Eye On Bountiful

What an inspired name for a community. What an aspiration for an egotist; to claim that his religion entitled him, through God's command, to assemble a modern-day harem, and to father countless children, where the females would be valued for their capacity to surrender themselves to the whims and demands of a powerful male, and the male children would be hugely disadvantaged and expendable.

Often authorities are forced by circumstances and their own inadequate reading of the law - as well as the unwillingness of lawmakers to make lawfully binding decisions and make them the unalterable law of the land expressing human rights values to reflect society's just determinations - to pursue justice in ways that simply skirt the true issue at hand.

Famously, key members of criminal groups in the United States known to have caused innumerable deaths through an institutionalized type of extensive violent gang activity along with hostilities erupting between competing gangs for greater control of territory, have been taken into custody and charged with economic crimes of tax evasion, in lieu of sufficient evidence to bring them to justice for murder.

In the case of Winston Blackmore, who describes his position as that of bishop in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a breakaway sector of the Mormon Church, and which still enthusiastically practises a very vigorous type of bigamous culture central to their 'beliefs' in the instructions of the Almighty to do Him pleasure, it seems income tax evasion has become a tool of justice.

The Tax Court of Canada has taken this infamous 'religious' charlatan to court for having provided tax returns from 2000 to 2006 claiming taxable income of $20,815 in 2000, when government auditors claimed that same income to be $277,395; a substantial difference, representing an outright instance of tax evasion.

Bigamy is outlawed in Canada by law, but this man has yet to be found guilty and disciplined. Tax evasion is also illegal, and a handier tool for carting someone off to prison.

During testimony, witness reports have painted some detailed portraits of life in Bountiful for the women who have lived there for generations. Blackmore's own sister, one of 30 siblings, spoke of her experience as a child of Bountiful. "I had finished high school and I wanted to go on with my education", she explained, describing a meeting in 1975 with the then-prophet, hers and her brother's father.

"I told him I wanted to go to school to be [a registered nurse] and a midwife. I was going to change the world and all that good stuff. But [the prophet] said I had another calling - to just be a wife. I was married by 9:20 that night." A religious ceremony took place with a man already married to an older sister. "I didn't want to marry him. I didn't like him."

When her husband left the community, she then became the third wife of his half-brother, already married to two of her nieces.

Another woman, 19 when she and her sister both were married to Blackmore on the same day, testified that while she never lived with him in the same house, sharing quarters with some of his other wives, she had borne him ten children.

Mr. Blackmore has 22 wives. And he has over 65 children, uncertain himself of precisely how many he has fathered. He cannot name them all. He stumbled during his own testimony, while recounting the names of his various wives, halting at number 14, because he just could not recall her name.