The women are indoctrinated from birth to subvert their own autonomy and by the time they get to puberty they know that they will be expected to also surrender their bodies and marry – ‘celestially’, of course – an older man. Mothers encourage early marriage and rationalize it as being good for the girls, much as the mothers on another continent sanction the genital mutilation of their daughters.
There is plenty about the sect’s way of life that seems repellent, even bone-chilling, to many of us, but for several years after the FLDS compound was built, there was nothing happening that authorities could latch on to as illegal. They must have waited impatiently for a reason to storm the compound, and finally, tenuous as it was, they got it. It came in the form of anonymous calls from a woman who has not been found, detailing abuse that cannot be confirmed, in a compound where she did not live.
With 31 teens pregnant or parents themselves among the compound’s 14 to 17 year old girls, it seems likely that the locals, their law enforcement, their child protective services, their jails and their media will have enough scandal to keep them all riveted for a long time.
As the children of FLDS grow up, attorneys will be debating and appealing the tar babies of this episode: religious freedom, privacy rights, parental rights and civil rights. It will cost taxpayers a lot.
It could have been so much easier, cheaper and less harmful to the victims if authorities simply shifted their attention from the group’s adolescent girls to the adolescent boys. When the children boarded the busses that would take them from their home, the small number of boys among the 400-plus children was shocking. There is a reason for that.
Polygamous cults sponsor another crime that is not nearly as salaciously gripping as sex abuse but is equally illegal: Child abandonment.
In order for the sect’s middle aged men to have flocks of wives, male children must be cast out when they reach adolescence. These boys are also the victims of polygamy. If states with polygamous settlements simply prosecuted parents who threw away their underage teens, to either fend for themselves or become wards of the state, polygamy would lose an important supporting pillar.
The raid on the FLDS compound had all the markings of a Ruby Ridge or a Waco, without the fatalities, at least so far. Each of these groups had a deep distrust of the government, and in each case the government proved the misgivings of these U.S. citizens well founded.
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