27 posts tagged “evil”
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
28 Apr 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger — often secret — say, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.
The administration's decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program's credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.
At issue is the EPA's screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.
A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report, which will be the subject of a Senate Environment Committee hearing Tuesday. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of steps was adopted two weeks ago.
Cancer risk assessments for nearly a dozen major chemicals are now years overdue, the GAO said, blaming the new multiagency reviews for some of the delay. The EPA, for example, had promised to prepare assessments on 10 major toxic chemicals for external peer review by the end of 2007, but only two reached that stage.
GAO investigators said extensive involvement by EPA managers, White House budget officials and other agencies has eroded the independence of EPA scientists charged with determining the health risks posed by chemicals.
The Pentagon, the Energy Department, NASA and other agencies — all of which could be severely affected by EPA risk findings — are being allowed to participate "at almost every step in the assessment process," said the GAO.
Those agencies, their private contractors and manufacturers of the chemicals face restrictions and major cleanup requirements, depending on the EPA's scientific determinations.
"By law the EPA must protect our families from dangerous chemicals," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the Senate committee's chairman. "Instead, they're protecting the chemical companies."
The EPA's risk assessment process "never was perfect," Boxer said in an interview Monday. "But at least it put the scientists up front. Now the scientists are being shunted aside."
The GAO said many of the deliberations over risks posed by specific chemicals "occur in what amounts to a black box" of secrecy because the White House claims they are private executive branch deliberations.
Such secrecy "reduces the credibility of the ... assessments and hinders the EPA's ability to manage them," the GAO report said.
The White House said the GAO is wrong in suggesting that the EPA has lost control in assessing the health risks posed by toxic chemicals.
"Only EPA has the authority to finalize an EPA assessment," Kevin F. Neyland, deputy administrator of the White House budget office's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote in response to the GAO. He called the interagency process "a dialogue that helps to ensure the quality" of the reviews.
One EPA scientist with extensive knowledge of the changes in the agency's risk assessment policies ridiculed the claim that the EPA still has the final say.
"Unless there is concurrence by other agencies, ... things don't go forward. It means we stop what we are doing," said the scientist, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of endangering his career.
"The (EPA) scientists feel as if they have lost complete control of the process, that it's been taken over by the White House and that they're calling the shots," the scientist said.
The GAO investigation focused on the EPA's computerized database, known as IRIS — the Integrated Risk Information System. It contains data on the human health effects of exposure to some 540 toxic chemicals in the environment. New chemicals are being proposed constantly for inclusion under a complicated assessment process that can take five years or more.
After years of stops and starts, the GAO said, the EPA has yet to determine carcinogen risks for a number of major chemicals such as:
- Naphthalene, a chemical used in rocket fuel as well as in manufacturing commercial products such as mothballs, dyes and insecticides.
- Trichloroethylene, or TCE, a widely used industrial degreasing agent.
- Perchloroethylene, or "perc," a chemical used in dry cleaning, metal degreasing and making chemical products.
- Formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable gas used to making building materials.
Environmentalists say these chemicals have been widely found at military bases and Superfund sites and in soil, lakes, streams and groundwater.
The findings, after an 18-month investigation by the congressional watchdog agency, come at a time of growing criticism from members of Congress and health and environmental advocates over alleged political interference in the government's science activities.
Last week, a confidential survey by an advocacy group of EPA scientists showed more than half of the 1,600 respondents worried about political pressure in their work.
By BEN EVANS
1 May 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Judiciary Committee threatened Thursday to subpoena former White House adviser Karl Rove if he does not agree by May 12 to testify about former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's corruption case.
In a letter to Rove's attorney, committee Democrats called it "completely unacceptable" that the Republican political strategist has rejected the panel's request for sworn testimony even as he discusses the matter publicly through the media.
"We can see no justification for his refusal to speak on the record to the committee," the letter states. "We urge you and your client to reconsider ... or we will have no choice but to consider the use of compulsory process."
Committee Democrats are investigating whether Rove and Republican appointees at the Justice Department influenced Siegelman's prosecution to kill his chances for re-election. It is part of a broader inquiry into whether U.S. attorneys were fired for not aggressively pursuing cases against Democrats.
Siegelman, a Democrat who served one term as governor after being elected in 1998, was convicted in 2006 on bribery and other charges and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He was recently released on bond pending appeal.
Last year, Alabama attorney and one-time Republican campaign volunteer Jill Simpson, told the committee under oath that she heard conversations among GOP operatives in 2002 suggesting that Rove was pushing the Justice Department to pursue a conviction against Siegelman. She also has said Rove asked her in 2001 to find evidence that Siegelman was cheating on his wife.
Rove, who frequently worked in Alabama politics before orchestrating President Bush's White House campaigns, has denied having anything to do with the case. In a recent magazine article, he called Simpson a "complete lunatic" and said he had never heard of her.
The career prosecutors who handled Siegelman's case also have denied any political influence.
Thursday's threat marks the latest development in a lengthy standoff between President Bush and Congress over testimony from current and former White House staffers.
The committee has issued or threatened subpoenas to more than half a dozen administration officials and is suing White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to comply with subpoenas on the U.S. attorney firings.
The White House has generally maintained that their testimony is off-limits from congressional oversight under executive privilege.
Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, maintains that Rove must defer to that position. But as the White House has offered on other matters, Luskin wrote the committee this week that Rove would discuss the Siegelman case on the condition that his comments not be under oath and not be transcribed.
Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and several other lawmakers rejected the offer, saying such an interview "will not permit us to obtain a straightforward and clear record."
Detroit's Scandal Is About More Than Sex
April 26, 2008; Wall Street Journal
Detroit
They are calling it "PagerGate." It's a sex scandal involving Detroit's Democratic Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. It broke in January and, as details dribble out, residents are falling into a depression as deep as the one afflicting their economy.
Although there is widespread disgust at Mr. Kilpatrick, there is also growing regret that the departure of this flamboyant, 37-year-old two-term mayor will end his nascent economic reforms. Actually, Motown isn't so lucky.
![[Detroit's Scandal Is About More Than Sex]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AH416_ccdalm_20080425173010.jpg) |
| Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff Christine Beatty, May 2007. |
The hard fact is that Mr. Kilpatrick was a false prophet under whom the city wasn't going to come back – and not just because of his vices, but his virtues as well.
Mr. Kilpatrick has been dogged by scandals ever since he sauntered into office – sporting a diamond earring and "mayor" embroidered on his French-cuffs – on January 2002. He habitually used city funds like his personal bank – running up $200,000 in spa treatments and champagne, for example, early in his term. The mayor reimbursed the city for about $9,000 after the scandal broke, claiming that the rest of the charges reflected legitimate city business. The city at the time was cutting police officers, and even auditors, to plug a $250 million budget deficit.
But the latest, most spectacular scandal had its genesis at a party that supposedly took place in the mayoral mansion to celebrate Mr. Kilpatrick's election, shortly after he took office. The allegation is that Mr. Kilpatrick's wife unexpectedly stopped by the party – and took a bat to a stripper whom she found consorting with him.
The state's Republican attorney general found no evidence that the party took place. The stripper is no longer available for questioning; a few months after the alleged party she was gunned down. But two Detroit police officers launched their own probe to investigate rumors of the party, as well as other complaints that the mayor's security staff was helping arrange extramarital liaisons, including one with his then chief of staff, Christine Beatty.
The mayor summarily fired the officers, who then filed a whistleblower lawsuit. Testifying under oath during trial, Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty categorically denied having an affair, much less firing the police officers because of it. Nonetheless, the jury returned a $6.5 million verdict for the officers.
Outraged, Mr. Kilpatrick accused the predominantly white jury of racism, and vowed to appeal. But a month later, he abruptly settled for $2 million more than the jury award.
It now seems that the reason for the about-face was that the plaintiffs confronted him with text-messages that he and Ms. Beatty had exchanged on city-issued pagers. The messages discussed their sexual encounters and the firings. In exchange for the payment, the plaintiffs signed an agreement not to reveal the existence of the messages.
The City Council, oblivious to the backroom deal, rubber-stamped the settlement. But the Detroit Free Press, not wanting to let it go so easily, mounted its own investigation – and uncovered the incriminating messages.
Now Mr. Kilpatrick is being forced to defend himself against allegations that he first committed perjury to cover up the firings, and then tried to cover up the perjury by purchasing a secret deal through taxpayer funds.
The county prosecutor – an African-American woman – has filed eight criminal charges against the mayor, each of which carries a 15-year jail sentence. But Mr. Kilpatrick responded by declaring that he is on "assignment from God," and has hired a team of high-priced lawyers – paid for, in part, by the city – to defend him.
Although few believe that Mr. Kilpatrick can – or should – hang on until the end of his term next year, there is also much worry that, without him, his economic reforms will wither. That, actually, wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Mr. Kilpatrick's entire economic revival plan rests on attracting high-profile, flashy projects. True, he has been more successful than his predecessors because of his wily ability to cut deals and push them through a dysfunctional city bureaucracy. For instance, he managed to land the contract to host the 2006 Super Bowl and convince General Motors, Compuware and, more recently, Quicken Loans Inc. to relocate their offices downtown. He also succeeded in creating three casinos, and in convincing developers to restore old, historic hotels such as the Book-Cadillac to serve the casino patrons.
Mr. Kilpatrick lured each of these projects with targeted tax breaks and subsidies. Quicken alone received $200 million. But corporate giveaways are not the stuff of an economic revival. "If anything, they put small businesses, the true drivers of the economic engine, at a competitive disadvantage," observes David Littmann, senior economist at the Mackinac Public Policy Center. As a result, he says, "Many of them either shut down or just don't open."
Indeed, every indicator of economic and civic renewal has trended in the wrong direction since Mr. Kilpatrick became mayor. There is not a single year in which Detroit's unemployment rate – currently at about 15% -- has been lower than in 2001, the year before he took office. Income tax revenues last year were $27 million less than three years ago, a testimony to the city's contracting tax base. Meanwhile, high school graduation rates are an abysmal 25%, and homicide rates an astronomical 47 per 100,000, the highest among comparably sized cities.
The lack of jobs and city services is accelerating the exodus out of Detroit. A recent study by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments estimated that, if current trends continue, the city's population will shrink to 770,000 in seven years, from about 900,000 when Mr. Kilpatrick became mayor.
Breaking the vicious cycle of shrinking population, declining revenues and worsening city services requires not a young prince selectively handing out privileges to a chosen few. It requires an overall climate fit for business. To do that, Detroit needs to simplify its Byzantine regulations (home-businesses such as day care centers or hair-braiding salons require 70 building or equipment permits to get started), slash taxes (Detroit is the fourth highest-taxed city for a family of four making $25,000), tackle crime, and improve public schools.
These are mundane, boring tasks to which a high-roller like Mr. Kilpatrick is singularly unsuited. His departure won't guarantee Detroit's economic revival. But, if he stays, Detroit will have no reason for hope, either.
Ms. Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation.
U.S. Identifies Tainted Heparin in 11 Countries
By GARDINER HARRIS
The New York Times
Published: April 22, 2008
WASHINGTON — A contaminated blood thinner from China has been found in drug supplies in 11 countries, and federal officials said Monday they had discovered a clear link between the contaminant and severe reactions now associated with 81 deaths in the United States.
a Chinese official disputed the assertion that the contaminant found in the drug, heparin, caused any deaths and insisted that his country’s inspectors be allowed to inspect the American plant where the finished heparin vials were made. He said any future agreement to allow American inspections of Chinese firms should be reciprocal.
“We don’t have a strong evidence to show that it is heparin or its contaminant that caused the problem,” said the official, Ning Chen, second secretary at the Chinese Embassy.
Mr. Chen said that illnesses associated with contaminated heparin had occurred only in the United States, which he said suggested that the problem arose in this country.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center, said that German regulators uncovered a cluster of illnesses among dialysis patients who took contaminated heparin. She said Chinese officials had conceded that heparin produced in their country contained a contaminant, though they say it was not connected to the illnesses.
“Heparin should not be contaminated, regardless of whether or not that contamination caused acute adverse events,” Dr. Woodcock said. “We are fairly confident based on the biological information that we have had that this contaminant is capable of triggering these adverse reactions.”
The dispute is a sign of growing tensions between China and the United States over the safety of Chinese imports. China has in recent years exported poisonous toothpaste, lead-painted toys, toxic pet food, tainted fish and now, contaminated medicine.
Bills to require far more aggressive inspections of Chinese products and companies are being proposed by members of Congress. Hearings are scheduled for Tuesday in the House and Thursday in the Senate.
China has lurched between defensiveness and cooperation on issues of product safety. Last year, it initially blocked the F.D.A. from investigating tainted pet food and accused foreign forces of exaggerating the issue. Then in July, China said that it had executed its former top food and drug regulator for taking bribes and promised reforms.
The F.D.A. sent a warning letter on Monday to Changzhou SPL, the Chinese plant identified as the source of contaminated heparin made by Baxter International in the United States. It warned that the plant used unclean tanks to make heparin, that it accepted raw materials from an unacceptable vendor and that it had no adequate way to remove impurities.
Heparin is made from the mucous membranes of the intestines of slaughtered pigs that, in China, are often cooked in unregulated family workshops. The contaminant, identified as oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, a cheaper substance, slipped through the usual testing and was recognized only after more sophisticated tests were used.
The F.D.A. has identified 12 Chinese companies that have supplied contaminated heparin to 11 countries — Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States. Deborah Autor, director of compliance at the F.D.A.’s drug center, said the agency did not know the original source of all the contamination or the points in the supply chain at which it was added.
Officials have discovered heparin lots that included the cheap fake additive manufactured as early as early as 2006, although a spike in illnesses associated with contaminated heparin began in November and persisted through February, officials said.
Separately, the Government Accountability Office will release a report on Tuesday showing that the F.D.A. would need to spend at least $56 million more next year to begin full inspections of foreign plants. It would need to spend at least $15 million annually to inspect China’s drug plants every two years, which is the domestic standard.
Bush administration officials have acknowledged problems associated with poor inspection of overseas plants and have plans to improve the situation. But President Bush’s budget does not provide the F.D.A. with funds to hire more inspectors.
At its present inspection pace, the F.D.A. would need at least 27 years to inspect every foreign medical device plant that exports to the United States, 13 years to check every foreign drug plant and 1,900 years to examine every foreign food plant. [Emphasis mine, profound evil theirs.]
Proposals circulating on Capitol Hill would increase the agency’s financing and charge domestic and foreign manufacturers fees to pay for inspections.
“Even the Bush administration seems to understand the potential peril that these foreign firms pose, but they offer only vague plans to address the problems and they refuse to spend more than a fraction of the money needed to protect the public,” said Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who leads the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The F.D.A. has announced plans to open inspection offices in three Chinese cities, but the agency has yet to get permission from the Chinese government. Mr. Chen said any inspection agreement should be reciprocal. “Will the U.S. government accept the Chinese F.D.A. to set up in the United States?” he said.
Dr. Woodcock said the Chinese had agreed to test heparin lots before allowing them to be exported. But Dr. Moheb Nasr, director of the drug agency’s office of new drug quality assessment, said that the Chinese test might not be sensitive enough to identify the contaminant.
Dr. Woodcock assured patients, however, that all heparin supplies in the United States had been tested with the most sensitive assays and had been found to be uncontaminated.
Scientific Protein Laboratories and Changzhou SPL said the company regretted the agency’s decision to send a warning letter that, it said, did not reflect the company’s current safety practices. The company said it had no way of detecting a contaminant present in heparin supplies throughout China.
Baxter International, which bought heparin ingredients from SPL and sold the finished drug in the United States, said that its tests confirmed that the contaminant could cause illness. It disputed the F.D.A.’s analysis that its product was linked with 81 deaths, saying it had identified only 5 in which its product “may have contributed to the adverse outcome, though there is not yet enough medical data available to draw a firm conclusion that the reaction caused the death.”
Deaths linked to the drug may have been concentrated in the United States because American doctors may be more likely to use large, quickly infused amounts of the drug, said drug officials. Also, the F.D.A. may track serious side effects better than its counterparts abroad.
Men who explain things
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, including a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me; with my infinitely generous younger brother; with splendid male friends. Still, there are these other men too.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow, or an elephant turd on the carpet.
Yes, it's true that guys like this pick on other men's books, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.
Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.
This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty.
More extreme versions of this syndrome exist in, for example, those Islamic countries where women's testimony has no legal standing; so that a woman can't testify that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male rapist. Which there rarely is.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling -- as though it were a light and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked the physicist, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for why she was fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....
Even getting a restraining order -- a fairly new legal tool -- requires acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don't work anyway. Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's a leading cause of death among pregnant women in the U.S. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.
I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when these kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop us and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well after my birth, that is. And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual violence isn't a life-or-death issue, remember that Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, age 20, was apparently killed by another Marine in December while she was waiting to testify that he allegedly raped her twice. The burned remains of her body and her fetus were found in the fire pit in his backyard in January, and he was arrested last week in Mexico. Being told that, categorically, he knows what he's talking about and she doesn't, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world. Several years ago, I objected to the behavior of a couple of men, only to be told on both occasions that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said they had, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female.
Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history has helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women are out there on this 6-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining Things, but it's part of the same archipelago of arrogance.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another 40-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.
A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when a writer friend invited me to a dinner that included a male translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential and mostly silent throughout the meal. Perhaps the translator was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me. The House committee, he insisted, no longer existed in the early 1960s and, anyway, no women's group played such a role in its downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.
I had written a book that drew from primary documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining men still assume that I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch -- even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with "striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC's Bastille." In the early 1960s.
Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.
The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled many women -- of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to mention the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.
After all, Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-making role in the antinuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. Things have certainly gotten better, but this war won't end in my lifetime. I'm still fighting it, for myself certainly, but also for all those younger women who have something to say, in the hope that they will get to say it.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books including "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West" and "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities." A longer version of this article appears at Tomdispatch.com.
It's rarely possible for me to wait until I'm out of earshot before laughing at pillocks like these; I'm wired for immediate snickering if not insulting them outright.
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
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Peter Scanlon
Dr. Theodore Tarby says FLDS polygamists will continue producing children afflicted with severe physical and mental disorders.
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Life Magazine
Polygamist patriarch Joseph Smith Jessop with his youngest daughter shortly before his death in September 1953.
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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.