Most municipal workers resign in Utah polygamous sect town

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Brady Mccombs, Associated Press
Updated 4:27 pm, Thursday, March 8, 2018

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The new mayor of a mostly polygamous town on the Utah-Arizona border is finishing off a complete overhaul of municipal staff and boards after mass resignations when she took office in January to become the first woman and first non-member of the polygamous sect to hold the seat.

Six of the seven Hildale, Utah, town workers quit after Mayor Donia Jessop was elected and took charge of the local government run by the sect for more than a century. They were joined by nine members of various town boards, including utility board chairman Jacob N. Jessop. All were members of the sect, the mayor said.

Jacob Jessop said his religious beliefs prevented him from working for a woman and with people who are not sect members, according to resignation letters obtained Thursday by The Associated Press through a public records request. The mayor's husband is distantly related to Jessop in the town of about 3,000 people where many have that last name.

"It has come to a point where I have to choose between my religion and participation in city government, and I choose my religion," he wrote in his letter dated Jan. 25. "My religion teaches me that I should not follow a woman for a leader in a public or family capacity."

Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Most-municipal-workers-resign-in-Utah-polygamous-12739283.php

[SoCalNative]

1. Bye Felicia

[Fred Sanders]

2. Sincerely held religious belief that he can not work with a woman?...will Shitler's new regime

support that? Or just pick and choose arbitrarily?

Doesn't one tax exempt religion believe we all come from an alien planet and need to get back there? If they want to build a spaceship will it be tax free?

[Egnever]

20. agreed

[bettyellen]

3. Awesome! Maybe the local government will actually help women leave the sect via those jobs!

It would be kinda awesome to see women take over the entire government there. And bust up the slave trade that calls itself a religion.

[Corvo Bianco]

4. The Mormons didn't fall far from this tree.

Excommunicated a woman for asking why she can't have the priesthood as well. Sent her straight to a fiery hell.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/24/mormon-who-advocated-ordination-of-women-is-excommunicated/

[weissmam]

5. don't let the door hit you pon the way out

or better yet let it

[keithbvadu2]

6. Sharia law by a different sect?

[Canoe52]

8. I couldnt have said it better.

[appalachiablue]

11. +1

At International Women's Day in Spain today a local Priest exclaimed, "the Devil has those feminists!"



Madrid women celebrate Internatl. Women's Day, March 8 and call for 24 hr. womens strike for equality & rights.

[GulfCoast66]

19. Hah!

Looks like the women in the photo could give a fuck about a horny priest!

[gay texan]

7. .....

[Atticus]

9. Isn't it about time someone with big boots stomped on this nest of snakes? nt

[BigmanPigman]

10. I read a very long article about this

in Rolling Stone but I didn't know it has been going on for a hundred years. WOW!

[Scurrilous]

12. Good!

[hatrack]

13. Paradise!!! Sincerely-held cousin-marrying!! Godly birth defects!!

The Colorado City/Hildale area has the world's highest incidence of fumarase deficiency, an extremely rare genetic condition which causes severe intellectual disability. Geneticists attribute this to the prevalence of cousin marriage between descendants of two of the town's founders, Joseph Smith Jessop and John Yates Barlow. At least half of the double community's inhabitants are descended from one or both men.[19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildale,_Utah

Fumarase deficiency causes encephalopathy,[1] severe mental retardation, unusual facial features, brain malformation, and epileptic seizures[2] due to an abnormally low amount of fumarase in cells. It can initially present with polyhydramnios on prenatal ultrasound. Affected neonates may demonstrate nonspecific signs of poor feeding and hypotonia. Laboratory findings in neonates may indicate polycythemia, leukopenia, or neutropenia. As they age, neurological deficits begin to manifest with seizures, dystonias, and severe developmental delay.[3]

A cluster of 20 cases has since been documented in the twin towns of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah among an inbred community of 10,000 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.[10][11][12][13] Nicknamed "Polygamist's down's", the syndrome has been blamed on cousin marriage, but in a larger sense is related to the reproductive isolation of a community among whom 85% are blood relatives John Y. Barlow or Joseph Smith Jessop.[11] (see Founder effect)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumarase_deficiency

Faith Bistline has five cousins with the disease, who she used to look after until she left the FLDS in 2011. “They are completely physically and mentally disabled,” she says. The oldest started learning to walk when he was two years old, but stopped after a long bout of seizures. Now that cousin is in his 30s and not even able to crawl.

In fact, only one of her cousins can walk. “She can also make some vocalisations and sometimes you can understand a little bit of what she’s saying, but I wouldn’t call it speaking,” she says. They all have feeding tubes and need care 24 hours a day.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170726-the-polygamous-town-facing-genetic-disaster

[NNadir]

15. That is extremely interesting.

The most famous and important effect of interbreeding was the case of Alexi Romanov, son of Czar Nicholas, whose hemophilia caused his wife Alexandra to rely on the faith healer Rasputin.

These idiots, helped by their cousin, Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, stumbled into World War I, a cousin's war.

We are still living with the consequences.

I've been working on a related metabolic disease, also involved with mitochondria, but I never heard of this fumarase defect.

I'll look it up.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. That family's hemophilia was not from inbreeding, probably just a mutation, most likely in Victoria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemophilia_in_European_royalty

(It might have been present in Victoria's mother, but she had 2 other children, neither of whom, nor their descendants, had the disease, so there's less chance of that)

The condition comes from a mutation on the X sex chromosome, and so the only time you might blame inbreeding for it is if a woman inherits the bad gene from both mother and father, which didn't happen with any of the family.

A woman with the faulty gene on one chromosome doesn't suffer from the disease, since her other X chromosome is OK, and the necessary clotting factors are produced. If she passes the faulty gene to a son - 50% chance - he'll have the disease since the Y chromosome can't cause the factors. If he has children (back then, more of them died before that), he'll always pass the bad gene on to a daughter, and never to a son.

The daughter of a woman with one bad gene has a 50% chance of inheriting it, and then she'll be in the same position as her mother - not suffering from the disease herself, but the same chances of passing the gene to children.

[NNadir]

18. You are correct.

I forgot that it's X linked.

Nevertheless they were an inbred bunch, and a number of histories rever in particular to Wilhelm's poor relationship to his uncle Edward in particular as a contributing factor in the tragedy of the war.

[TheBlackAdder]

17. Hildale sounds like Heaven on Earth!

[bdtrppr6]

14. good riddance

the less stupidity in any form of government is more than welcome.

If you live in a town of 3000, and many others share your name, you might want to look at your gene pool. Fucking mormons.

[displacedtexan]

21. These towns were featured in a documentary series on women & kids escaping from there.

The show was a bout people helping women and kids escape and start new lives. The scariest part was the fact that sect members ran everything there, especially law enforcement: they had access to law enforcemnt databases and could track escapees easily.

Even though sect members quit their jobs in one town, they still have access to information from sect members in the other town.