked like those in the illustration, except Aaron’s were all above the elbow, on both arms. Deep, wide scars as much as four inches long. Many scars were laid across other earlier scars, indicating that this behavior had gone on for a prolonged period of time.

I counted 15 large scars.

Abducted children get lousy medical care.

Learn about how Alex Exendine overcame the urge to self-mutilate; see the complete article and illustration by Marty Two Bulls at Indian Country Today here:

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/06/more-than-skin-deep-indian-leaders-address-self-injury-prevention/

A slain son, a father's heartbreak and the end of poetry

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Grief-stricken Mexican poet Javier Sicilia read a poem dedicated to his murdered son last Saturday, and then declared that this would be his last, that “Poetry does not exist in me anymore.”

I understand how he feels, find much in common, remember when the poetry died in my life…and how long it took to come back….

24-year-old Juan Francisco was found in an abandoned car along with six other bodies, their heads, faces, hands and feet bound with tape, suffocated to death under that tape, among the latest victims in the ongoing war that has its foundation in American demand for drugs and the many billions of dollars U.S. citizens are willing to export in order to feed their habits.

These seven are believed to be innocent, “collateral damage” in the incessant violence between the gangs, the cartels, for control of the smuggling routes, and the Mexican government, the battle for the soul of Mexico itself “so far from God, so close to the United States”….

More than 35,000 people have been murdered in Mexico in just the last five years, most often with guns supplied by U.S. gun dealers, and by criminal enterprises nearly entirely funded with U.S. dollars, smuggled back across the border or transferred electronically to offshore tax havens by corrupt American banking officials.

And now there is Mr. Sicilia’s last poem:

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra
Nos la ahogaron adentro
Como te (asfixiaron),
Como te
desgarraron a ti los pulmones

Y el dolor no se me aparta
sólo queda un mundo
Por el silencio de los justos
Sólo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo.

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra, es mi último poema, no puedo escribir más poesía...la poesía ya no existe en mi.


The world is no longer worthy of the word
They suffocated it inside us
Like you (they asphyxiated)
Like you
they slashed your lungs
And pain won’t cleave from me
only a world is left
By the silence of the just
Only by your silence and by my silence, Juanelo.

The world is no longer worthy of the word—is my last poem, I can’t write any more poetry...poetry no longer exists in me. (Javier Sicilia)

I understand the grieving poet’s sentiments so well…nearly fifteen years went by following the loss of my children in a Mormon abduction…and more than five years passed after the death of my son Aaron, a death preventable had he received medical care of minimal competence…before I could find my way to the poetry, to the lyrics, to the music once again….

No one knows how long these things take….

No one knows how much time will pass before Mr. Sicilia finds the poetry in his soul once again….

A year ago, I would have been among the first to say, “Never…it will never exist in me again”….

But today I taste the bittersweetness of life with purpose and compassion…I hear songs, melodies, feel the pulse of the drumbeat in my heart…lyrics close to the surface, where tears used to abide…and down the road, perhaps, another poem will rise for Mr. Sicilia, as it has for me….

I greet the day gladly.

Your child disappeared...then what?

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Last night, KATU-TV’s Steve Dunn asked viewers the question “What would you do if your child suddenly disappeared?” and in the broadcast described what Kaine Horman, whose 8-year-old son Kyron disappeared nearly a year ago, is doing this weekend.

315 days after his son was abducted, Mr. Horman told reporter Anna Canzano: “Well, there’s only one day to me that has any significance, and that’s June 4, 2010. Every day after that is pretty much as painful as the one before it.”

I know that feeling well…. When asked over the years about how I felt about missing birthdays and other special days, I would respond that those days are just like every other day, only more so….

My life changed forever on February 12, 1996, when my four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction, Mormon zealots and my former wife carrying out a Mormon shunning. This is what can happen when you disagree too openly with Mormon Borg-like intrusion into your family life…the church is very highly organized to sever Mormon family members from contact with non-Mormon members of their own family.

Just ask the grieving parents and grandparents of MormonsHMC (Mormons Have My Child)….

I counted the days, marked out on my calendars, month after month, year after year, 1876 days lived one day at a time, before I finally stopped counting five years and two months after my children were kidnapped….

But enough about me….

Find out what the father of Kyron Horman is doing, and think about what you would do if your child was abducted….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COP0kWJW-kI&feature=player_embedded#at=21

KATU-TV news:

PORTLAND, Ore. - When was the last time you cherished getting your kids ready for school, walking them to the bus stop or tucking them in at night?

Those are the kinds of things - the simple things we sometimes easily take for granted - that Kyron Horman's dad, Kaine Horman, says he misses about his son.

"The days I miss the most are him in one arm and Kiara (his daughter) in the other arm, just sitting on the couch together," Kaine told us.

Kyron disappeared from Portland's Skyline School on June 4, 2010. His stepmother, Terri Horman, has not been named a person of interest or suspect in the case but she has been the focus of the investigation. She is believed to be living in Roseburg with her parents. Kaine still believes she knows something.

While police continue looking into the case and searchers continue heading out to try to find any trace of Kyron, Kaine is keeping his son's name and face out there in the hopes that someday his boy will be found. Kaine was at the Expo Center on Friday and plans to be there throughout the weekend, both at the KidFest and at the Portland Garage Sale.

On counting coup on a kidnapper

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—I used to own a .357 magnum revolver, but not long after my children disappeared in what I had come to learn was a Mormon abduction, I gave the weapon away to my brother, lest I be tempted to use it, either on myself while in the depths of hopelessness and despair, or on one or more of the people responsible for the crimes they were inflicting on my children and my family.

I have never regretted this decision.

As weeks turned into months turned into years, fighting through four jurisdictions in three states, with my children’s kidnappers enjoying safe harbor in theocratic Utah and my children suffering terrible abuse, I had many opportunities to think about this single fact.

There were many long, strongly magnetic moments when the grief and pain were unendurable, and I might have found a solution in that holster long ago had it still been in my possession.

And there were many sharp hours of contemplation, my anger grown cold, considering what events might take place should I decide to go out and impose a form of frontier justice on the criminals who were most responsible for the abduction and the subsequent abuse of my children, none of whom was my former wife.

These persons were Mormon zealots Kory Wright and Steve Nielson and my former brother in law Tony Micheletti, and I contemplated this Trifecta for years, but took no action other than to continue to fight through an indifferent and ineffective legal system, compromised by Mormon cronyism and the paranoid, self-absorbed and delusional mindset that is the foundation of that religion.

Outside of these moments, these hours of weakness and vengefulness, I held to my core integrity, passed down to me from my late parents and grandparents, and it was in those reflections that I found the strength to act honorably, and to work to make something good and lasting result from these terrible crimes.

In 2003, I had the great good fortune to be offered an opportunity to work for Oregon State Senator Avel Louise Gordly, a transformational and widely respected leader known as “the conscience of the Senate”, and it was in that year that we began work on legislation addressing the issue of children abducted by family members and persons into whose care the children had been entrusted.

I have written elsewhere and in depth regarding the history of that legislation, the Senate Task Force on Parental and Family Abduction, the death of my son Aaron Cruz, and the passage of Senate Bill 1041 in 2005, known as “Aaron’s Law” in his honor, and will not repeat it here, other than to make these points:

Aaron’s Law is designed to address the failures of both the family law and criminal law systems in preventing and resolving child abductions that involve known perpetrators, a crime that continues to take place at the rate of more than 200,000 cases each year.

An abduction is a continuing crime, an offense that has a beginning but no real end, a fact in conflict with the reality that law enforcement and the courts take little interest in these cases, hence the large annual numbers.

I am often contacted by parents whose child or children have been taken into concealment by the other parent, looking for advice, running out of hope. Their painful stories all have points in common with mine: law enforcement is apologetic but does not act; they cannot find a lawyer who is willing to listen; when and if they do get before a judge, the judge is indifferent, even judgmental; every avenue burns up precious time, time scalding hot, in weeks and months, and yet there is a child missing….

This adds up to more than 200,000 cases of child abduction a year, every year….

Several years ago, I became aware that Kory Wright, after having concealed my children in his home in Utah, their first stop in Mormon Country, had moved into the Portland area, and was employed at Columbia Ultimate across the river in Vancouver, where his ugly, criminal face was displayed on the company website.

Without Kory Wright, the abduction of my children would not have taken place. Senate Bill 1041 was deliberately written with his actions in mind, criminal acts that Aaron’s Law is designed to prevent, and here he was, having suffered no consequences for his crimes….

I chose October 6, 2009 as A Good Day to Die….

In the days and weeks leading up to the day, I reflected on all that had taken place, thought about a wide range of options, a very wide range….

President Bush had recently been pelted with an Iraqi journalists’ shoes, and I thought of that option, too, the night before the day…but tossing my shoes at Kory Wright would have been poorly understood in American culture….

I decided to count coup, to count coup with a copy of Aaron’s Law, written for Kory Wright and for people like him, as the honorable course…only one criminal in this confrontation…a non-violent but pointed confrontation….

I began the dialogue, in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, with this statement: “My name is Sean Cruz. You kidnapped my children, motherfucker.”

An abduction is a continuing crime, and a criminal is responsible for all the damage that ensues from his or her criminal act….

Many a grieved parent would have brought a weapon, would have made the news for a couple of days, maybe…I brought the law instead, Aaron’s Law….

Here is the series of essays that described the incident and the ensuing trial (note that the “slap” was a rhetorical slap, not physical; the rhetoric created some confusion at trial):

Sean Cruz confronts man who kidnapped his children

http://blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/2009/10/sean-cruz-confronts-man-who-kidnapped.html

Kidnapper confrontation earns commendation from judge

http://blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/2009/10/cruz-kidnapper-confrontation-earns.html

Not guilty!

http://blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/2010/02/not-guilty.html

Reflections and resolve on Aaron's birthday 2011

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Today, March 21, is/was, could have been, should have been, should be my son Aaron’s birthday, a day for celebration and a sharing of love and companionship, with my beautiful boy and my three surviving children, the Cruz family gathered together like we did before my children vanished fifteen years ago in a Mormon abduction.

Like most parents who have suffered the death of a child, or, as I have also, the disappearance of a (four) child(ren) in a kidnapping, I find special calendar days are an emotional obstacle course, a test of coping skills, and a time for reflection and resolve….

There is a law on the books now in the state of Oregon, an important, landmark piece of legislation designed to deter and resolve non-stranger child abductions that bears my son’s name, called Aaron’s Law, passed on a unanimous House vote shortly after his death in 2005.

Had Aaron’s Law been in statute in 1995, my children wouldn’t have been abducted in the first place, and today would be one of those marvelous days of celebration that instead ended so abruptly so long ago.

The U.S. Department of Justice counts each year more than 200,000 cases of children abducted by a parent or family member, of parents themselves generating more than 200,000 child victims in this country, year after year.

While most of those abductions are of short term duration, the harm to the children lasts far longer, and some six per cent of the child victims are never recovered. This fact suits the Mormons who abducted my children just fine. Even as adults, my children are prohibited from having free contact with me or with other members of my family. That’s how a Mormon shunning works….

March 21 is no longer a day for celebration in the family of Aaron Cruz. The date instead has become a time for reflection and resolve, and I am ever more determined to see the principles of Aaron’s Law embedded in statute across this nation, to see that justice is served, to see that parents and family members (and religious fanatics) are sufficiently deterred from causing their own children this terrible, completely senseless suffering.

This is for you, my beautiful son, with all of my love,

Dad