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Posts: 5819
04/18/08 8:46 PM
Moderator/Assoc. Editor
04/18/08 8:51 PM
Posts: 130596
04/18/08 10:38 PM
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SAN ANGELO, Texas (CNN) -- Hundreds of children who were taken from a polygamist ranch by Texas child welfare authorities will remain in state custody, a judge ruled Friday night.
Judge Barbara Walther also ordered court DNA testing for all 416 children who lived at the YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch in Eldorado to determine their biological parents.
The compound is run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- a Mormon offshoot that practices polygamy.
Walther made her ruling after two days of testimony at a hearing to determine whether the children were properly removed by child welfare authorities.
Walther said she found sufficient evidence for Texas Child Protective Services to keep custody of the children.
Officials are now looking for "the very best temporary placements for these children," said Marleigh Meisner, CPS spokeswoman.
"This is not about religion -- this is about keeping children safe from abuse," she added.
An attorney representing some of the children said he planned to appeal the ruling.
"We're a little disappointed in what the process turned out to be," said Cody Towns.
The ranch raid stemmed from a series of phone calls in late March from a 16-year-old officials referred to as Sarah, who said she had been beaten and forced to become the "spiritual" wife to an adult man.
FLDS members have denied that the girl, supposedly named Sarah Jessop Barlow, exists. Authorities have been trying to locate her, but have been unable to identify the girl.
Texas Rangers said Friday they are pursuing a Colorado woman as a "person of interest" regarding the phone calls that touched off the raid. Authorities said a search of the home of Rozita Swinton, 33, resulted in evidence that may link her to phone calls made about the YFZ ranch.
Earlier in the day, a defense witness testified that it is uncommon for a polygamist sect to force girls as young as 13 into marriage, as the state alleged.
Religious scholar John Walsh also addressed a particularly damning piece of evidence: At least one bed found inside a temple that was allegedly used to consummate such marriages immediately after the ceremony.
"Historically, the only use of a bed in a temple is for temple worship itself," said Walsh, who said he has studied the FLDS practices for 18 years. "The worship lasts a couple of hours, so all the temples will have a place where someone can lie down."
But, he said, "To my knowledge, there has never been any sexual activity in a Mormon temple."
Walsh said he also studies the mainstream Mormon church, which renounced polygamy a century ago and has no ties to the FLDS. He said without the polygamy aspect, the FLDS would resemble the Baptist or Catholic religions.
Walsh was followed to the stand by FLDS member Marilyn Jeffs, who said she was not forced into marriage before age 18. It wasn't clear whether Jeffs is related to jailed FLDS leader Warren Steed Jeffs.
Another FLDS woman, Maureen Jessop, said she was a mother of two toddlers and an infant, but also was trained as an emergency medical technician -- despite her husband's wishes. Jessop said she is a stay-at-home mother by choice. "I have a wonderful life in Eldorado," she testified.
Also testifying Friday was child psychiatrist and state witness Bruce Perry, who said FLDS children are taught that disobeying orders leads to eternal damnation and have little opportunity to learn how to make independent choices.
Young children are not mature enough to enter into a sexual relationship or a marriage, he added.
Perry, who has worked with families in groups such as the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas, said that if the children are allowed to remain in state custody, "There have to be exceptional elements in place for these children and their families. The traditional foster care would not be good for these children."
The state had the burden of demonstrating to Walther why removing the children was necessary.
In court Thursday, Texas state officials presented records they said show 10 women were either married or pregnant as minors. The list was found during the raid, locked in a safe at a main ranch office building, the officials said. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/18/polygamy.custody/index.html
04/18/08 11:45 PM
Posts: 34817
04/19/08 6:25 AM
Yeah ok sure, you hide a bed in a church for kids to take a nap if they get tired during worship. ONE BED for how many children???? Please, that Walsh insults my intelligence. A parent forcing a child to have sex with an older man because they are directed to by their prophet is still RAPE. A body is going to tell me that ALL those female children had consenual sex? Is that the argument for ALL the females that were forced to have sex with the men in that compound? A prosecutor would have a field day with that argument. Just because they are of age to have consenual sex doesn't mean the sex was consenual. The more I read about this cult the more sickened I am by it. I sincerely hope that law enforcement didn't drop the ball on this. I hope they have followed the law and are able to prosecute. These sick SOB'n men need to be prosecuted for using these female children as sex toys and those "mothers" should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting in the act of rape.
Posts: 173430
04/19/08 8:38 AM
Adminstrator Co-Founder Owner/Emeritus
04/19/08 9:30 AM
The more I read about this cult the more sickened I am by it.
Posts: 12349
04/19/08 1:10 PM
Warren Jeffs - who was convicted in September of rape as an accomplice for forcing an underage girl to marry her adult cousin - has directed the affairs of the Fundamentalist LDS Church since 2003, following the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs.
With that change in power, decades of living in relative harmony within their own Utah-Arizona border-town communities began to unravel as Jeffs sought to control personal property, family relationships and marriage within the community on an unprecedented scale, according to two authors who have written about the sect. Within two years of taking control of the group, Jeffs landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before his capture in 2006 and subsequent criminal conviction.
The authors agree that Jeffs' determination to wield control made him into something of a God-like figure among his followers, who seem to have taken his directives as divine decrees that bound them to do his bidding, regardless of the potential consequences.
Though he renounced his own leadership from prison during his criminal trial, calling himself a "false prophet" and "one of the most wicked men on the face of the earth," he later rejected those assertions, and followers regularly visit him in prison. Many observers believe he continues to direct the affairs of the FLDS group from behind bars.
Brian Hales, a Layton physician and historian who wrote "Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto," said much of what has happened since Jeffs took the reins "has been unpredictable." FLDS leaders before him "followed similar goals. For Warren to waltz in, excommunicate people (he felt were a threat to his authority) and build a temple - those are brand new ideas and thinking which makes everything unpredictable with him."
As word of Jeffs' mistreatment of his own followers began to leak out in media reports, many of them moved to what is now the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, constructing their first temple and shunning outsiders and the media. But with the fate of the FLDS children now in the hands of Texas authorities, the world press is both intrigued and baffled by polygamy's modern-day complexities as the women seek out reporters in unprecedented ways.
How did the FLDS community evolve to include allegations of widespread child sexual abuse from what some saw in the early 1900s as a religious offshoot group determined to continue plural marriage after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outlawed the practice for its members in 1890?
Hales, who has studied fundamentalist Mormons for years, has a theory.
"The tendency of polygamy ... is to create narcissists of men and co-dependents of women. It's a very fertile field for sexual exploitation and perversion. Beds in the temple ... there's a tendency to exalt the man. If he doesn't get what he wants from wife one, you can see him going to wife two."
Jeffs' quest for control built on a family legacy of power based in the idea that the FLDS leader would one day personally help usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ.
And Jeffs took it a step further, Hales said, recalling a recent conversation with an insider who has dealt extensively with current FLDS practice and had access to personal communications to and from Jeffs.
"When you get leaders like him thinking he has displaced Christ. ... Reading through some of those letters it dawned on (the insider) there were no references to Christ. Warren sees himself as their intermediary with God." Such a view is "the trajectory of the narcissism," he said.
"When left unchecked, men can become very controlling. The FLDS are an extreme example. They are by far the worst, particularly among the leadership, which is why the whole group will crumble, because you can't sustain it," Hales said.
Stephen Singular is the author of a new book yet to be released titled, "When Men Become Gods," which details how Jeffs has perverted spiritual doctrines for personal gain, taking on a God-like role within the FLDS Church.
He told the Deseret News that Jeffs' history of indoctrination and control began with his leadership of the Alta Academy in Salt Lake County 30 years ago. "His father made him head of the school at 17," where he began to experiment with children "using fear and manipulation. He sequestered the children and asked for dirt on their parents, then he used that against them. He learned to divide and conquer early on."
Jeffs used the concept of fear "to great effect," Singular said, telling the children, "'something terrible is going to happen to us, and I'm the only one that can protect us,' whether from law enforcement, a meteor striking Salt Lake City or some other outside force. 'You must obey and keep sweet,"' he would tell them.
As Jeffs eventually moved south, joined the faith's leadership with his father and finally succeeded him, he used the same tactics with adults in southern Utah, Singular said. "He would make outlandish demands: you can't wear this color or eat that food. He pushed it to see if they would get rid of media, give him more money, refuse to wear red, swim or dance. ... He found the adults would behave in exactly same way. Their need for authority and to be told what to do was profound."
Though Jeffs was served with several civil suits over the years, he refused to ever appear in court or address the charges against him, Singular said, adding to the notion that "he's above the law, and he only answers to God's law."
That philosophy eventually cost him control of the group's $107 million trust in Colorado City, which is now managed by a government-appointed trustee.
Hales said brainwashing is a legitimate description of what occurs within the FLDS Church "because they don't allow any outside information inside and vice versa." On the other hand, the Salt Lake-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - which many continue to mistakenly associate with the polygamist sect - sends missionaries around the globe preaching a gospel message centered in Jesus Christ, Hales said.
The opposite is true of the FLDS Church, which is insular, secretive and has no desire to share a message of salvation with others. "The gospel (LDS Church founder) Joseph Smith taught was for all the world, and even stretched beyond death to redeem the dead (with vicarious ordinances performed by living proxies). As the FLDS get further and further away from that, the narcissism grows, and they become very self-focused. That's their world, and it's the direct opposite from what Joseph Smith and Brigham Young promoted."
Even when early LDS leaders were prosecuted for polygamy in the 1880s, Hales said, "they weren't rounding up the wagons. It was not the same behavior you see among the FLDS." Some media continue to confuse the two groups because the FLDS claim the same 19th century history as the LDS Church.
He believes early polygamist leaders who preceded Warren Jeffs in FLDS leadership "would be appalled" at what has happened to the sect.
"The control over property and marriages - these (earlier) guys didn't do that," Hales said. "That level of control would not be well-accepted by John Barlow or Joseph Musser - but they don't hold Musser in high esteem. He went north with the (polygamist) Allred family, and the others stayed in the south with Barlow's children."
While the secretive FLDS believers are making headlines, they represent only one of several modern-day polygamous fundamentalist groups scattered around the West.
Some live in isolated communities (one group worships in a pyramid on the Utah-Nevada border); some may live next door in the Salt Lake Valley, not unlike the folks on HBO's "Big Love" television series. Others live in Texas, in polygamous colonies in northern Mexico and western Canada, and in tiny outposts scattered around the Intermountain West.
Despite the imprisonment of the movement's most visible leader, polygamous fundamentalism appears to have a staying power that makes it unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Anne Wilde, a polygamist widow and a director of the pro-polygamy group Principle Voices, says there are currently some 37,000 people (including children) who are fundamentalist Mormons - and the number has stayed fairly consistent in the recent past.
The term "fundamentalist Mormons" is a name that the LDS Church finds objectionable, but one that the fundamentalists say is fitting. It is the mainstream LDS Church, they argue, that strayed from the faith's original doctrinal underpinnings when LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto in 1890, advising Latter-day Saints to refrain from plural marriage.
Because polygamy continued in secrecy to a small extent, a second "official statement" on the practice was issued by LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith in 1904, ending authorization for plural marriages on pain of excommunication from the church. Current LDS leaders acknowledge the practice as part of their early history, and LDS scripture still contains passages that fundamentalists use to defend its continuation.
In the first few decades of the 20th century, several LDS Church members - including a few leaders - were excommunicated as they continued to advocate polygamy and/or practice it. Some were later reinstated in the church, while a handful split from the faith to form their own groups under separate leadership. The ins and outs of those complex relationships are documented in Hales' 500-page book, which recently received the best book award in 2007 from the John Whitmer Historical Association.
Back in Texas, where Singular was attending the hearing on Thursday that will determine what happens next to the FLDS children removed from the Eldorado compound, the consequences of Jeffs' edicts - and his followers' willingness to adhere to them - are playing out now, he said.
After multiple interviews with teenage boys expelled from the sect and women who have left on their own, Singular said they eventually come to understand "how someone assumes power over people's lives and how people allow that to happen - and that they are both culpable. People who have broken away from it realize that."
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com; jarvik@desnews.com
04/19/08 2:13 PM
The government used the media to make the public feel the very same way about the Branch Davidians at Waco. The warrent there was obtained claiming sexual abuse of the children. Something about this is giving me the feeling that all is not as it is being portrayed.
04/19/08 3:41 PM
Coercing children, be it their mother or some strange woman they were handed over to at one point in time for care, to have sex with an adult male is rape. That is child abuse.
04/19/08 5:44 PM
However do you believe that all 401 children were being abused? Do you believe this happened in every family?
04/19/08 6:02 PM
Posts: 4522
04/20/08 6:00 AM
Moderator/Assoc. Editor 6,000,000 Visitor
But the issue I am bringing up is dose the state have the legal right to go into a community and take all the children on a warrant to find one girl?
Posts: 36635
04/20/08 6:16 AM
Moderator/Assoc. Editor 50,000th Poster & 2,500,000 Visitor
04/20/08 8:48 AM
Compare it to: If one person in a town committed a crime, would the state break into every home in that town?
04/20/08 11:54 AM
We're dealing with the welfare of children and the legislation which law enforcment and social services must follow. It is a different animal altogether. A social service worker cannot leave a child in a home if they believe they are at risk of abuse
Hey, if there is proof that these young female children are not forced to have sex with the older men in that cult, that their mothers aren't coercing them to have sex with these same men, then they should all go back to that compound.
04/20/08 5:11 PM
Sorry but I have heard that "do it for the children" defense so many times it automatically raises the alarm bells.
There should first be proof that they were forced and coerced before they were taken away! What the Hell happened to innocent until proven guilty! When did the Constitution change to guilty until proven innocent?
04/20/08 6:51 PM
A lot of children removed from the home are determined to be in danger by the social worker who gets the assignment to investigate by, a lot of the time, an anonymous phone tip.
Look up the legislation for Indiana and see what criteria your local child welfare agency has to meet before they can take children out of the home. I think you'll be surprised.
Posts: 444
04/20/08 7:48 PM
Reporter
Reading this thread reminds me of the Duke University rape case discussions that were here a while ago !!!!
04/20/08 8:35 PM
cynicwithhope wrote: Reading this thread reminds me of the Duke University rape case discussions that were here a while ago !!!!
Never fear, MJ and I may disagree on many things but we will always walk away friends.