They would excommunicate him in a hot minute if he got on YouTube and made videos showing why the church is a fraud and didn't recognize the church leaders as real representatives of God and the priesthood.
They won't excommunicate him for protesting the government even if he does some illegal things like breaking into a wildlife compound. He will just be a Mormon idiot in jail.
Heck. It's Mormon old school stuff attacking the government and spending time in jail. That's what Brigham Young and Joseph Smith lived.
Lot's Wife Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > When will the church excommunicate that fool?
Never. He appeals to the core membership of the church. It is more likely they would call him as a GA than they would excommunicate him. Besides, the only way to be excommunicated is to express compassion and solidarity with the LGBTQ community, or to expose the truth about church history.
Agreed in general. But I don't think Bundy appeals to the core of the LDS church--at least not the whole core.
The church's problem is that its core is bifurcated between the Bundyites and the traditional conservatives who value law and order. The church doesn't excommunicate him because it doesn't want to deepen and expose that rift.
So you are right about their inaction. But they will pay a price for their silence, too.
Ammon Bundy is a walking insult to the rule of law, a concept that is supposed to be fundamental to how this country operates. You don't just get to show up armed and either reverse government decisions outright, or intimidate the powers that be into reversing themselves. It is certainly fast and efficient, but it is not how we do things. Except for Ammon.
1) pointed at rifle at federal agents when they attempted to seize his dad's cattle after two decades of grazing them on public land without paying the rental fee for using public land. The agents didn't see that this was worth a gun fight, so retreated and just put a lien on the herd. That worked.
2) He decided to protest a jail sentence for a couple ranchers in Oregon by occupying a federal wildlife refuge in the middle of nowhere at gunpoint. The "rule of law" way of trying to overturn a judgement is an appeals court. They gave up the siege after the plumbing got plugged up.
3) Antti-mask protests in western Idaho a few months ago. I don't even remember what he did there. At some point I stop paying attention to the nonsense.
4) This incident, where a group affiliated with Bundy is forcibly overruling the decisions of a water conservancy district and opening the irrigation gates on a reservoir. They are basically deciding who gets the water, and of course, who doesn't, without regard to law, contractual obligations that might exist, health and safety requirements, yada yada yada. When you don't like a decision, there is a "rule of law" way to get decisions changed. Just showing up and opening the gates ain't it.
I understand some people consider him a hero, but this is a minority opinion. Getting your way at the threatened or actual point of a gun is not how we resolve disputes. If he wants to protest, fine. If he wants to get arrested, also fine. Perhaps he can get Jane Fonda's autograph if they end up in the same jail at the same time. She's in Mahnomen, MN this week protesting a pipeline. BTW, Keystone XL just got cancelled. That's how you win a dispute. It took ten years.
In the meantime, most people are going to read about his antics and roll their eyes, wondering when he will get arrested again. And why he is still Mormon.
Ammon Bundy is yet another pretend individualist who thinks he's independent even as he sponges off public resources and government expenditures. He's a caricature, not a man.
I heard about the lien in a presentation by Pat Shea, now SLC attorney, was Director of BLM from 1997 thru 2000. I poked around on the internet, and couldn't find any mention of a lien one way or the other.
I did, however, find some information that I was not aware of. Cliven and Ammon and the gang are part of the sovereign citizens movement, a domestic terrorist movement whose preferred weapon is blizzards of legal paperwork.
I knew someone who was involved in that movement back when the Montana Freemen were a thing. Incidentally, a number of the Montana Freemen were from Utah, as were a pretty good chunk of the people at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Utah punches way above its weight in anti-government nutcases.
Sovereign Citizens would do things like refuse to recognize the authority of courts that had American flags with yellow fringe, because that made them admiralty courts that only had authority in maritime cases. I kid you not. They'd refuse to pay taxes because they have no income because federal reserve notes are not real money. (notice they never say fed reserve notes are not real money, so take all you want, hell if they care)
They would do things like write up their own "judgement" against a person, often a judge, and then use the quarter million dollar judgement as collateral to create a bank-like entity, then write $250K checks on their "bank account", for $20K fines, and demand $230 in change back, and they would treat the $230K they were "owed" as another asset they could borrow against. They would also sell shares in lawsuits they were filing (give us $5 thousand now and we will give you back $18 thousand when we win our suit. People actually fell for this)
I kid you not on that either. I had a classmate at BYU who filed a suit agains IBM claiming he owned the patent to some data structure, and he sold shares in the suit. He was a student then. He has a short wiki entry that sounds like he had a career of questionable business practices. I won't mention his name to save CZ the possibility of a law suit. He made a career of filing lawsuits against anyone badmouthing him. A real piece of work.
Anyway, I was not aware the Bundys were associated with the Sovereign Citizen movement. That explains a few things.
From the eenews link Anonymous Muser posted above - and this sounds very "soverreign citizeny":
It's not only the federal government that could aim to collect from Bundy in the near future: The anti-government activist owes the Center for Biological Diversity $92,000 for legal fees.
Nevada state Judge Jim Crockett awarded the payment for attorneys' fees to the environmental organization last year, in connection to a lawsuit Bundy filed seeking to force the federal government to turn over ownership of 56 million acres of public lands to state and local control.
CBD attorneys intervened in the case, in which Bundy argued that only individual states and not the U.S. government may own land. In his ruling against Bundy, Crockett criticized the lawsuit as "simply delusional" (Greenwire, April 10, 2019).
Following the ruling, CBD Executive Director Kierán Suckling told E&E News that his organization was weighing whether to seek a lien against Bundy's ranch on the Virgin River (Greenwire, July 30, 2020).
But in a statement this week, Suckling said a decision on how to procure the funds remains under review, noting that much of Bundy's land is secured by trusts run by his children.
"We don't think this shell game actually works to shield them, but are researching," Suckling noted.
I think a lot of mormons are very similar to Ammon. Conservatism without conserving anything. I was talking to one of my utra mormon anti masker friends and what is most annoying to her about the whole covid thing was that they were forced to wear a mask and actually be concerned about other people's health.
Forget about overspending of tax dollars, expansion of eic tax credits, ban on foreclosures, The recent mantra from the news of supposedly lifting millions of kids out of poverty, at someone else's expense to the tune of trillions of dollars, our expanding national debt to China.
Ammon interprets the Constitution as meaning liberty to do whatever benefits him, he'll bleed the beast and take any thing from anyone he can get. The Mormon's are the same way, It says it right there in the proclamation to the family, "we encourage governments everywhere to enact policies that benefit families" It should have read 'we encourage families to pay their own bills and leave the rest of us alone.'
Narcissistic attention whore. He doesn't care about anyone but himself. Hell, he doesn't even care about his kids. Remember that football game he screwed them out of by being an ass?