The FLDS raids - who are the real prisoners? [Updated]

As most of you know by now, last week police raided the YFZ (Yearning for Zion) ranch in Eldorado, Texas, taking 416 women and children into custody. The ranch is a church compound belonging to the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints).

Authorities claim that children were being abused and that underage girls were married off to much older men. Members of the sect claim their polygamous life is simply religious freedom, and that their families have been taken away unjustly.

But when you see the women in interviews on television, they don't appear normal. Of course they belong to a different culture from most of us, but it's more than that. When they speak, they don't appear alert or even fully awake. Their voices are so soft and childlike it is almost eerie. They repeat the same answers over and over verbatim (an indication of being coached), and constantly claim they "don't know" when asked about any underage girls being married, even though authorities have names of at least 10 of them. One 16 year-old girl reportedly has four children. Unless she had quadruplets, you can do the math yourself and figure out how young she must have been when she was married off.

I don't deny that religious freedom is an important right, and I couldn't care less how many wives/husbands consenting adults take. But when you involve children, you don't have consenting adults anymore, and all bets are off.

The spiritual leader of this sect is Warren Jeffs, who I wrote about in an earlier article. Although the man was guilty of gross immoral conduct, I criticized the way his case was handled. Still, I have little sympathy for him or for the abusive lifestyle his followers have chosen. Incidentally, in video of the dormitories on the compound, there is a photo of him on nearly every wall in the house - a strong indicator of a cult environment.

When police initially raided the compound, they were expecting to find about 150 people. Instead, they found over 400. That alone is rather disturbing. Has a census worker ever visited the compound? How many more people are living there in the shadows?

If anyone still has any qualms about this raid, they can listen to former FLDS members such as Flora Jessup, who describes how she was punished for trying to escape, or Kathy Nicholson, who describes the brainwashing involved.

UPDATE 04/18/2008 08:15:00 AM: Some grammatical fixes (I shouldn't write when I'm sleepy).

Also, since roughly the same number of boys/girls are born to each woman, if anyone is wondering how these sects can operate with marrying 5-6 women to every man, Slate has the answer. Essentially, they banish teenage boys from their families at alarming rates. This is from the same community that claims to care so deeply about their children.

It also should be noted that cults like this are isolated from the rest of society by necessity; they cannot exist otherwise. If these women lived in typical communities and sent their children to local schools, they might pick up "subversive" ideas, such as the idea of equality. Without exception, every single FLDS woman profiled on the news is a mother and a homemaker only. I have not seen a single one who has taken up a profession in medicine, art, business, or anything else. I don't even see any evidence that any of them has even had a higher education.

I believe that so far, the Texas authorities have done the right thing here. But this is an explosive situation, and hopefully they don't blow it.

UPDATE 04/18/2008 07:22:00 PM:
In an earlier posting, I spoke about the hypocrisy amoung some people who fight for the right of gays to marry, but won't lift a finger on behalf of marriage rights for polygamists.

Eric at Classical Values makes another good point about hypocrisy here. What about Muslim polygamy? Why so little outrage about that? They don't just happen in the Middle East - they are a reality in the US and Europe as well. In fact, in the bizarro land of the UK, Muslims with more than one wife can collect benefits for them all even though the marriages are illegal.

The next time that Europeans scoff at those strange religious Americans they see on TV, maybe they should take a look at their own backyard...



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