On August 12, 2004, purported "polygamist," Tom Green, stood before a Utah parole board and "apologized." The board has until September 26th to consider the possibility of his early release from prison. 
 
Since his convictions in 2001, Green has been in prison, serving his five-years-to-life sentence for felony child rape and five year sentence for welfare fraud. His sentences for four counts of bigamy are being concurrently served, so he will actually serve no real time for any bigamy charges. 
 
In front of the parole board, Green purported to be sorry for "marrying" his very under-aged "step-daughter." 
 
While pro-polygamists are glad to hear he said that, they do not trust it for a moment. 
 
Tom Green has repeatedly proven that he will say and do anything to manipulate people into believing anything he says. Normal pro-polygamists who are familiar with the story are typically quick to point out that Green cannot be trusted. 
 
Indeed, the welfare fraud conviction also outrages pro-polygamists, especially how Green sought to excuse himself. Not only did Green defraud the welfare system, but he was oh-too-clever in trying to self-justify it. 
 
Namely, Green would try to manipulate a person into feeling sorry for him. He would suggest that he had "needed" the welfare after a horrible fire which killed one of his babies. That kind of a heart-wrenching story causes any normal human being to naturally be emotionally touched by it. No one disputes that a baby's death by fire is a horrifying tragedy indeed. 
 
But what Green would not reveal when telling the story was that the fire and the welfare crime occurred in completely separate years. The two events were so far apart in time that they were 100% unconnected.  
 
Shamelessly, Green would fraudulently exploit that profound tragedy of his baby's horrible death, to play on people's emotional reactions, in order to self-justify his fraud -- even though the two events had nothing to do with each other. 
 
The ability to deceive like that is, as they say, downright scary. The guy clearly has a pathology of lying. 
 
No wonder that polygamists want nothing to do with him. 
 
But then again, pro-polygamists have repeatedly been saying that Tom Green is no "poster boy" for polygamy in any way whatsoever. 
 
Green apparently had considered himself married to ten women. Half of them, though, are no longer with him. Indeed, many have left him. The only ones still with Green are the ones he "married" very young, while the "married-as-adult" women are gone. Of those remaining five, four of them are two different pair of sisters he "married" in their mid-teens. The last remaining one was the "step-daughter" with whom he consummated when she was thirteen - the "marriage" for which he was convicted of child rape. Most horrendously of all, three of those remaining five "wives" were what he would call "step-daughters," born of two of the adult mothers who are no longer with him. 
 
That does not represent polygamy. 
 
That's just harvesting women, copulating with their daughters, and falsely exploiting the cause of good polygamy in order to self-justify his pattern of manipulating teenage girls to have conjugal relations with him. 
 
Nevertheless, Tom Green wants to be viewed as a persecuted would-be "polygamy martyr." Polygamy supporters say, "God forbid." 
 
Pro-polygamists view Tom Green as the "polygamy Tim McVeigh." To such normal, freely-consenting, adult pro-polygamists, Green is a self-seeking hero-wannabe. He has been as similarly destructive to the polygamy movement as that which the hero-wannabe Timothy McVeigh was to the early 1990s "militia movement" with the horrifying Oklahoma City bombing. 
 
Similarly, Tom Green's patently false representation of polygamy threatened to destroy the polygamy movement. The devastation he has done to normal polygamous families are severe and incalculable. 
 
Understandably, pro-polygamists want that pathological liar away from the public eye forever. 
 
And that re-iterates back to the central issue regarding Green's purported "apology." 
 
Was Tom Green telling the truth? Can the parole board trust his new found sorrow? Is Green really sorry? 
 
Pro-polygamists have a simple litmus test, and they will be watching.  
 
From now on, will Tom Green authorize even one media interview about himself? Will he do anything else to keep himself in the public eye or in "history" regarding polygamy ever again? 
 
The next time he does anything like that, Tom Green will prove that he is still the same pathological liar and hero-wannabe. It will prove that he really did lie to that parole board and to the world. 
 
If sincere, he'll disappear. 


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Bibliographic URLs:

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0813prosecutingpolygamy-ON.html 
 
http://www.truthbearer.org/media/talksport/