6 posts tagged “cults”
Saturday, April 19, 2008; 9:13 AM
SAN ANGELO, Texas -- A chaotic two-day hearing ended with dropped heads and silence when a judge ordered that the 416 children taken from a ranch run by a polygamous sect will stay in state custody for the time being.
State District Judge Barbara Walther heard 21 hours of testimony over two days before ruling Friday that the children would be kept in custody while the state continues to investigate allegations of abuse stemming from the teachings of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
"This is but the beginning," Walther said.
She also ordered genetic testing to sort out family relationships that have confounded welfare authorities.
Individual hearings will be set for the children over the next
several weeks, and the judge will determine whether they are moved into
permanent foster care or can be returned to their parents. All of the
hearings must be held by June 5.
Walther ordered all 416 children and parents be given genetic tests. Child welfare officials say they've had difficulty determining how the children and adults are related because of evasive or changing answers.
A mobile genetic lab will take samples Monday at the main shelter where children are being kept; parents will be able to submit samples Tuesday in Eldorado, closer to the ranch.
The custody case is one of the largest and most convoluted in U.S. history. The ruling on Friday capped two days of marathon testimony that sometimes descended into chaos as hundreds of lawyers for the children and parents competed to defend their clients in two large rooms linked by a video feed.
Attorneys popped up with objections in a courtroom and nearby auditorium, then queued up and down the aisle to cross-examine witnesses in a mass hearing that frustrated attorneys and stretched the small-town court system.
The April 3 raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch was prompted by a call made to a family violence shelter, purportedly by a 16-year-old girl who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. That girl has never been identified.
The state argued it should be allowed to keep the children because the sect's teaching encourages girls younger than 18 to enter spiritual marriages with older men and produce as many children as possible. Its attorneys argued that the culture put all the girls at risk and potentially turned the boys into future predators.
A witness for the parents who was presented by defense lawyers as an expert on the FLDS disputed that the girls have no say [regarding] who[m] they marry.
"I believe the girls are given a real choice," said W. John Walsh.
"Girls have successfully said, 'No, this is not a good match for me,' and they remained in good standing."
But Dr. Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist who has studied children in cults, testified that the girls will not refuse marriages because they are indoctrinated to believe disobedience will lead to their damnation.
The renegade Mormon sect's belief system "is abusive. The culture is very authoritarian," he said.
Perry acknowledged that many adults at the ranch are loving parents and that the boys seemed emotionally healthy. When asked whether the belief system really endangered the older boys or young children, Perry said, "I have lost sleep over that question."
He also conceded that the children, taught from birth to believe that contact with the outside world will lead to eternal damnation, would suffer if placed in traditional foster care.
"If these children are kept in the custody of the state, there would have to be exceptional and innovative programmatic elements for these children and their families," he said. "The traditional foster care system would be destructive for these children."
CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said the department was pleased with the judge's ruling and believes that the children will now be safe.
It's not clear how quickly the children might be moved from the coliseum and fairgrounds where they are staying on cots into foster homes or other temporary housing, but they could be placed with family members if CPS determines the children will be safe, Meisner said.
Four women testified Friday, and all said they were free to make their own choices. They also said they would do whatever it took to get their children returned to them.
"We're a peaceful people," Lucille Nielson said. Life on their 1,700-acre gated ranch "is very peaceful. You can feel the peace when you are there. Very loving. We raise our children in a loving environment."
But the women also acknowledged that girls get married at ages younger than the state allows.
Some of the women bowed their heads when the judge issued her order to keep the children in state custody. They left the columned courthouse stoically, ignoring [reporter's shouted] questions.
They'll face more hearings, and some could be required to take steps to prove to Child Protective Services that they should...regain custody.
Tim Edwards, a lawyer representing four mothers, said the women would comply with the judge's orders.
"We are going to comply with the orders of the court, we're going to cooperate with CPS and their requirements and do everything within our power to turn the situation around," he said.
Texas Rangers also are investigating a Colorado woman as a "person of interest" related to calls made to a family crisis center. Police arrested Rozita Swinton, 33, on Wednesday in Colorado Springs on a misdemeanor charge of false reporting to authorities for a call she made in late February.
Authorities did not say whether a call by Swinton might be the one that triggered the raid.
But officers who searched her home found items suggesting a possible connection between Swinton and calls regarding a compound owned by FLDS in Arizona and one in Eldorado, the Texas Department of Public Safety said late Friday. The items weren't identified.
"The information, evidence and a statement obtained from Swinton by the Texas Rangers while they were in Colorado will be forwarded to state and federal prosecutors for their review and determination whether Swinton will be charged with a criminal offense," the statement said.
Swinton's whereabouts were unknown, and it wasn't known whether she had an attorney. A phone number for her in Colorado Springs was disconnected.
Authorities in Colorado confirmed Swinton has a history of making false reports.
All the flds-ers' DNA looks like this.
Inbreeding among polygamists along the Arizona-Utah border is producing a caste of severely retarded and deformed children
By John Dougherty
Published on December 29, 2005
-
Peter Scanlon
Dr. Theodore Tarby says FLDS polygamists will continue producing children afflicted with severe physical and mental disorders.
-
Life Magazine
Polygamist patriarch Joseph Smith Jessop with his youngest daughter shortly before his death in September 1953.
-
Mark Folkersen
Colorado City resident Isaac Wyler says FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs is trying to create the "perfect race."
He prepared urine samples and sent them to the University of Colorado Science Center's Dr. Steve Goodman, a professor of pediatrics who runs a laboratory that detects rare genetic diseases.
Goodman soon made a startling discovery: Tarby's young patient was afflicted with an extremely rare disease called fumarase deficiency.
"I had never seen a patient with it," Tarby says. "Right away I asked the parents if there were any other children with the same problem."
The parents said their daughter had cerebral palsy. Tarby asked them to bring the girl to him for an examination.
"As soon as I saw her, I knew she had the same thing as her brother," Tarby says.
The fact that fumarase deficiency had shown up in one child was startling enough -- there had only been a handful of cases reported worldwide. But now that it was appearing in two children in the same family was an indication it was being spread by a gene that was getting passed to the children by their parents.
Tarby and a team of doctors from Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix and the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson began researching the disease and soon discovered that fumarase deficiency was occurring in at least two other families living in the same isolated community that practiced an unusual custom.
Nearly everyone in Colorado City, Arizona, and the adjacent town of Hildale, Utah, was a member of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practices polygamy and had long encouraged multiple marriages between close relatives.
By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah.
Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding.
Fast-forward to the present: About half of the 8,000 people living in the towns are blood relatives of two of the founding families that settled in the 1930s on the desolate high desert plateau against the base of the Vermillion Cliffs.
Religious leaders control all marriages in the community, and many of these relatives have married or likely will marry in the future. Some of these marriages will include parents who both are carriers of the fumarase deficiency gene, making it certain that more children will be afflicted with the disease.
"We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition," Tarby says.
In this isolated religious society north of the Grand Canyon, few secrets have been more closely guarded than the presence of fumarase deficiency. Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints elders, who control the community, have labored to keep the public from finding out why the disorder is manifesting. Many members of the fundamentalist community don't even know it's occurring.
The state of Arizona is contributing to the secrecy. The state Department of Health Services and the Department of Economic Security have been quietly providing services to assist the children and families of fumarase victims for more than 15 years. Both DHS and DES officials refused repeated requests from New Times to document the type and cost of services the state is providing to treat fumarase deficiency. The agencies claim that federal health laws prohibit them from releasing records or allowing their authorities to comment on the situation.
Doctors and family members interviewed by New Times say up to 20 children from families in the polygamist community are currently afflicted with the condition that requires full-time attention from caregivers. Victims suffer a range of symptoms, including severe epileptic seizures, inability to walk or even sit upright, severe speech impediments, failure to grow at a normal rate, and tragic physical deformities.
"They are in terrible shape," says Dr. Kirk A. Aleck, director of the Pediatric Neurogenetics Center at St. Joseph's Hospital. Aleck is a geneticist who participated along with Tarby and others in the groundbreaking study of several polygamous families with fumarase deficiency in the late 1990s.
There is no cure for the disease, which impedes the body's ability to process food at the cellular level.
"We can only treat the complications of the disorder," Aleck says. Once a baby is born with the condition, Aleck says, "You really can't treat the underlying disorder."
There is one documented case of a child dying from the malady since medical experts began studying it, but it is unknown how many others could have died in the fundamentalist community before the condition was diagnosed.
Before the plethora of fumarase deficiency cases was discovered in Colorado City and Hildale, many victims among the handful of cases documented worldwide died in the first several years of life.
"If you look in the literature, you won't find another dozen cases in the world that have been reported," says Tarby.
Experts say the number of children afflicted in the FLDS community is expected to steadily increase as a result of decades of inbreeding between two of the polygamous sect's founding families -- the Barlows and the Jessops.
"If you cross a Barlow and Jessop, you stand a high risk of getting this condition," Tarby says.
The genetic defect has been traced back to one of the community's founding patriarchs, the late Joseph Smith Jessop, and the first of his plural wives, according to medical literature, the Mormon Church genealogy database and residents of the community familiar with Jessop and Barlow family histories.
Joseph Smith Jessop and his first wife, Martha Moore Yeates, had 14 children. One of their daughters married another of the community's founding patriarchs and religious leaders, John Yeates Barlow. By the time Joseph Smith Jessop died in September 1953, he already had 112 grandchildren, the majority of them directly descended from him and Yeates.
Fifty-two years later, more than half of the 8,000 people now living in Colorado City and Hildale are blood descendants of the Barlows and the Jessops, says Benjamin Bistline, a lifelong resident of the area who has published a book, Colorado City Polygamists, on the history of the fundamentalist community.
An unknown number -- but believed to be in the thousands -- of Barlow/Jessop descendants carry the recessive gene that causes fumarase deficiency. If both parents carry the gene, the likelihood that their offspring will be affected by the disease or become carriers of the gene greatly increases, medical experts say.
"It's like any inbred disorder," Tarby says. "If the community gets larger, the number of people with fumarase deficiency gets larger."
Aleck says the fact that so many people in the polygamist enclave are blood relatives of the founding Barlow and Jessop families "shows the magnitude of the problem."
The disease is not widely known about even in Colorado City, a place where even normally public events such as marriages are conducted in secret. But residents who are aware of fumarase deficiency fear that the number of children afflicted with the disease will indeed increase.
"This problem is going to get worse and worse and worse," predicts 40-year-old Isaac Wyler, another lifelong Colorado City resident who was excommunicated from the FLDS in January 2004. Wyler's ex-wife's sister has had two babies afflicted with fumarase deficiency. "Right now, we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg."
For more than 70 years, all marriages in the isolated towns have been arranged by the leader of the FLDS, a breakaway sect of the Salt Lake City-based Mormon Church.
Marriages among first and second cousins have been common for decades in the community, where religious doctrine requires men to have at least three wives to gain eternal salvation. Only the FLDS prophet can arrange and perform polygamous marriages, and those marriages are taking place in a community in which almost everybody is related.
The current FLDS prophet is 50-year-old Warren Jeffs, who has not been seen publicly since August 2003. Last June, Jeffs was charged with seven felonies by Mohave County, Arizona, in connection with his performance of "spiritual" marriages of three underage girls to already married men. He was placed on the FBI's most wanted list last August. Eight other Colorado City polygamists have been indicted by a Mohave County grand jury for having unlawful sex with underage girls who were their plural wives.
The indictments have come amid a three-year investigation by New Times of the FLDS community. That probe has uncovered widespread sexual abuse of young girls forced into polygamous marriages that, until recently, was downplayed by Arizona political leaders and law enforcement.
The state not only ignored the crimes for decades, it helped facilitate them by allowing the FLDS polygamists to set up a town government, a public school district and a police department that have received tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds despite the fact that polygamy violates Arizona's Constitution. The FLDS has had an iron grip on the local governments, because it has been impossible to get elected or hired to a taxpayer-funded post without the church's blessing.
The fundamentalist community has also benefited immensely from state health-care services for the poor and indigent by receiving more than $12 million a year in state assistance in Arizona to pay for health-insurance premiums.
It turns out that taxpayers also have been footing the bill for the fumarase deficiency children born to polygamists who insist that plural marriage involving close relatives is their divine right.
There is no doubt in the mind of any expert interviewed by New Times that the practice of polygamy combined with inbreeding has fostered the spread of fumarase deficiency.
"Polygamy leads to sexual predation, and that leads to genetic problems," says Rehabilitative Services' Tarby. "If you stop the sexual predation, you stop the genetic problem as well. But [FLDS members] don't think of it as sexual predation. That's the big problem."
"This man has left nothing of his worldly worth, but he has left far more than most people of God's work. There isn't another man in the U.S. that can boast this man's posterity," Life magazine quoted Virgil Jessop as eulogizing at the September 1953 funeral of his 84-year-old father, Joseph Smith Jessop.
Five decades later, it appears that Joseph Smith Jessop and his first wife also passed on the rare genetic disorder fumarase deficiency.
The stage was set for the appearance of the rare disease when their 12th child, Martha Jessop, married her second cousin, John Yeates Barlow, in 1923, according to LDS genealogy data and Colorado City historian Ben Bistline.
Like his father-in-law, John Y. Barlow became one of the towering patriarchs of the fundamentalist Mormon community and served as FLDS prophet from 1935 until his death in 1949.
The Barlow-Jessop marriage brought forth some of the major political and religious leaders of the community, including former Colorado City mayor Dan Barlow, police officer Sam Barlow, public school superintendent Alvin Barlow, teacher Louis Barlow, and civic leader Truman Barlow. All of these men have or had multiple wives and scores of children.
Fumarase deficiency began to manifest in the community when three sets of Joseph Smith Jessop and Martha Moore Yeates' great-grandchildren married each other. The three marriages between second cousins have produced at least eight children afflicted with fumarase deficiency, according to a report in the May 2000 Annals of Neurology (based on the study conducted by the group led by Tarby and Aleck), interviews with doctors treating the disease and anecdotal evidence gathered from the community.
The children afflicted with fumarase deficiency from these three marriages include the grandchildren of Dan Barlow and his brother, the late Louis Barlow, and Merill Jessop, a top aide to fugitive prophet Warren Jeffs. It is Merill Jessop who is overseeing construction of a massive FLDS temple in Eldorado, Texas, where many believe Prophet Jeffs plans to move his faithful eventually.
Dan Barlow, who has been excommunicated from the FLDS, and Merill Jessop could not be reached for comment. But Isaac Wyler, a former FLDS member who was excommunicated from the church last year, says he has firsthand knowledge of multiple fumarase deficiency children in each of the three families.
"I know this off the top of my head," Wyler says. "I know these people personally."
Medical experts say the incidence of the disorder will increase because the FLDS community is refusing to accept recommendations to reduce the likelihood of producing babies with fumarase deficiency. Tarby says he discussed the disease and its causes during a town meeting on November 18, 2004, that was attended by more than 100 FLDS members.
Tarby says he explained to the gathering at Town Hall in Colorado City that the only way to stop fumarase deficiency in the community is to abort fetuses that test positive for the disease and for the community to stop intermarriages between Barlows and Jessops, Barlows and Barlows and Jessops and Jessops.
Tarby says members of the community made it clear that neither choice was acceptable. Tarby recounts a conversation he had with a member of the Barlow clan in which he tried to explain why so much fumarase deficiency was occurring among Mormon polygamists.
"I said, 'You're married to somebody you're related to. That leads to problems.'
"The man's response was, 'Up here, we are all related,'" Tarby says. "They just don't worry about the effects of intermarriage."
Tarby says the disease could begin to show up in children at Warren Jeffs' new FLDS headquarters under construction on a 1,600-acre ranch outside of Eldorado. The FLDS already has moved several hundred men, women and children to the compound, many of whom very likely carry the fumarase deficiency gene.
The only long-term solution to the health crisis is for Barlows and Jessops to have children with spouses from outside the polygamist community.
"They have to outbreed," Aleck says.
But this is a very unlikely scenario for FLDS faithful, who practice a religious doctrine that requires men to be strictly obedient to religious leaders and requires women to give birth to as many children as possible to increase the sect's numbers.
"Who [from outside the fundamentalist Mormon religion] would want to go in there and join their population?" Aleck asks. "It's probably hard to recruit into that environment."
Indeed, even if an outsider wanted to join the FLDS community, such a person would not be welcome.
"They are discouraging any new blood," historian Bistline says. "They've got this idea that their blood is pure and that they want to keep it pure."
With no other options available, more FLDS families will be faced with the difficult burden of caring for children suffering with fumarase deficiency. Rather than take steps to avoid the problem, the FLDS loyalists may believe it is their duty to accept their fate.
"They think it is a test from God," says Wyler, who was born and raised in the FLDS before he was booted out.
And a terrible test it is.
Fumarase deficiency is caused by a lack of the fumarase enzyme, an essential component in a biological process called the Krebs cycle, which converts food into energy within each cell. Not enough of the fumarase enzyme can lead to severe mental retardation and physical deformities.
"The kids that I have seen have terrible seizure disorders and developmental delays," says Dr. Aleck. "They are functioning way below their chronological age."
Yet, Aleck says, some children are more seriously affected by the disorder than others. "Some are very debilitated and some aren't," he says.
Some fumarase deficiency children, he says, develop a small degree of motor skills over time: "They don't remain infantile their entire life. They do develop to some degree, but it's way behind their peers."
Dr. Tarby, who routinely treats fumarase deficiency children at a state-funded clinic in Flagstaff, says, "They are funny-looking kids [with] biggish heads and coarse, thick features."
Their brains, he says, "are strangely shaped" and are frequently missing large areas of brain matter that has been replaced by water. An MRI of the brain of one fumarase deficiency child showed that more than half the brain was missing.
Tarby says most of the children "can say at least a word or two," but that all of them "have severe mental retardation" with IQs of less than 25.
Some of the kids can walk, but others have a difficult time even sitting. The children who can't walk, the medical experts say, have most likely suffered strokes during severe seizures.
Despite the secrecy in the community over fumarase deficiency children, Wyler says he has observed his ex-wife's sister's children and others on several occasions.
"People don't like to talk about their fumarase babies for obvious reasons," Wyler says. "I don't know how many who die within the first two or three years that we don't even ever know about."
Wyler says he has seen some fumarase deficiency children who can walk, but others can barely move and spend their entire lives prone.
Children of the latter variety, he says, "can't crawl. They can't sit up. They are lucky if they can even move their head and eyes a little bit."
All of the fumarase deficiency children Wyler has seen remain dependent on the parents or caregivers.
"They are totally helpless," he says.
Frequent and powerful seizures are among the most disturbing characteristics of the disease. Wyler says he once saw a fumarase deficiency child suffer a seizure while she was sitting with her mother and two other children also suffering from the disorder.
"All of a sudden [with] this one little baby, everything tightened up and she arched her back so hard her head was almost touching her toes," Wyler says.
"The mother," he says, "was just sitting there rubbing her hands on [the child's] back trying to get her to relax."
Families with fumarase children receive in-home help from the Division of Developmental Disabilities, a unit of the state Department of Economic Security. Much of the state care is simply helping parents with hygiene, feeding and mobility of the child.
"One lady I know, she just cannot physically pick [her son] up anymore to get him into the bathtub," Wyler says. "A lady comes in and helps her. And it takes two of them to get him into the bathtub just to wash him down and clean him up."
One advantage of polygamous families, Wyler says, is that the mother of a fumarase child will likely have other women in the household to lend a hand.
"A sister wife would be a godsend just to be able to help out," he says. "Not only to help physically, but to be somebody to talk to."
Arizona used to send doctors from Children's Rehabilitative Services, which is a division of the state health department, to Colorado City on a regular basis to examine fumarase deficiency children.
But doctors stopped going to Colorado City after the state and press stepped up scrutiny of the community in 2004. Doctors feared that the media would photograph fumarase deficiency children as they were entering a medical clinic in Colorado City.
"We had no desire to encounter ABC News at the clinic entrance," Tarby says.
The doctors only agreed to talk to New Times after Tarby was approached with a copy of the fumarase deficiency study.
Families now must drive fumarase children to Flagstaff for regular evaluations. Despite the frustrations doctors have with dealing with a community that refuses their recommendations on how to prevent the condition in the future, there is no question that treatment will continue.
"We do not deny medical care to people because of religious beliefs," Tarby says.
In fact, the state's willingness to provide medical assistance to afflicted children may be allowing Utah families to receive treatment paid for by Arizona taxpayers. "I don't know if all the patients I treat are technically eligible for my services [because they may live out of state]," Tarby says.
Researchers have identified a gene on the first chromosome that causes fumarase deficiency, but no test has been developed that could be used to identify individuals carrying the malady. If such a test were developed, a community-wide screening program could be instituted that would identify those carrying the fumarase gene.
Dr. Vinodh Narayanan, a pediatric neurologist at St. Joseph's Hospital, says he is seeking funding to develop a test that would allow public health officials to collect voluntary blood samples from as many FLDS members as possible. The samples could be tested for the gene at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix.
He estimates the test would cost about $50 per sample and would provide crucial information to community members of who is carrying the recessive gene that causes fumarase deficiency.
Until the test is available, Tarby says, the best prevention measure remains refraining from crossing Barlows, Jessops and their relations -- who make up half the population of the polygamist enclave.
It's unlikely the polygamous community will heed the doctor's advice.
Even the few highly educated people there, including a medical doctor who practices at the Hildale Health Center, refuse to accept advice from any outsider, including doctors such as Tarby, who has treated their children for years.
"They don't believe anything written about Colorado City [by outsiders, even medical experts] carries much truth," Tarby says.
For Colorado City and Hildale to avoid more fumarase, polygamist leaders must use their authority to make sure that those potentially carrying the fumarase gene are not allowed to marry, says geneticist Aleck.
The leaders must also understand the ethical considerations of continuing behavior, he says, that is bringing children into the world who suffer tragic deformities.
"They have the authoritarian structure necessary to keep this from happening, but I don't think they have the advanced thinking," Aleck says.
"I try in my own, quiet way and tell them to outbreed. But that's like spitting in the ocean."
The ultimate decision on marriages rests with FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs. And Jeffs so far has shown no indication that he is concerned about the increasing prevalence of fumarase deficiency children in the community, former FLDS member Isaac Wyler says.
Even if a genetic screening test were available, Wyler says, Jeffs would have to be cautious about how he allowed it to be implemented. If the FLDS faithful believed that Jeffs was relying on science to determine marriages rather than divine revelation from God, he could lose control of the church.
"Warren has to be really careful that he doesn't lose his position as a god to these people," Wyler says.
FLDS marriages, Wyler and other community experts say, are an extension of a breeding program that began with Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith in the 1830s. The early Mormon Church practiced polygamy until 1890, when leaders abandoned the practice as a condition for Utah to gain statehood. The FLDS was formed by Mormons who refused to give up polygamy.
Warren Jeffs, like Joseph Smith before him, has emphasized the importance of obedience among members of the church. Jeffs is following a long-established practice -- started by Smith 170 years ago -- of excommunicating those who do not strictly adhere to church leaders' commands.
"The 'gene' that Warren is really selecting for," Wyler says, "is the 'obedience gene.'
"Joseph Smith was also selecting for the 'obedience gene.' He was kicking people out, too, who weren't obedient.
"I hate to talk like this about my own genealogy," Wyler says, "but, literally, they are keeping all the breeding stock -- the women, the [strictly faithful] men -- and weeding out the disobedient men."
The ultimate goal of the breeding program, Wyler says, is to create the perfect race.
"Remember how Hitler was trying to breed a perfect race?" he says. "Warren Jeffs is also trying to breed a perfect race."
The widespread presence of the fumarase deficiency gene in the bloodlines of the founding families of Colorado City is going to make reaching any such goal extremely difficult.
The few dissenters in the community say the serious genetic problems that are beginning to surface are an indication that the closed FLDS society could eventually collapse.
"Maybe it will just self-destruct," historian Bistline says of the fundamentalist church he quit 20 years ago because of a dispute over religious doctrine and property ownership. "In the meantime, the taxpayers have to pay the bills."
Phoenix New Times, Arizona
Opinions differ on how to characterize alleged polygamists
By Jeanna Bryner
April 9, 2008
The allegedly polygamous group whose compound was raided this week in Texas is either a religious sect or a full-blown cult, depending on whom you ask.
The raided compound was founded by jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, who took over in 2002 as prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which broke off from the Mormon church in the 1930s over the issue of polygamy.
Authorities have reportedly taken into legal custody more than 400 children and 133 women deemed to have been harmed or in imminent danger of harm.
While the media and some sociologists call the group a religious sect, other experts see it as a clear-cut cult, defined by charismatic leadership and abuse. According to news accounts of the FLDS, pubescent girls were forced into "spiritual marriages" to older men. Inside the compound's walls, researchers say, a new reality was born, with members indoctrinated so fully they had no concept of reality outside the walls.
"In the case of the FLDS, we're talking about basically believing that women are there to be baby factories, and you have extreme patriarchal control of that group," said Janja Lalich, a sociologist at California State University, Chico.
Lalich told LiveScience she definitely thinks the Texas compound should be called a cult. "If you've got a group that's abusing hundreds and hundreds of women and children, let's call it what it is," she said.
Another scientist weighed in on the cult-or-not question. "From what I can understand of this movement in Texas and other places, is that it would probably fall under new religious movement or cult movement," said John Barnshaw of the University of Delaware, who studies collective behaviors such as social movements and cultish behaviors.
Why people join
Some people have no choice about whether to join a religious group or other ideological group. Many FLDS members were apparently born into the society and have no concept of mainstream beliefs.
"These people grew up in this world. They don't have a clue what regular society is about," said Lalich, who has written several books on cults. "They come to believe this kind of behavior is normal even though clearly people leave because they realize this isn't healthy. You don’t give up girls at age 14 to marry some 50-year-old relative in many cases. The women have absolutely no choice. They have absolutely no power in that group."
Some adults do sign up with cults voluntarily, but those with stronger social ties to mainstream society are less likely to do so, explained Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman.
"What we do know is that the more radical kinds of groups are unlikely to attract people who are well-positioned and well-integrated into the larger society," Ammerman said. "People who are middle-aged business owners living in suburbia with a mortgage are less likely to be attracted to joining such a group than for instance a 22-year-old fresh out of college, without a job, perhaps estranged from their family."
Cults vs. sects
The term "cult," is derived from the word culture and has not always carried today's negative connotation, said Phillips Stevens, Jr., an anthropologist who studies religions and cults at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
"The word cult, up until the 1970s, was a respectable term referring to the central focus of a religious faith," Stevens said. "You could speak of the Catholic cult, and in fact, people still do."
Beginning in the 1970s, around the time of the UFO-spawned Reälians and Charles Manson's "Family," cults were associated with "a repressive, exclusive group of people whose members are held emotionally, if not physically, against their wills, led by usually a megalomaniacal leader," Stevens said.
The media, scientists and outsiders following the recent news from Eldorado, Texas, spout various labels to describe Warren Jeffs' establishment.
"Most social scientists would probably describe (FLDS) as a fundamentalist religious movement or a new religious movement because of the degree of difference between it and any previous existing religious tradition," Ammerman said in a telephone interview.
"Social scientists have increasingly not used the term (cult) at all, because it does carry that pejorative value with it," Ammerman said. Instead, the emergence of "new religious movements" serves as an umbrella term for cult-like groups. That way, Ammerman and other sociologists can focus more on the dynamics in a group and beyond, such as the demands placed on members and how the rest of society responds to the group.
Meanwhile, many news organizations are referring to the FLDS group as a sect, meaning a break-off from a traditional religion (in this case, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).
In contrast, Lalich said she uses the word cult, "and I think it's important that we use the term. I think by not using the word cult to identify these groups we let them hide behind the veil of religion."
Lethal leaders
Charisma is in some ways what gives cult leaders such power.
"The charismatic leader doesn't necessarily need to verify things; it's often based on trust," said Barnshaw, the University of Delaware researcher. "That person is often the lawgiver. They decide on what is right and what is wrong."
With that power, cult leaders have persuaded or otherwise convinced members to take extreme measures to reach some sort of salvation. Some cults do things that make them more clearly deserving of the label of cult. For the Heaven's Gate cult, Marshall Applewhite sold his message to 38 members who in March 1997 took their own lives with the promise that suicide would allow them to shed their bodily "containers." They were to hitch a ride on a spacecraft hidden behind the comet Hale-Bopp to reach a higher existence.
The leader of the Branch Davidians changed his name from Vernon Howell to David (after King David of the Israelites) Koresh (from the Babylonian King Cyrus). Rumors and later reports from ex-cult members suggested Koresh married several members, some in their mid-teens, and sexually and physically abused members. Rather than the apocalypse Koresh spoke of, a 1993 FBI raid on their Waco, Texas, compound left 76 dead, more or less resulting in the disappearnce of the group.
In Lalich's view, the distinction between a legitimate sect and a cult is simple: It depends on what or whom you worship.
"In a healthy or legitimate religion or sect, you are presumably worshiping some higher principle or some higher authority," Lalich said, "whereas in a cult people tend to end up worshipping that living human leader."
She added, "Your salvation is tied up with that particular living leader, and obeying orders and not breaking the rules, and subjecting yourself to whatever personal transformation you're expected to go through to be on that correct path to salvation."
Why members stay
Once they become members of a cult, individuals become more and more isolated from society and from reality-checks found in a diverse world.
"You take on new reality, this new interpretation of the world," Lalich said. "It doesn’t mean you have to live in a compound in the middle of Texas. But you've closed your world view. Everything you're interpreting, you're interpreting through the cultic belief system."
One former member of the Eldorado group echoed this.
"Once you go into the compound, you don't ever leave it,'' Carolyn Jessop, an ex-FLDS member, told The Associated Press. Jessop was one of the wives of the alleged leader of the Eldorado complex, before leaving in 2004.
One reason for the seeming lifelong loyalty, Lalich suspects, is fear.
"A lot of these groups operate on fear. You're afraid of whatever punishment you might get from the group," Lalich said. "But more so, you're afraid that you're going to be missing out on that path to salvation, whatever that salvation might be."
Often, Barnshaw said, cult members are made to believe the outside world is evil. The leaders will set up a dynamic of "insider versus outsider," and "interworldly versus otherworldly." This internal world "is the path to righteousness, as opposed to the external world, which is wicked and harmful and detrimental to our society," Barnshaw said.
Regarding the FLDS group in Texas, this type of lens apparently was a powerful force. "There was a strong distrust of anyone who this group perceived as being an outsider," Barnshaw said.
By JENNIFER DOBNER
The Associated Press
Thursday, April 10, 2008
SALT LAKE CITY -- The recent raid on a polygamist sect's compound by child welfare investigators has been tried before - but only temporarily interrupted the sect's way of life.
Authorities previously burst into the rural Utah-Arizona border home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1935, 1944 and 1953.
Children were shuffled off to foster care and their parents imprisoned. But the families came back, time after time, more committed to their religion and to polygamy.
"It ended up strengthening them in the long run," said Ken Driggs, an Atlanta attorney and polygamy historian.
Last week, state troopers and child welfare officials began a search of the FLDS compound in Eldorado after a 16-year-old girl there called a local family violence shelter to report her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her.
Driggs, who is not an FLDS member but has spent a lot of time with the community and became close to several members, said the latest raid won't change much.
"It's not going to make it go away," he said.
Polygamy in Utah and Arizona is primarily a legacy from Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of what today is the mainstream Mormon church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mormons brought the practice to what is now Utah in 1847 and soon began to openly preach it. As pressure mounted from the U.S. government, the church discontinued polygamy in 1890.
That, however, birthed an underground movement to which today's self-described Mormon fundamentalists tether their beliefs. The Mormon church renounces polygamy, excommunicates members who engage in the practice and disavows any connection with the FLDS church.
The FLDS is the largest-known polygamous sect. Although its membership is not published, figures from the 2000 U.S. Census show roughly 6,000 residents were living in the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.
The recent raid at the Yearning For Zion Ranch is having a "shockwave" through the fundamentalist communities of Utah and Arizona, said Mary Batchelor, a co-founder of Principle Voices, a polygamy advocacy group.
"We've been working for years so that this exact thing would never happen, so it's very disappointing and heartbreaking," she said. "I think it will impact a lot of the work we have done to build bridges."
Church leaders have kept a strict hold on every aspect of FLDS life _ from the modest prairie-style clothes worn by members, to amount of time their kids stay in school and which house a family calls home.
Marriages, which sometimes have included unions between teenage girls and older men, are arranged through the church's prophet and leader. Sect dissidents say the rules got even tighter in 2002, when Warren Jeffs took over the church.
Jeffs, now 52, demanded more from followers, asking for steep increases in the 10 percent monthly tithe. Dozens of men were excommunicated. Their wives and children were given to other men deemed more worthy. Many say the number of child brides also increased dramatically.
Taking a less confrontational approach to polygamous sects may not work any better, as Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff learned in 2006 when he took on another secretive clan - the Kingston family, a 1,500-member group based in the Salt Lake City area but scattered across the state.
Shurtleff told KTVX-TV in Salt Lake City that instead of conducting a sweep to serve 80 search warrants for DNA samples and other evidence, he tried to work with the family's attorney.
"And, of course, the result of that was all our subjects disappeared, our targets disappeared and we didn't get the warrants served like we hoped to do," he said.
By MICHELLE ROBERTS
Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 6 minutes ago
SAN ANGELO, Texas - Young teenage girls at a polygamist compound in West Texas were required to have sex in a soaring white temple after they were married in sect-recognized unions, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
The temple "contains an area where there is a bed where males over the age of 17 engage in sexual activity with female children under the age of 17," said an affidavit quoting a confidential informant who left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Agents found a bed in the temple with disturbed linens and what appeared to be a female hair, said the affidavit signed by Texas Ranger Leslie Brooks Long. The Rangers are the state's investigative law enforcement arm.
The temple also contained multiple locked safes, vaults and desk drawers that authorities sought access to as they searched for records showing alleged marriages of underage girls as young as 12 or 13 to older men and births among the teens. The affidavit unsealed Wednesday mentions a 16-year-old girl who has four children.
Texas law prohibits polygamy and the marriage of girls under 16.
Also Wednesday, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers completed a weeklong search of the 1,700-acre grounds, said spokeswoman Tela Mange.
Lawyers for the sect had wanted to cut off the wide-ranging search as it dragged on but agreed in court Wednesday to the appointment of a special master who will vet what is expected to be hundreds of boxes of records, computers and even family Bibles for records that should not become evidence for legal or religious reasons.
Gerry Goldstein, a San Antonio lawyer flanked by nine other attorneys the church hired, said the search of the temple is analogous to a law enforcement search of the Vatican or other holy places. The church lawyers described in documents three men being dragged from the temple as law enforcement sought entry for the search.
Troopers also arrested two men over the week and charged them with interfering with the search.
Prosecutor Allison Palmer argued the search was to uncover any evidence of criminal activity, not to malign a religion.
The search of the compound in Eldorado, 40 miles south of San Angelo, began last Thursday after a 16-year-old girl called a local family violence shelter to report her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The search warrant covered all documents related to marriages among sect members, including photos and entries possibly written in family Bibles.
Since then, the state has taken legal custody of 416 children, who are being housed at two sites in San Angelo, about 200 miles west of San Antonio. Another 139 women voluntarily left the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — known as the YFZ Ranch — and were being housed with the children.
Goldstein said a federal search warrant was issued as well as the state warrants.
Outside court, Goldstein declined to comment on the allegations against the church.
Court documents said a number of teen girls at the compound were pregnant, and all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of "emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse."
On Wednesday, state officials said the women and children were in good overall health but would not comment on pregnancies. About a dozen children appear to have chicken pox but were being separated at the evacuation sites, which include an old historic fort and a convention center here, said Child Protective Services spokesman Chris Van Deusen.
Authorities were trying to determine the identities and parentage of many of the children; some were unwilling or unable to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers.
Officials still aren't sure where the 16-year-old girl is who made the initial call, and she is not named among the children in initial custody petitions by the state.
Texas has an outstanding arrest warrant for the man alleged to have been the girl's husband, Dale Barlow, 50. He's a registered sex offender who pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor in Mohave County, Ariz., last year.
An unknown number of men and women stayed at the ranch while authorities completed the search of the gleaming 80-foot-high temple, a cheese-making plant, a cement plant, a school, a doctor's office and housing units.
The Texas investigation is the state's first of FLDS members, but prosecutors in Utah and Arizona have pursued several church members in recent years, including sect leader Warren Jeffs. He is serving two consecutive sentences of five years to life for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old wed to her cousin in Utah. He awaits trial on other charges in Arizona.
By GRETEL C. KOVACH
The New York Times
Published: April 9, 2008
SAN ANGELO, Tex. — Texas authorities released court documents on Tuesday detailing accusations of a “widespread pattern” of physical and sexual abuse of children by a polygamous sect.
The accusations led to a raid that began on Thursday at their compound in a remote area of West Texas and the removal of 416 children.
Texas state troopers and child welfare investigators executing a search warrant started the search for a 16-year-old who called to tell of abuse at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado. Leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints, a breakaway sect not recognized by the mainstream Mormon Church, own the ranch.
The girl who made the call has not been found, the authorities said.
The children and more than 100 adult women who elected to leave the ranch to be their caretakers are being housed at the Fort Concho historic site here.
An affidavit released on Tuesday says the 16-year-old repeatedly called a local family violence shelter asking for help to leave the ranch. She said that she had been taken to the ranch three years before by her parents and that when she was 15 she was forced into a marriage with a man who was then about 49, becoming his seventh wife.
The girl said the abuse began shortly after she moved to the ranch, the court papers say. She added that the man would force her to have sex with him and beat her when he became angry. The last time he beat her was on Easter, she said in the papers.
The girl, whispering into someone else’s cellphone, told the authorities that she thought she was several weeks pregnant, the papers say. She said that she was not allowed to leave the ranch other than to receive medical care, but that the man had left the ranch for a while to go to “the outsider’s world.”
A lawyer for the sect declined to comment on Tuesday.
The authorities have determined that the suspect, identified in the original search warrant as Dale Barlow, had been indicted in Mohave County, Ariz., on criminal charges of sexual conduct with a minor in connection with a reported marriage.
The man struck a plea deal, had the charge dismissed, served 45 days in jail and was given three years’ probation.
His probation officer said Monday that Mr. Barlow maintained that he did not know the girl and that he had not been in Texas in 30 years.
“YFZ Ranch and church members had told her that if she tried to leave, she will be found and locked up,” the affidavit states.
Church members also reportedly told her that outsiders would hurt her, force her to cut her hair and wear makeup and “have sex with lots of men.” The girl also said her parents were preparing to send her 15-year-old sister to the ranch from outside the state.
At the end of the call, she began crying and “then stated that she is happy and fine and does not want to get into trouble and that everything she had previously said should be forgotten.”
Based on that account, investigators entered the compound and found a number of young teenage mothers who appeared to be minors, some of them pregnant and some already with infant children.
“Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice among the residents of YFZ ranch in which minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them,” the affidavit states.
Because of this “pervasive pattern of indoctrinating and grooming” girls to accept these spiritual marriages and bear their husbands’ children, the authorities found all the girls to be in danger of abuse.
Boys also are forced to marry under-age girls, “resulting in them becoming sexually perpetrators,” and are in danger of abuse themselves, the affidavit said. The affidavit was the basis for obtaining a judge’s approval to take custody of the children.
Child welfare investigators also found evidence that children had been deprived of nutrition and forced to sit in closets as a punishment, court documents indicate.
Carolyn Jessop, author of a book, “Escape,” fled the sect’s historic home base in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., in 2003 to escape a polygamous marriage.
Ms. Jessop said she believed that her former husband, Merrill Jessop, was leading the Eldorado group after the conviction and jailing of its well-known leader, Warren Jeffs. Mr. Jeffs was convicted last year of being an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old to marry her cousin.
“Those girls are terrified,” said Ms. Jessop, who traveled to Eldorado in an unsuccessful effort to speak with her stepdaughters. “They don’t think these people are there to help them.”
The authorities made two arrests in searching the compound, but have not charged any member with a crime relating to the abuse accusations.
On Sunday, Levi Barlow Jeffs, 19, was arrested for interfering with the duties of a public servant. Leroy Johnson Steed, 41, was arrested on Monday on a felony charge of tampering with physical evidence.
