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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The REAL Inside Story, November 14, 2007
This review is from: Banking on Heaven: Polygamy in the Heartland of the American West (DVD) (DVD-ROM)
Finally, the real story about the polygamists in Colorado City, AZ. This new documentary, the only film to get inside the cult, features, among others, Carolyn Jessop. Carolyn's book, "Escape", just hit the NYT Bestseller list. "Banking on Heaven" reinforces the horrors Ms. Jessop so clearly describes.
"Banking on Heaven" will shock and sicken the viewer. How can it be possible to have the Taliban in our own back yard?
This is a fast-paced and cutting-edge documentary, especially in light of the prophet Warren Jeffs recent conviction for child rape.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vividly shocking and disturbing; at the same time compelling, September 12, 2008
This review is from: Banking on Heaven: Polygamy in the Heartland of the American West (DVD) (DVD-ROM)
Banking on Heaven
I have just watched Dot Reidelbach's and Laurie Allen's documentary on the FLDS sect in Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah with shock and outrage. I thought I had seen everything when I read Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" and Carolyn Jessop's "Escape", but they pale in comparison to the cruelty and abuse women right here in America are enduring at the hands of misguided and, in cases, perverted men.
Interviews with escapees, exiles, lost boys, women who have been victims of incest, who have lost their children and have endured tragedy at which we recoil in horror, makes this must viewing. Here you will discover abuse in the name of religion, elected officials turning their backs on these women's cries for help, the Mormon Church profiting from payoffs by the very well-heeled FLDS sect.
Film footage takes the viewer on a journey to northern Arizona where polygamist men live like potentates in houses worth millions, but whose wives and children lack the bare necessities of life and who are made to go on welfare at the taxpayers' expense. Here, young teenage boys are thrust out into the world to fend for themselves with only the clothes on their backs. Why? Because there are not enough young women to go around for the older men who have been taught they need a minimum of three wives to attain heaven.
Banking on Heaven reveals the corruption in the FLDS, a corruption that extends to a polygamous law enforcement and higher.
This film will anger you, disturb you, maybe make you cry, but it should be required viewing so more people can see a tragedy occurring right here in the United States.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Theocracy isn't just for Iran anymore, July 4, 2008
This review is from: Banking on Heaven: Polygamy in the Heartland of the American West (DVD) (DVD-ROM)
I just finished watching this video after reading Escape. If what is happening to the women and children (girls become sex slaves for older men, excess boys, some barely past puberty, are taken to the streets of large cities in the region and tossed into the gutter like trash) does not make you angry, you are incapable of being outraged.
These are communities where violence and rape of children are normal activities, where God's spokesmen control the lives of everyone. Where happiness and love and knowledge are despised, and the only virtue is obedience.
We, the taxpayers, are funding this horror. Yet politicians in places where this goes on do little besides pay a little lip service. This may have something to do with the fact that many politicians in the region are members of the mainstream Mormon church, which would rather ignore the cruelty carried out in the name of its Prophet.
We listen to the stories of women and children who managed to escape. We listen to state officials, a few of whom are trying to do something, but somehow very little ever gets done.
It is amazing what you can get away with in America if you are a religion. If a bowling league was little more than a scam to bilk the taxpayer to fund the rape of little girls, it would probably, even in Utah and Arizona, be shut down pretty fast. But a church? No, that isn't child rape. It's our freedom of religion. It's our family values.
Listen to some of these women talk about their struggle to get their upbringing -- I would call it brainwashing -- out of their heads, and then try to tell yourself that religion isn't mind poison. For the women and children trapped in these communities, religious faith is a leash and collar around their necks.
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