‘It needs to stop’
ONE MAN’S BATTLE TO REMOVE HIS CHILDREN FROM THE POLYGAMOUS COMMUNITY OF BOUNTIFUL, B.C.
Brandon Seth Blackmore is desperate to gain sole custody of his young, impressionable children and wrest them from of the grips of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Since leaving the FLDS and the polygamous community of Bountiful in 2015, Blackmore has tried to find a way to ensure that the church doesn’t turn his children against him while accommodating his ex-wife’s devotion to the church and to prophet Warren Jeffs.
“I never wanted to take them from Maria,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to accommodate them (Maria and the church) to some degree.”
Blackmore never wanted his children to end up like him — estranged from his parents and many of his 36 siblings since his excommunication seven years ago.
Trying to make it work has cost him thousands in legal fees. Over the past three years, his ex-wife has ignored consent orders, contested them and had one overturned when a judge agreed that the consent order should have been made in provincial court, not B.C. Supreme Court.
It’s been frustrating. His youngest child, his daughter, was only eight months old when he left. She’s now six and her brothers are aged eight, 10 and 12. Their futures are on the line since one of the overturned orders required them to attend public school in the village of Yahk, about 30 kilometres east of the fundamentalist enclave.
One year, they were homeschooled by their mother, who has only a Grade 8 education. Blackmore finally got his exwife to agree to register them with an educational service, so at least there is some oversight of their schoolwork. But they’re not doing well and Blackmore knows how hobbling a poor education can be.
But for now, his biggest fear is that until he has full custody, his children might simply disappear, just as two of his halfsisters did a few years ago.
One disappeared in 2004 when she was 13. Blackmore didn’t see her again until 2010, which is when she told him what had happened to her.
Her parents had taken her from Bountiful to the United States, where she was married to the prophet (Warren Jeffs) and subsequently raped.
Last November, Blackmore testified for the prosecution and against his father, Brandon James Blackmore, and Emily Ruth Gail Blackmore (one of his father’s three wives). They were convicted of removing a child from Canada for unlawful purposes, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail. They will be sentenced tomorrow.
Blackmore never finished high school. His uncle and Bountiful’s former bishop, Winston Blackmore, made him leave school to work long hours for a church-owned company for wages that Brandon says worked out to about $1 an hour.
It was only after he left the church that Brandon was able to complete his Grade 12 equivalency in 2013. It means that, finally, at 34, Blackmore is pursuing his lifelong dream to be a police officer. A dual Canadian-American citizen, Blackmore starts at the police academy in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, this fall.
Education has always been a concern when it comes to his children.
“I want them to have a choice — like I didn’t have — to pick and choose their careers and when they want to leave.”
Still, that wasn’t what prompted Blackmore’s final decision to pursue full custody. It was the prophet’s June 4 revelation.
Writing as Jesus Christ from his Texas prison cell, Jeffs proclaimed that 4.7 billion people had been wiped off the face of the Earth during the previous week.
They were “removed quiet way, by angel power, off this world, out of all nations, more than three billion people, all guilty of spirit of murder. Amen.”
Indonesia had been “lifted away to other planet” along with Papua New Guinea. The others had disappeared from the United States, France, Russia, Britain, Germany, Spain, China, India, Australia and New Zealand.
Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence for sexually abusing two 12-year-old girls, also claimed to have saved Texas after seeing “Putin of Russia give code to blow up the Powledge Prison in Texas ... I, God, did by God power, lift both the truck, trailer with heavy bomb … (Y) es, I, Jesus Christ, did by Godhead power, lift up bomb immediate order above world, more than 3,000 man’s measure miles.”
With no access to news and no outside contacts, Blackmore’s ex-wife and others in the FLDS in Bountiful aren’t questioning Jeffs’ assertion that half the world’s population was suddenly “lifted away.”
Instead, it reinforced for them that with The End coming, they, too, will be disappeared if they’re not good enough to be saved.
They’ve ramped up the number of hours they’re praying and listening to Jeffs’ rambling, mind-numbing sermons.
Children are terrified because they’re being told they, too, must shoulder the burden of being unworthy along with the adults.
Even before the revelation, the children had to write weekly letters to Jeffs proclaiming their loyalty to him and confessing their sins.
Every morning, they listen to an hour of Jeffs’ sermons before they do their schoolwork. Every night, they have another session of religious instruction.
They can’t have toys or play games. Jeffs outlawed those years ago. They must wear the so-called “holy underwear” with religious symbols embroidered on it and cover it with either long-sleeved shirts and pants or the pioneer-style dresses that can only be made with solid-coloured material.
Anything that their father gives them is thrown away — clothes, toys, even candy.
The children’s mother hands both Blackmore’s child support money and the monthly government child-benefit cheques over to the church.
In exchange, she gets food from the church’s storehouse in quantities prescribed by church leaders. She gets a small stipend of no more than $200 a month for any other expenses. And she and the children live rent-free in a church-owned house that is shared with another woman and her children. (During a 2015 court hearing that went in Blackmore’s favour, he had alleged physical abuse by both Maria and the other woman.)
It’s far from a good situation and Blackmore believes that Jeffs’ latest revelation ought to be the final inanity that tips the scales of justice in his favour.
Of course, he’s learned not to have much faith that judges and social workers really understand what’s going on in Bountiful.
Brandon Seth was 21 when he was instructed to go to Colorado City, Ariz. He didn’t know why he was called down to the FLDS stronghold. Nor did his father, who got a call as well. But about an hour before his half-sister married the then49-year-old Jeffs, Brandon Seth married Rose Maria Johnson. He had never met her before and found out only the night before the ceremony that they were to be husband and wife for “time and all eternity.”
(They later married in a civil ceremony, which cleared the way for Maria to get Canadian citizenship in 2005.)
Their marriage ended on a Friday night when Blackmore returned from his forestry job. The house that he’d built on church-owned property near Yahk had been stripped. His wife and four children were gone.
He had been deemed unworthy by the church’s leaders for asking so many questions. No one would tell him where his family was. Blackmore went door-to-door in Bountiful looking for them. He found them, but Maria refused let him in. He was an apostate.
Blackmore went straight to the RCMP and with their help, notified the border patrol to ensure that his wife didn’t try to flee with the children.
His first consent order was granted in April, 2012 — twohour visits every weekend, but they couldn’t leave Bountiful. In mid-August, Richard Blackmore — Brandon’s stepbrother and now the FLDS bishop — told him not to come back.
But he’s kept going to court again and again, and kept going back to Bountiful.
Blackmore wants it all to end.
If he had his way, all the children in Bountiful would go to public school and not be homeschooled or taught at the government-funded, private FLDS school as he was.
Blackmore testified against his father because he wants the marriage of underage girls to end along with the practice of polygamy. His fiancée, Rachel Jeffs, testified as well. Her father is the prophet.
“That whole way of living is not a good system,” Blackmore said. “It needs to stop.”
I WANT THEM TO HAVE A CHOICE — LIKE I DIDN’T HAVE — TO PICK AND CHOOSE THEIR CAREERS AND WHEN THEY WANT TO LEAVE. — BRANDON SETH BLACKMORE