I’m getting this low, thudding migraine that’s starting to curl up the left side of my face. Every time I see the letters FLDS all together, or hear the name “Eldorado” the pain slightly increases. I’m so embarrassed to be a Texan. Why must we elect pretentious, xenophobic, provincial busybodies to the state legislature? Why do people have to get their panties in such a wad just because somebody is doing something a little differently?
Before going into what’s going on now, I’d like to cast attention upon the actions of the state legislature in 2005, which raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 for girls, primarily to bedevil the FLDS community in Eldorado. This was just one of a number of legislative and economic tactics used to try to force the YFZ ranch denizens to depart “voluntarily”.
While I recognize that these people are “different from us”, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with polygamy or marriage after puberty. Maybe I’ve been exposed to too many anthropology texts as a youth, but variations on how people mate are myriad and we all seem to still be easily repopulating the world. I suspect that this is nothing I need to worry about.
Except now, this is suddenly my problem. The State has taken upon itself to separate these families based on prejudice and possibly malfeasance. Now, tax dollars will have to be shifted away from the minuscule funding of some road project somewhere and used instead to house and feed people who had originally been entirely self sufficient. Because they were a little weird. “Who’s gonna save the children?”
So now the entirely overburdened CPS and foster care systems are faced with placing into homes and communities an unprecedented number of people who had all been part of a single family community up until last week. Thanks to this entirely ludicrous crusade a few state officials have leveled against those freeky Mormons, there’s going to be dozens, if not hundreds of actually abused, abandoned, and orphaned kids who won’t have places to go while all these other poor souls are being institutionalized.
At least they didn’t burn the building down before they got the kids out. We can thank the ATF for staying home this time.
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22 Responses:
April 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I absolutely agree. The latest sensationalist headline says that authorities found a BED inside the temple, where men had SEX with UNDERAGE GIRLS. (Nevermind that the mainstream LDS church members consummate their marriages in the temple, too.)
What keeps bothering me off every time I think of it is the fact that (except for the polygamy part) their lifestyle is exactly like that of the American pioneers who settled our nation. A hundred years ago religious piety, corporal punishment, and teen marriage were the rule, not the exception. Those are freakin’ family values.
While I despise their patriarchal pseudo-Christian ideology, those FLDS people are practicing sacred sex in their temple beds. And I am down with that.
April 10th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
The ATF stayed away because they didn’t need to justify their existence to the moneylenders in Congress, as they did when the Waco massacre happened.
No word yet on who — if anyone — the kids will be placed with. If they aren’t put into Mormon homes I think that the regular LDS folks in Utah should sue the state for religious discrimination. They have the buck$ to do it, and it might wake some folks up.
If the child and spousal abuse charges turn out to be bogus, or the warrant is dirty, or both, then the FLDS should sue.
Another snarky thing that the Leg did, in re FLDS, is increase the time one had to be a Texas resident before one could run for office. They were afraid that these folks might take over the county, I guess.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I still take the view that religion, like alcohol, should be illegal for kids until the age of majority. *
Sorry, folks, but there appears to have been at least a certain amount of what can only be considered non-consensual rape being perpetrated by these bozos. Unless you really believe that women and children can legally be the sexual property of men whether they consent or not, I don’t see any great need to defend these folks. I would hope that no actual civil rights are being violated here, but state and federal laws are what they are and at least some of them appear to have been broken wholesale. Sorry. I’m totally against the pot laws too, but I’m neither surprised nor particularly outraged when someone gets busted for having a plantation. It’s the risk you run.
And I have to say, if these bozos decided to take over my community (and yes, they were explicit in stating that intention, which is why they moved people from all over the country into the compound and registered them to vote in the county), I’d sure vote to do whatever was necessary to stop them, you betcha. I know too much Mormon history to want them running around my part of the woods in any great quantity. Ask the few remaining non-Scientology residents of Clearwater, FL what it’s like to live with your city government controlled by a sectarian religious enterprise.
[EDIT: Ok, that first comment sounds overly snarky if taken literally so let me clarify my opinion. Religion, like alcohol or LSD, is a potent substance that should only be used sparingly and with forethought and context by young people, and like alcohol or LSD, should never, ever be forced on children against their will.]
April 10th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I’m a little bemused by the German government’s use of Stasi tactics to eliminate the Scientologists and other groups the German government accuses of using Gestapo tactics on their members. I suppose the only reason they haven’t lowered the boom on the Co$ yet is that they’re waiting to see how Cruse’s film about Claus von Stauffenberg comes out. =(:o)
One way to hem these groups in would be to eliminate the tax exempt status for religious organizations. Lack of asshole behavior on the group’s part would result in not getting audited every year by the IRS.
As far as restricting children’s access to religion the way their access to drugs is, that’s not very practical in so far as religion is one of the pillars of a community, and continuity of the religion is necessary for the continuity of the community as it exists. There are lots of examples of asshole missionaries wrecking havoc in primitive societies by trashing the religion. Alcoholism and other problems usually soon follow.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
The German government’s extreme intolerance of Scientology comes from a judicial finding (one that is accurate, as far as my distant but not totally uninvolved or unaware knowledge goes) that it is not a religious enterprise but a corporate one, and a corporate one that has comitted tax fraud and other economic non-nos against both the German government and a large number of individual German citizens.
Heck, they were caught breaking into and robbing IRS offices here in the US - a case that was ultimately dropped under pressure from President Clinton, who perhaps didn’t want to alienate his Hollywood contacts.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
If the German courts have so ruled then what is Interior Minister Schäuble waiting for?
As far as the IRS case goes, that can be reopened — assuming that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out.
It could be argued — and Richard Dawkins may already have done so — that all religions are money-making outfits that fleece their members. Germany can make that kind of call because it has an official state religion. Any attempt to define “religion” in this country won’t pass constitutional muster, hence my suggestion to just dump tax exempt status for the whole lot of them — and that’s for taxes on all levels of government.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
f the German courts have so ruled then what is Interior Minister Schäuble waiting for?
As far as the IRS case goes, that can be reopened — assuming that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out.
It could be argued — and Richard Dawkins may already have done so — that all religions are money-making outfits that fleece their members. Germany can make that kind of call because it has an official state religion. Any attempt to define “religion” in this country won’t pass constitutional muster, hence my suggestion to just dump tax exempt status for the whole lot of them — and that’s for taxes on all levels of government.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
i hate arguing on the internet…
if you call marrying children off to strangers (against their will i believe indoctrinated youth aren’t allowed to have a will) is just being different, i just don’t know.
the head of the church is told by “god” who they should marry, the children have no say in this.
sexist
April 10th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Colorado City, AZ, where many of Eldorado’s residents came from, used to be known as Short Creek, the site of yet another raid in the 50s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Creek_raid
That one was to enforce the polygamy laws. Probably more trivia than anything useful. Or not: http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/10/polygamist.towns/
As for Warren Jeffs, he seems like a very bad man, but I think this commenter at the Salt Lake Tribune says what you’re saying, just a little differently:
As a Mormon, I find it interesting that so many other Mormons aggressively condemn polygamy with a zealousness that seems to be connected more with our own contradictory past with polygamy than out of a genuine interest for victims of forced underage marriages.
When I was at BYU, I got into a discussion on polygamy in an African literature class. We were reading a French African novel written by an abandoned polygamist wife (I highly recommend this book, the translation of the novel is “A Very Long Letter”) and I felt like the acknowledgement of our polygamist heritage caused unease among my Mormon classmates. I sort of felt like we skirted the tough questions and reduced our discussion to the typical PR effort in the church which seeks to distance Mormons from polygamist offshoots such as the FLDS church.
I do think it is necessary to point out again and again that Mormons are no longer polygamists. But I’m afraid that Mormons, who were once persecuted for practicing polygamy, have now become the new persecutors and are doing so in order to appear more mainstream. Part of the reason I think this way is because Warren Jeffs, prophet of the FLDS church, received a disproportionately harsh sentence for accomplice to rape. I do not wish to downplay the seriousness of sexual abuse, but I followed the details of this case it seemed to me that Warren Jeffs became the scapegoat for the angst that the LDS Church felt at being unable to put polygamy behind it due confusions between FLDS and the LDS (i.e. Mormon) Church.
I think that polygamy should be legal among consenting adults. It goes without saying that polygamous relationships should respect the natural human rights of individuals and no coercion or abuse should exist in these polygamous relationships. Of course, full prosecution should take place with those polygamists that violate the law in regards to statutory rape and take “spiritual wives” or who abuse government programs such as welfare and Medicaid.
This action by Texas does sort of set a dangerous precedent where religious probable cause is used in order to justify the widespread action of the state. That being said, it appears that the suspicions of Texas’s Child Protective Services were correct in that at least some (and no one has released any numbers yet) underage girls had given birth or are currently pregnant. But the argument that FLDS religion, because of its doctrine, jeopardizes human rights and therefore the state is justified in removing children from their families sets up a frightening precedent in which any government organization could conceivably make a similar argument against a religious group or societal group whose practices they disagree with (i.e. gays and lesbians, home schoolers, atheists, agnostics, Mormons, Muslims, communists, etc.)
http://166.70.44.77/comments/read_comments.asp?ref=8876169&PageIndex=2
April 10th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
The point of my post wasn’t to say that I thought polygamy or teen marriage was neato, but that I felt the State had acted inappropriately and without appropriate consideration for the lives they would disrupt.
Given the amount of national play this story has received, I have no doubt that any accusation of inappropriate behavior would have been well described — yet the one detailed account comes from a victim they now cannot find. I have read that the children look healthy, even loved. From what I understand, this is probably the first time many of them had been away from the ranch. This whole episode has probably been shocking and unpleasant for all of them. The more time this goes on, the more damage will be accrued at the hands of several State agencies that do not have the capacity to handle this situation.
That being said, I don’t know exactly what was going on at the YFZ ranch. It appears that after Jeffs took over from his father, he made some changes in policy and I’m not up on that group’s history enough to know if these were modernizations or not. Obviously there are at least twelve who feel that he was up to something nasty enough to put him in jail.
On the face of it, his community is not one I would want my daughter involved in. Inasmuch as a group like this does have the potential to seriously skew local (and state) politics, I understand the source of the ire coming from the state legislature. Sure, these may be some righteously unpleasant folks, but without proof that more malfeasance remains we just don’t have an excuse to arbitrarily execute law.
Additionally, I’d like to address the phrase ‘marrying children off to strangers’. As far as I know, the youngest girls married by this FLDS sect were 14, which, until a few years ago, was the age of consent in Texas. Now my lawyering is amateurish at best, but intuitively, someone who has reached the age of consent is certainly no longer a ‘child’. For that matter, anyone past puberty is, by any classification, no longer a child. Let’s be clear that we’re not talking about toddlers or preschoolers, but mostly grown, freshly molded, young adults. They may not be adults in the sense that we would put them to work in a factory or that we would send them off to war, but they are certainly not children. Conflating teen marriage with child abuse is inappropriate and unnecessarily inflammatory.
Teen marriage and arranged marriage have long been traditional in most of the world throughout nearly all of written history. Only in our day is marriage after 20 and “marriage for love” even something people can consider “normal” and not “bizarre” or “anti-family”. I can hardly look at a group attempting to maintain a culture from one or two hundred years ago and say that those people are wrong for doing what their ancestors did. Anacronistic, patriarchal, maybe even fascist they may be, but not “wrong”. Because if they are wrong then my great-great grandparents and all of their ancestors were wrong about something they all did in their day as a matter of family honor.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
not to be snarky, but i want to talk about this again when zoe is “legal”
i’m not going to argue semantics… people know when something is wrong, they can rationalize it all they want to, it still feels wrong. teenagers are more than children than adults. they have low impulse control and very rarely make good decions for themselves. i know this part is a big learning experience, i don’t think getting married off like cattle is a learning experience.
tradition is not always the way to go… we wiped our asses with our hands and didn’t bathe for a long time either.
knowing it is time to move away from tradition does not have to color the past or taint those in the past. i have great pride in my ancestors, but it is no longer neccessary or appropriate to mimic their lives/choice. time marches on.
culture should be stories, music, food, etc. not how you can treat your women as objects.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Water torture on infants sounds pretty nasty. But the San Angelo Sheriff had a mole on the inside at YFZ, so if there was lots of good dirt like that, why did they rely on their mystery victim? Without people coming forward with videotape, this kind of thing is really hard to prove judicially.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Has it occurred to you that the reason arranged marriages occurred was because teens don’t make good decisions for themselves? Once puberty occurs, it is very difficult to keep teens from having sex. Marriage is simply one mechanism by which many cultures deal with offspring and create interfamilial relationships. Arranged marriages usually provided the best opportunity for economically successful matches and could even be used to improve the lot of both families. By marrying one’s teenage daughters to good families, one could hope to provide for the grandchildren that came from the arrangement. This seems like strong, pro-family behavior to me.
Would I like the opportunity to pick Zoe’s husband when she came of age, rather than whatever nutball she happens to run into? You bet. There’s no way I’d get to make that choice, but I sure do see the value in it.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Yeeeeah, but they didn’t usually get shuffled around by the all-powerful leader as a method of punishment. I see what you’re saying, but using this particular group led by that particular leader and his friends might not be the best support for your case. Which is not to say that there aren’t some elements throughout the recent history of the group (i.e. the last few years) that don’t smack of “we don’t like you polygamist types ’round here” which as a knee-jerk reaction may or may not be appropriate. “Sarah” is likely in custody but not saying that she’s the one who made the calls. Discussing the appropriateness of the actions of the community is a little premature without further questioning of her, the people who live there, and people who used to live there.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:16 am
A hundred years ago religious piety, corporal punishment, and teen marriage were the rule, not the exception.
So were slavery, and wife beating (the adult version of corporal punishment.) Women were treated like property- those teen marriages were often conducted like horse trades.
those FLDS people are practicing sacred sex in their temple beds. And I am down with that.
Even if some of the participants are being raped? I’m not down with that. While I agree that the current invasion seems spurious, numerous witnesses have testified that rape and coercion are the general way of things among this particular sect.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:18 am
If they aren’t put into Mormon homes I think that the regular LDS folks in Utah should sue the state for religious discrimination.
Why? I don’t see the logic there. The “regular” LDS considers the FLDS to be a completely different animal than are they. It’s like saying “If those Baptist kids aren’t put into Catholic homes, the Vatican should sue Texas for discrimination.”
They were afraid that these folks might take over the county, I guess.
With good reason- they have used similar tactics in other places.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
marrying children off to strangers
The flds tends marry thier kids off to family not strangers, in fact they’ve got a huge inbreeding issue because there are only a couple of family lines and you get lots of cousin/uncle marriages.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
people know when something is wrong, they can rationalize it all they want to, it still feels wrong
Like gay or interracial marriage?
“feeling wrong” is a product of how you were raised
April 11th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I think it was the San Angelo Sheriff. I’ve been reading Grits for Breakfast for near daily updates on this fiasco, and the reference is there. See the Eldorado Roundup for more.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Appear to be two different things.
Age of parental consent, for marrying off children, versus age of consent, for non-married sex that includes at least one teenager.
In Texas, if you’re unmarried, you’re jailbait until you’re 17, and that’s been the case for quite some time.
From August 2001:
http://teenadvice.about.com/library/weekly/qanda/blageofconsentchart.htm
Also, some background news, reported in 2005, on those parental age of consent laws:
http://children.safepassagefoundation.org/archives/2005/04/panel_looks_at.html