Four of 8 incest charges against FLDS leader Warren Jeffs have been dropped by Mohave County Superior Court Judge Steven Conn in Kingman, AZ. The charges stemmed from Jeffs’ arrangement of marriages between some lovely young Fundy ladies and their older half-cousins (one of them around 50 years of age).
The judge ruled that Arizona’s incest laws only pertain if both parties are over the age of 18, which the female participants were not (absurd, I know). Jeffs’ potential imprisonment now drops from 27 years to 8 for the remaining crimes.
Lawyers for Warren Jeffs, FLDS “Prophet” are arguing Thursday for a new trial for the polygamist leader. Currently cooling his heels in an Arizona jail, Jeffs was found guilty of accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her older cousin.
The legal team seeks to have the conviction thrown out on the grounds that a juror, who was replaced during deliberations, failed to disclose that she was a rape victim herself.
UPDATE: Utah Judge James Shumaterejected the requestfor a new trial. Politically now might not have been the time to ask for it.
Given the recent news of the raids in Texas and the arrest last year of Warren Jeffs, prophet of the FLDS church, there has been much said about polygamy and the practices of the FLDS people.
An in-depth interivew was conducted by MormonStories.org with Anne B. Wilde: co-founder of Principle Voices, a support and advocacy group for Mormon Fundamentalist Polygamy. Anne herself practiced polygamy for around 30 years, and is an extremely articulate and thoughtful woman.
You can hear what it’s like for someone that choose polygamy as a adult and spent many years practicing it.
Audio-only version are avaiabe on the Mormon Stories webpage, plus many other polygamy related items.
Thoughtful roundup of the polygamist FLDS situation over at the Huffington Post. There are reactionaries and right wingers suggesting the government is overreacting and doing more harm than good by removing the girls from their families. Then there are rational people reminding us that the intentional warping of children (psychologically as well as sexually) is a crime.
Notions of religious freedom are protecting groups that should be investigated in a hurry. Anything that swings as far outside the mainstream as polygamy under religious auspices bear the hallmarks of a cult. As Hamilton remarks of Warren Jeffs, “…his conviction alone should have put all authorities in the jurisdictions where the sect resides on the alert to rescue the women and children.”
The largest FLDS stronghold is Bountiful, in British Columbia. This is something to think about for many of us at Topic Agnostic who call the Great White North home.
Polygamy is illegal in Canada pursuant to s. 293 of the Criminal Code. The practice of polygamy is also contrary to many of Canada’s international commitments and to the notion of gender equality that is fundamental to Canadian society.
…A polygamous community thrives in Bountiful, British Columbia and, to date, nobody from the community has been prosecuted for violating s. 293. Justice officials in British Columbia say prosecuting s. 293 would invite a defence challenge to the section’s constitutionality, based on the argument that the section infringes the guarantee to religious freedom as set out in s. 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, an analysis of the practice of polygamy in Canada, and how it undermines the equality rights of women and children, suggests that even if s. 293 impinges on religious freedom, such a limit is justified, because of the inherent harms polygamy engenders for the women and children of polygamous families.
This may be a call to action to Canadians to observe your Charter more closely. The first line of it is
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.
So, what do we know about Mormon Fundamentalists (FLDS)? We know that Joseph Smith, already in jail for destroying a copy of the Nauvoo Expositor, a local paper that exposed Smith’s polygamist leanings, was killed by an angry mob (presumably for said offense). We know that Utah, then a part of Mexico, was seeking statehood and that Wilford Woodruff as head of the Mormon church officially suspended the polygamist practice in order to ease past Washington. Clearly not a revelation from God, but rather a political expediency, members of LDS suceeded and became the FLDS.
We know that the current head of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, was one of America’s 10 most wanted and currently languishes in jail himself for various conspiracy-to-do-bad-stuff-to-minors charges.
We know that men of all ages are, somehow, married to teenagers in FLDS society.
What I did not know is that the town of Bountiful, British Columbia, is an FLDS stronghold of 1000 people, allegedly descended from only 6 men. The leader, Winston Blackmore, has 26 wives and 80 children. Girls as young as 14 have been impregnated there, and boys are routinely cast out to retain the gender imbalance. The petition linked to above was sponsored by the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation, who opposed public dollars funding schools in which girls were taught “preparing, catering and cleaning up after a meal…sewing and other types of handiwork”.
How are these cults surviving in mainstream North America? Really, they’re not. As soon as authorities have legal reason to act, as in the case of the El Dorado, they go in and release the women and girls being held by fundamentalists. This particular standoff didn’t result in a conflagration, thank goodness.
What happens to these victims of cult exploitation? Do they shed their turn-of-a-few-centuries-ago garb and become modern citizens? Are they screwed up forever, not sure what “God” or their “fathers” want them to do?
CNN’s Mike Galanos repudiated the cult followers as ‘perverts’, but is the urge really that abnormal? Many 50-year-old men would be delighted to sleep with teenage girls given a supportive community. The larger issue here is that acceptance of religion is the catalyst for this this harmful behavior.
I can’t think of worse abuse than to take a kid, tell them your version of God’s plan for their life, and marry them off to their uncles as part of it. Biology programs kids to believe what adults tell them. Taking advantage of that is mean, by which I mean small.
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Four of 8 incest charges against FLDS leader Warren Jeffs have been dropped by Mohave County Superior Court Judge Steven Conn in Kingman, AZ. The charges stemmed from Jeffs’ arrangement of marriages between some lovely young Fundy ladies and their older half-cousins (one of them around 50 years of age).
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