A Merry Christmas Message from Goel

Some thoughts from the sick bed and the diseased wit

As I sit here at my computer pondering the latest difficulties, including a strain of COVID that apparently targets the GI tract-definitely targets the GI tract, if my experience is any indication and this really is COVID-I am reminded of the meme below.

We often mythologize the Devil and his minions, but as the meme says, those minions tend to be fat, retarded, infertile demon worshippers making no attempt to hide their true nature and all that is necessary is to oppose them.

Take Gordon Bowen, the alleged Church of Satan High Council Punisher, a closeted gay man who had to rely on pilfering homeless men and young teenage boys because he couldn’t handle the challenge of a functioning woman or another gay man. By all accounts, Gordon Bowen is a pathetic human being, one who had to rely on stealing credit from his coworkers at Bonneville, Ogilvy Mather, Young and Rubicam, and McCann Erickson in order to build his reputation as an advertising genius. When he was confronted by his peers about his endless lying and manipulation, Gordon Bowen was reduced to a quivering mess in the backseat of a car, whimpering that he’d stop playing both sides against the middle.

He might have been terrifying to prepubescent girls and children, or to adults he had compromising information on regarding their sexuality or their finances, but to everyone else, Gordon Bowen was a pitiful human being who had to recruit his male coworkers to sleep with him at night because he was scared of the dark. He constructed an alter ego that appeared dark and malevolent, one that studied the secret combinations and codes as part his ridiculously conceived mission for the Church, but when his gay lover had enough of him, Gordon Bowen wound up chained to a bed, his body smeared in feces. He was-and is-a degenerate who allegedly could not manage or control his sexual proclivities long enough to abstain from dialing gay escorts while he was watching his young daughter Lily.

The teenage boys who reportedly tore through his home in Scarsdale, New York, destroying the contents and smearing feces on the wall, demonstrated more courage and fortitude than any of the Church authorities over the years who indulged the pitiful excuse for a man that Bowen is, and yet today Bowen is held up as some archetype of evil when he is in fact extremely pedestrian. Gordon Bowen was not the creative director of the Salt Lake Olympics. The Olympic slogan he took credit for when he passed it off to Mitt Romney came from a restaurant menu. Bowen had nothing to do with the creation or execution of the Homefront series, which predated him and originated in Bonneville’s creative department among the men Bowen repeatedly plagiarized over his career.

Bowen was a homosexual bottom who had to pantomime as a woman during a sexual encounter with his girlfriend, wrapping his legs around her body to make her the man in the encounter. He was able to terrorize girls like Rachel, Eliza, and Katherine Hamblin, and he was able to bully a widow like Barbara Timothy recovering from the devastation of losing her husband and facing the prospect of life as a single mother, but Gordon Bowen was never a man. He was the type of boy who would have been deservingly mocked in a different era as a sissy, whose own cowardice and inability to deal with his internal issues gave rise to a sadistic bullying instinct in order to overcompensate for his own inadequacy.

Bowen was rejected by virtually every man he ever made overtures towards, from his secretary Michelle Avantario’s boyfriend to his coworker Lincoln Kevin Kelly to Adrian Pulfer. He wanted to be gay, but the objects of his affection did not want to reciprocate his advances. Like many men with his peculiar beliefs in Satan, Bowen pursued the Devil because he believed that the Devil offered power instead of the impotent, pitiful existence Bowen had known prior to his rise in the advertising world. People tolerated Bowen because of who he pretended to be, not because of anything he actually was. They came to his parties, which Bowen went into debt to throw, but they did not like or respect him. During his divorce from Barbara Timothy, dozens of his friends lined up to swear out affidavits detailing his dishonest and immoral conduct.

The only obvious reason anyone still endures Bowen’s presence in their lives is to keep him from revealing what he knows about their secrets.

The same was true of David Lee Hamblin, the psychologist who lost his license after preying on mentally ill women and boys in his practice. His wife Roselle Stevenson likely suffered a breakdown during her senior year of high school, which resulted in her finishing school in Scarsdale, New York with her Uncle Clyde and Aunt Nola during the second half of her senior year. David’s father Robert Lee Hamblin lost his position as the head of the Sociology Department, eventually being forced to decamp to a second tier sociology program at the University of Arizona.

The stories of David Hamblin performing for CS members by demonstrating his supposed psychological mastery over his children are numerous. The fact that CS members sat around while a father demonstrated his ability to make his children dance seductively and perform sexually is an indication of the pathetic quality of David Lee Hamblin, who sought personal and professional validation from an audience of people whose inclinations ran towards watching children pantomime stripteases. These were people who existed on the fringes, unable to obtain the success and prestige that characterized their families.

Lee Bennion dropped out of college, failing to finish her degree until years had elapsed. Joe Bennion eked out a hardscrabble existence in the nowhere land that was Spring City. Joe and Lee Bennion hailed from families full of doctors and successful individuals, but they lacked the discipline and the ability to achieve the same outcomes. Brian Kershisnik started out as an aspiring potter, studying under Joe Bennion, only to realize that he had no talent with ceramics and venture over to Lee Bennion’s studio to learn how to paint. The result was a career spent painting crude, two-dimensional figures on canvas that resemble something a small child might have etched out in their parents’ garage.

David Leavitt’s brother was the governor, but Leavitt relied on an appointment for his first public position as Juab County Attorney. In order to protect his brother’s flank, it fell to David Leavitt to prosecute polygamist Tom Green, whose public advocacy of polygamy was ill-timed during the lead up to the Salt Lake Olympics. David Leavitt was the spare brother, whose career would be sacrificed to save Mike Leavitt from immolation. David Leavitt lost his re-election campaign in Juab County after convicting Tom Green.

He managed to become the county attorney in Utah County, only to lose his campaign for Attorney General. During the time he affiliated with David Hamblin, Leavitt’s wife Chelom reportedly developed an infatuation with David Hamblin, showing up to his home office in Provo to engage in a sexual relationship with Hamblin. David Leavitt was the second most prominent public figure in his immediate family, and the second option in his own marriage. He was cuckolded by David Lee Hamblin. When Hamblin faced exposure a second time in 2023, and the CS had to contend with the repercussions, David Leavitt was trotted out for a bit of theater a second time during a press conference that ended any chance he might have had for a future in politics while also incinerating his reputation.

David Leavitt was expendable. After a raid in Juab County uncovered a family stowed away in his cabin and a potential trafficking operation, David Leavitt was forced to decamp to Scotland under the guise of remodeling a decrepit castle.

It may perhaps seem like an oversimplification, but the Church of Satan members named in the Hamblin Victims Statements profile like utterly incompetent maladroits. The allegations against these individuals are gut wrenching, but the victimology reveals them to be impotent cowards. They preyed upon castaway children, boys from polygamist groups who were sold by their families or girls with physical disabilities. They tormented their own members who ran afoul of the group, people who couldn’t go to the police or the Church because they had participated in rape and murder.

The CS has not succeeded because of any especial competency or malevolent power. They have succeeded because their opposition has chosen an artifice of polite propriety over simple, blunt honesty. When Gordon Bowen stood up in sacrament meetings and praised his wife’s skills as a lover before the congregation, he should have been mocked for his inappropriate and melodramatic affectations. It wouldn’t have been mean or inappropriate. Bowen’s conduct was not appropriate for a sacrament meeting, and censure and ridicule were the appropriate responses. If necessary, he should have been physically escorted from the lectern.

There is a standard of propriety, rooted in Scripture and sound doctrine and truth. It is not rude or vindictive to stand up for that standard in everyday application when faced with the high strangeness of men like David Lee Hamblin, Gordon Bowen, David Leavitt, and Joe Bennion. It is instead the most loving thing one can do, to confront the freaks and give them an incentive to behave normally and biblically. In our culture and in our Church, we have become afraid to call weird and inappropriate conduct for what it is, lest we be seen as heartless and mean.

It is far crueler to let a cringeworthy individual persist in cringe inducing behavior, to suppress one’s natural-and appropriate-reaction to such conduct instead of giving a voice to it. Very often, the Adversary and his followers will adopt the posture of the fringe, the downtrodden, and the bullied to cultivate sympathy as a cover for their freakish, cringeworthy, and downright disgusting activities. There is a reason why the natural reaction to certain conduct is one of revulsion, because the natural sense of what is right and wrong is deeply ingrained within us all. We know what is obscene and weird when we see it, and we should trust our instincts when we encounter those whose actions are strange, weird, and freakishly inappropriate.

If they won’t respond to civil attempts to correct their inappropriate conduct, stronger correction may be required. Subtlety is not always efficacious, and neither is kindness.

It is a damning indictment of the Church and the surrounding communities that the CS members named in the Hamblin Victims Statements were not discreet. They were not hiding their nature. David Lee Hamblin had a mental patient living in his house with his children, and he publicly advertised it. He had members of his ward and stake who held no psychological training coming to his house to participate in sessions with that patient.

Joe Bennion, Paul Larsen, and others openly affiliated with an apostate, excommunicated Latter Day Saint named James Warren Mooney and they embraced his use of peyote in sweat lodges. They publicly espoused their own use of peyote, and IRA has become aware that bishops were allegedly recommending attendance at the healing circles and sweat lodges hosted by Mooney, Hamblin, and Bennion. Mooney was a self-confessed alcoholic and manic-depressive.

In the name of polite decorum, Saints abdicated their God-given responsibility to oppose such nonsense for the idiocy it so clearly was and is. As a consequence, these individuals were free to push the boundaries further and further, and if the Hamblin sisters are telling the truth, the failure to forcefully and forcibly confront the likes of Joe Bennion, Paul Larsen, David Leavitt, and David Hamblin led to children being raped and abused. These men and women were not hiding. They were operating in plain sight.

Sound doctrine and Scripture exist for a reason: to provide clarity and guidance in everyday life, but both are useless if individuals lack the will to call things what they are. Over the holidays, I’d like to challenge every reader and Saint to consider this, and to go forth into the New Year renewed with the notion that this is not a hard battle. It’s the easiest thing to see, and it’s the easiest thing to fight. These people deserve your ridicule and censure, and it is impossible to be too mean to them given what they represent. They are not victims. They are apostate infiltrators who have done incalculable damage to the Church by taking advantage of the kindness and mercy of members who meant well.

As the meme says, they are fat, retarded, infertile demon worshippers. Treat them as such, with their rainbow flags and their pandering embraces of whatever flavor of the moment is being pushed by cable news. They deserve your ridicule, and they deserve to be excluded and even bullied because they are weird and inappropriate. The price of membership in the Restored Church is that you play by the rules, and these people clearly don’t. It is entirely appropriate to expel them and exclude them before they rot the Church from within even more than they already have. We are also entitled to say what we will and will not tolerate in our communities and neighborhoods.

Christ was not a bully when He drove the moneylenders out of the Temple, and He was not an extremist when He said he came into the world with a sword to divide it.¹ The Christian faith is uncompromising, and Christ clearly says that if you love your father, mother, son, or daughter more than you love Him, you are not worthy of Him. Our foes will be in our own households, because darkness has nothing but enmity with light.

We all have relatives and friends whose lives do not match up with the commandments of Christ. It’s heartbreaking, but you cannot love someone into repentance. If you could, you’d never have to spank or punish your children. Sometimes, you have to kick some ass. In that spirit, I’d like to encourage the gentle readers of this blog to bring back bullying when they encounter the inveterate freaks that have infested our neighborhoods and our Church.

We all start out a little weird and out there in life, and thank God for the spicy old ladies and wooden tongued men who smooth out our rough edges so that we can grow up knowing what normal, healthy, and appropriate interactions and behaviors are. This is an easy battle if you’re willing to simply say the obvious when you encounter the high strangeness. It’s not complicated.

When Annie Pratt and her mother encountered a strange and sickly boy before dinner at Gordon Bowen’s home, they could have confronted Gordon about having a boy he wasn’t related to living under his roof. They could have called the police and DCFS. They could have contacted the bishop and the stake president that very night. Instead, they looked at each other and said “That’s not right,” and then went on to have dinner with Gordon Bowen.

No one knows what happened to that boy as a result.

When the school administrators and paraprofessionals noticed the chronic truancy of the Hamblin girls, they could have initiated welfare checks and legal proceedings against Roselle and David Hamblin. They could have had social workers and school counselors interviewing the Hamblin girls to find out why they were always late to school and frequently absent. If they had done so, they might have found out about the abuse before the late Nineties or the 2003 custody hearing.

Every Latter Day Saint ward I have ever attended, like every Southern Baptist Church I have ever attended as a child, has at least one mother hen with a will of iron and an eagle’s eye. Most wards and churches and parishes have multiple such women, all colluding to police their congregations with ruthless vigilance. Let them do it, with acid tongues and wicked, pithy wits. There are plenty of older men, hardened by life and marriage, who can do the same thing, if only they are free to do so without having to worry about being classified as bigoted jerks.

The likes of David Lee Hamblin and Joe Bennion would be nothing more than sawdust after encounters with such men and women, who do not suffer weird or inappropriate behavior. The men and women who carved a livable existence out of the frontiers of Zion were not soft. They hung and shot those who behaved like David Lee Hamblin and Joe Bennion and Gordon Bowen, and they were right.

Christ came to offer grace, but those who reject grace with their depravity are entitled to wrath. The problem that we have today is that we have falsely conceptualized mercy as a panacea for even the most degenerate behaviors, and we have bought into a notion of forgiveness that extends to those who do not request forgiveness and make no sincere effort at contrition. You have to say you’re sorry, and ask for forgiveness, and then be sorry and turn away from the conduct you engaged in that caused harm or offense in order to confirm that you are sorry.

In a year and four months of working on the Hamblin case, I have encountered example after example of a false grace extended to those who made a request of forgiveness from their victims but demonstrated no real contrition or change either before or afterwards. Their victims were obligated to accept the apology, to forgive, to forget, and to move on, but the abusers were free to continue abusing with impunity. This is wrong.

We’re right to be mean to those who act like David Lee Hamblin and David Leavitt and Joe Bennion. This is an easy battle as long as we don’t accept the terms that they impose on the debate or the argument, and those terms are clearly unbiblical and dishonest. I challenge everyone to stop making this more complicated than it needs to be, because these men did plenty of things that would have warranted excommunication and disfellowship before you even get to the allegations of child rape and murder.

We simply failed to take the easy battle given to us by Heavenly Father, and now we are faced with a far harder battle. That battle is nothing compared to the suffering these men inflicted on their victims over five separate decades.

1. Matthew 10:34.