This was not your typical tax court case, to put it mildly.
The case was finally heard in early 2012 after frequent delays and a failed attempt by Blackmore and his legal team to win a sweeping ban on evidence, publication and some witness testimony. In the end he gave his own testimony under subpoena as a “compelled witness” with the expectation that his statements in this civil case can’t incriminate him in any future criminal trials.
Blackmore arrived each day at the Vancouver courtroom during the four weeks of hearing wearing a natty black suit and clutching a black-bound Book of Mormon. Campbell and federal Justice Department lawyers were bound by an equally unbending tome: the Canadian Income Tax Act.
“These appeals introduced unique and novel legal and factual issues that are not normally before this court,” Campbell wrote with judicial understatement. She wrote how she had to acquaint herself with the intricacies of Mormonism, Episcopal polity and apostolic success. “Many terms, such as ‘The Priesthood Work,’ ‘United Effort Plan,’ or ‘United Effort Plan Trust,’ ‘Law of Consecration’ and ‘Tithing’ were either completely new to me or I had no working knowledge of them.”
Her patience was tried by Blackmore’s often evasive or vague answers, and his convoluted spiritual explanations, frequently delivered sotto voice. He grudgingly admitted to having 21 “plural wives,” though he had trouble remembering the name of at least one. He fathered 47 children during the five years under review, which may help explain his inattention to the intricacies of the tax act. By some estimates he has more than 120 children.
Bountiful doesn’t appear on any B.C. map. It is the name that the fundamentalists call the community based at Lister, just a kilometre north of the U.S. border and seven kilometres from Creston, where some of the sect’s business dealings are based. Many operate under the Blackmore-controlled company J.R. Blackmore and Sons, which include several fencepost-manufacturing plants in B.C. and Alberta, as well as various logging and farm-related operations.
Takes a while to set up "several fencepost-manufacturing plants" and "various logging and farm-related operations", don't it? While producing 120 children? I've only got two thoughts:
1) Child sexual abuse or no child sexual abuse, nobody really wanted to catch these guys too badly. I've never heard a word about them on Michelle Malkin's Hot Air, Breitbart, or ("21st Century Relationships") Instapundit.
AND/OR
2) When it comes to acceptable ways of building wealth, they might be right that black people have been going about this thing ALL WRONG,...
