Genetically, if you have a small number of males mating with a large number of females and each female producing a very large number of offspring from the same father, and then this pattern is replicated over and over in a closed community, you’d end up with a bunch of inbred, blithering idiots. Oh, wait.
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This is worse than the harems in sharia law.
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Polygamy is a religion? Why do they refer to them as polygamists in opposition to “nonbelievers” before mentioning that they are FCJCLDS or Mormons? I don’t see anything in the article about people being mistreated because they weren’t polygamists. I do see them being mistreated because they left the church. But then you’d think the headline and lead paragraph would say something like “Mormon Towns In AZ, UT Violated Constitutional Rights Of Nonbelievers”…
I disagree. The problem here is with religious discrimination, not polyamorous discrimination. Adults should be free to love in any way they see fit. Who ordained it universal moral code that romantic love can only exist between two people?
Depends. Did they actually have bigamous and polygamous marriages, obtaining fraudulent licenses therefor? If not, they’re no different in that respect than a number of free-love communes. Internal recognition of couplings won’t change that.
The child raping, food stamp fraud, and all those other bonus activities, OTOH…
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There was an article about them years back in Nat Geo (pre FNC ownership) about the cult. Basically the husband would divorce and marry over and over so that there was no multiple marriages at once and the children were born from married parents.
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Cut their welfare, food stamps and medicaid benefits. This people are nothing but welfare queens.
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He does not have “24 underage brides.”
He has 24 captive child rape victims.
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One of the problems about prosecuting cultists like this is that you have to find criminal acts that don’t require their fellow-cultists (brainwashed/coerced or otherwise) to testify against them.
But really, the idea that discrimination is OK just as long as it’s based on your religion is widespread. It’s just taking it into the basics of city services that’s uncommon.
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buying in bulk, sisterwives got a good deal on that fuchsia poly…
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IMO if it takes persecuting these towns for refusing services to non-church members and hauling them into Federal Court for discrimination against those who aren’t part of the FLDS church, then so be it. Communities cannot be so insular that they refuse to abide by the Constitution and of course, being part of a religious organization does not shield one or another person or group from culpability when they refuse to follow the law.
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The towns do NOT belong to the cult, those are actual towns and the cult members have taken over all of the positions of power in an attempt to drive out all the citizens of those towns.
The cult has dumped so many little boys off on the side of the road near those towns that the county in AZ went broke trying to house them all and provide medical attention for the hundreds of babies born with birth defects due to incest. They call the boys, ‘Lost Boys’ and they are abandoned on roadsides in neighboring towns so that the old men can have all the little girls to themselves.
Anyone who believes polygamy is benign knows nothing about the true horror of it.
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Jon Krakauer looks at this a bit in Under the Banner of Heaven. If Krakauer is correct, the “non-believers” are mostly former believers who withdrew from the cult on their own or were excommunicated by Warren Jeffs. In at least one case, he’d built a life in Hildale and didn’t want to leave.
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Speaking of medicare, one county went broke just treating all the birth defects from incest in one of those cults. All states are required to provide healthcare to all children and part of the cost comes out of local money so any county that has a polygamy cult in it has a huge burden paying for those birth defects.
There is nothing good about cults and the government allowing so many children to be used and abused and woman held prisoner and forced to bear children until they drop dead is just insane!
“Jeffs also manipulated Short Creek’s gender balance to make sure
there were enough unattached women and girls to serve the loyal men. He
excommunicated less-loyal husbands, sometimes dozens at once,
“reassigning” their wives, children and property to those he thought he
could trust. No matter how many men Jeffs expelled, it didn’t solve the
sect’s math problem, so he began banishing boys as young as 12, ordering
their parents to drop them off in the desert or the streets of Las
Vegas. They were already damned, he said – dead to their families.
Hundreds were cast out, so many that the media coined a term for them:
the Lost Boys.
Short Creek’s polygamy also encouraged inbreeding that apparently
caused a number of genetic disorders. In 2006, for instance, the
community had 25 known cases of Fumarase Deficiency, one of the rarest
and most severe forms of mental retardation – more than half of the
known cases in the world.”
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Yes, I read this years ago.
None of us who lead our lives in diverse communities surrounded by friends of all persuasions can understand what it is like to live in closed communities like this where we could suddenly be ostracized for the tiniest diversion from the norm. Those who withdrew or were excommunicated could never have imagined the many ways their lives would be turned upside down either.
And I doubt that their lives will get any better due to this decision by the court.
I cannot find this on the web but the scene from Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion” where the patriarchs severed arm giving the middle finger salute as the boat floats down the river comes to mind.
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This oversimplifies things a bit, candide. The towns of Hildale and Colorado City were founded by a polygamist Mormon group (the Short Creek Community, the predecessor group of Jeff’s FLDS Church) in the early 20th Century. It isn’t so much that the cult members have taken over the positions of power as it is that they have always held the positions of power.
But your broader point remains: government belongs to the citizens of those areas. No religious test can constitutionally be applied for office holders or government services.
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What a fascinating article.
You’ve got to give this article a read:
@candide33 posted it earlier. It’s from June 2012 and mentions a little bit about the current lawsuit, as well as other legal issues with the sect over the years. For the most part, authorities in Utah aren’t really concerned about polygamy. But this sect is basically running an underage sex trade. It’s really abominable.
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Unless the male is very wealthy or enough of the wives have good jobs polygamy just isn’t practical. Housing and feeding all those people and kids is expensive. Educating all those kids is even more expensive but then that is not the goal of these people. The Mormon fundamentalists use government welfare, “bleeding the beast” as they so charmingly put it, to make it work more or less and most of the “wives” are not wives under state law. Abandoning surplus young boys is the other cruel practice that keeps the wheels from totally coming off this practice. Joseph Smith, in his lust for more than one bed partner really opened up a can of worms with the plural wives “revelation.”
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Because practices by religious communities are considered “not the business of outsiders” and “ordained by God.” Here in the Portland area there was a sect that refused to allow their members access to medical help. Their graveyard is notorious for all the graves of children who died, often horrible deaths because this bunch of loons believed only in anointing with cooking oil and praying away any medical problem. Finally, finally this murder of helpless children was stopped although who knows what these nuts are up to these days. These cults are always so secretive that often it is difficult to know what they are doing until dead bodies appear.
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