Religious Persecution, or Looking the Other Way? Isn’t There A Third View?

In Eldorado, Texas, there’s been a gathering up of women and children taken into protective custody from a commune that practices polygamy, one that claims LDS (Mormon) status, (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints: FLDS) but long ago was exiled from the Mormon Church… Facts presented in affidavits brings again into the spotlight, evil toward children justified by wrapping it in robes of religion.

Lawyers for the commune are arguing that this was ‘an unlawful raid,’ “matching anything in Russia or Germany,” rather than a taking into protective custody 401 some children and girls, most under 18 years of age and more than a few either pregnant or with children of their own. Proponents of polygamy are outraged.

The alleged phone call that was the catalyst for this protective custody came from a girl who said she was 15, had been married off to a 48 year old man who raped her, abused her and that she had a child by him already and was currently pregnant again… She said other women in the community would hold her child, while her (their) husband beat her.

Where this girl-woman is among the 401 taken to shelter by protective services of Texas, is not clear. (Also accompanied by 130 grown women who volunteered to leave the commune, I think to be with the children.) It appears that the young caller’s husband, an LDS progenitor of babies, is also a registered sex offender, according to records, showing he was charged with trying to solicit a minor, and put on probation for three years.

It’s a long night, and it’s cold here in the Rockies tonight. Maybe that’s disturbed my outlook.

It’s not about polygamy between adults. It’s a set of different issues regarding children.

Remember all the arguments, for/pro, years ago about the usefulness and the ethnic roots that ought not be disturbed in female genital mutilation “rituals?” It was “religious,” they said. Therefore, somehow, supposed to be ok.

This ‘ritual’ is wherein a girl child between ages of birth to eight years old is held down and with an old knife or rusty razor to her tender parts has her clitoris sliced off and sometimes her outer labia also lacerated off, with the inner labia sewn shut except for…. good God Almighty, what are people thinking? Or not.

If you’re a man reading this, the equivalent is not taking the foreskin… which personally despite all mohels’ teachings and any physician averring “it doesn’t hurt” or that boys will grow up to be too stupid to learn to wash themselves properly, so “this must be done.” (what are people thinking? Or not.) … as a mother who labored to bring life into this world, who knitted up bones from my bones, blood from my blood, I am never, ever going to accept grown mens’ claims …in the clear face of seeing many a newborn boychild at hospital screaming bloody murder red-faced and sobbing themselves to sleep after ‘circumcisions’ that ‘don’t hurt.’

I don’t buy the bring ‘em into the world, and hurt them right away to make them tough. Boychildren deserve every consideration, as do little girls.

The equivalent of female genital mutilation, for a male would be severing the foreskin as far up as possible, and severing the corona and head of the phallus… including the nerve plexus at the base of the corona.

I’m not even a man and writing about this makes me cringe deeply. Whether these assaults are on a girl or a boy, it makes me think perhaps I might know why old Yahweh destroyed the earth and humans and just wanted to erase everything and start all over again.

And, why are these matters of harming children, and wrongfully assigning diabolical sexuality and projected sloth as the supposedly astute reasons to mutilate the children, why are these so often wrapped in religiosity?

These acts are not religious. They may have become ‘tradition,’ but that is different than religiosity… the heart of religion holds life as the most tender of all matters, and holds the weakest amongst us as worthy of utter shelter and protection.

The Texas LDS commune referenced here, is being run by Warren Jeffs’ younger male kin, because Mr. Jeffs is in prison for pressing an underage girl to have sexual relations with an older man (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)… Jeffs seems reminiscent of Reverend Moon, Jim Jones and others who also orchestrated ‘marriages at whim’ amongst their ‘followers’…

The power lust and hunger that that infers, is mind-burning.

Given that each LDS man on the commune has about 50 or so children apiece, and given that according to one reporter, Mike Watkiss, who has covered similar communes of LDS for the last decade… the little boy children are used to farm way past 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, with ones as young as 8 years old running big equipment unsupervised.

I grew up in a rural outback; farmers and ranchers often had 8 and 12 children. Everyone worked. Hard. The difference was, the children went to school, made friends with many others, joined in the social events with others, and most were free to leave the family, and to love and marry –for good, bad, or ugly– whomsoever they chose, whenever they’d reached past 18 and 21.

It’s not only that those men who call themselves LDS and practice polygamy in Jeff’s group, press girl children to engage sexually with older men when the girls are at puberty, which is the onset of menses… today that’d be about age 11 and 12 on the average… it’s also that a girl that young, like a pup, or a young mare, or any young creature, has all kinds of hazards in too early pregnancies, that older women are far less subject to. Apparently, the girls’ tender ages, lack of complete growth of the pelvis and uterus, are not regarded.

There’s something that disturbs me even more about Warren Jeff’s LDS male copy-cats: I have this sickening feeling that the most vile thing this group may be up to is literally… I really can barely think/ write this… literally breeding children to systematically provide older men with virginal children. A child mill.

…In which especially the grown middle-aged and older women are as culpable in their own says, as the men. In court cases I’ve seen, it is a well-known facet of incest that the mother colludes by looking the other way, by not paying attention to her child’s life and moods… in her own way… she seeks to adapt to the predations, and to “normalize” the predation… by not intervening, by not protecting. Such a mother, after the sexual intrusion is exposed, most often will tearfully say, she didn’t know, didn’t realize it was wrong, thought the intrusion was ‘love.’

Can this really be religion? In any tradition? By my sights, adults who predate on children can say, My religion, my religion, my religion, I do this because I love, I love, I love the child… they can echo these prevarications all day and all night. But it still will not be celestial. No matter what, it will continue to be crime.

While some are charging the gathering up of the children and women from the commune as “unfair, polygamy is scriptural and just fine…” I’d just mention that it is also “scriptural” to murder your brother, make your father drunk to lie with your father in order to get pregnant, tell your enemies not to hurt you but take your concubines and rape them, to slaughter all the boy infants of the land. Just because it is in scripture, doesn’t mean it is holy.

In these matters, ethics is higher than the law. However, in our land and in other nations, often it is the law that is the only arbiter:

The following is a good insight into how ambivalent the process appears at that level: Andy Ivens at The Province writes about how the Canadian Government is grappling with polygamy:

The provincial government will have to decide whether to send to the courts the question of the legality of practising polygamy in Bountiful…

Leonard Doust, a senior member of the B.C. bar, agreed with the conclusions of a special prosecutor last year — that having the state pursue polygamy charges against members of the breakaway Mormon sect in the Creston Valley enclave near the U.S. border would likely fail.

Special prosecutor Richard Peck was appointed by Attorney-General Wally Oppal last year to submit a legal opinion on polygamy. Section 293 of the Criminal Code prohibits “any form of polygamy [or] entering into a conjugal union with more than one person at the same time.” The maximum penalty is five years in prison.

But Peck found the law likely would not survive a challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the ground it infringes the constitutional guarantee to freedom of religion.

Oppal asked for another opinion from Doust, who agreed with Peck. His view was released yesterday. “The serious misconduct in Bountiful will likely continue until the constitutionality of Sec. 293 is authoritatively decided by the Supreme Court of Canada,” wrote Doust.

Thus, wrapped in religion, predators thrive. Or can they, when it’s really about sexual predation of children– in the Name of the Father, or not?