http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.10/flds...ah-and-arizona

FLDS continues abusive polygamist practices in Utah and Arizona

News - From the June 11, 2012 issue by Debra Weyermann

Rumors swirled around the courthouse in San Angelo, Texas, last summer.
Prosecutors had charged Warren Jeffs -- leader of the nation's most
notorious polygamous sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints -- with sexually assaulting two underage girls in the
group's Texas compound. For weeks, spectators whispered that the
prosecutors possessed a vivid "rape tape" from 2006. When the audio
recording was finally produced, however, no amount of preparation could
buffer the shock.

Photographs projected on an enormous courtroom screen showed a
freckle-faced, 12-year-old redhead, bundled head-to-toe in the trademark
FLDS pioneer-style dress and caught in an awkwardly posed embrace with
her 6-foot-4-inch, 50-year-old "husband." With her braids, she resembled
the pre-teen heroine of the Pippi Longstocking books and movies. The
jurors stared at the images, openly dreading what they were about to
hear. Prosecutors handled the recording gingerly, as if they feared to
touch it.

The sound quality was poor, but the packed courtroom hung on every word.
Jeffs' voice drifted down from ceiling speakers like curling smoke. The
FLDS "prophet" both threatened and reassured the girl, mumbling prayers
that enjoined her to joyfully perform God's will. In the courtroom,
hands involuntarily flew up to cover mouths as it became clear that the
girl had been restrained on a sort of temple altar bed, while several of
Jeffs' adult "wives" stood by to assist him in case the child panicked.
Five minutes into the recording, Jeffs' droning prayers were accompanied
by the sound of rustling clothing. Then came a rhythmic heavy breathing
that no adult could misunderstand; it went on and on. At one point,
Jeffs, panting, asked the girl if she "liked it." She answered in a
small, squeaky voice: "I'm OK, sir."

Fifteen excruciating minutes later, several jurors were in tears; others
gripped their chairs in white-knuckled disbelief. The jury sentenced
Jeffs to life in a Texas prison, adding another 20 years as a kind of
exclamation point. That day, it seemed like the head had been cut off
the FLDS snake.

Yet since Jeffs' conviction last August, FLDS leaders have continued
many of their extreme practices -- especially in the sect's longtime
headquarters on the Utah-Arizona border, called "Short Creek," the local
nickname for the neighboring towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City,
Ariz. For more than a decade, the Short Creek community had been roiled
by accusations of systematic child abuse, rape, incest and massive
fraud. Although those crimes seem less common now, bizarre allegations
continue: involuntary "reassignments" of women to new husbands, the
intimidation of children, book burnings, assaults and kidnappings by
"God squads" composed of religious vigilantes and Short Creek's
state-certified police force, and so on.

And following a well-established pattern, most authorities in Utah, the
state with the longest relationship with the sect, have responded with
tolerance rather than prosecutions. Arizona's stance is only slightly
tougher. Neither state is anywhere near as aggressive as Texas, whose
lawmen took on the FLDS bigtime. The questions are impossible to avoid:
How has Utah and Arizona's cultural acceptance of the illegal practice
of polygamy created a habitat for the much more serious crimes of the
most extreme polygamists? And will it ever be possible to dismantle this
sect, or any others like it that might arise in its wake, unless those
two states finally crack down?

In February 2010, a beautifully illustrated cover story in National
Geographic magazine profiled the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints in Short Creek. The polygamist families were shown
in a romanticized, golden light: the wives in old-fashioned prairie
dresses, the healthy-looking children frolicking. Few photos showed the
men in charge, and any mention of crimes or court battles was outweighed
by positive spin. People magazine had treated the sect similarly in a
2009 cover story. TV viewers nationwide enjoyed Big Love -- a humorous
HBO series about a polygamist family in a Salt Lake City suburb that ran
from 2006 to 2011. A reality-TV show called Sister Wives -- which
chronicled the lives of Nehi, Utah, polygamist Kody Brown, his four
wives and their 17 children -- has also been popular since its 2010
debut; recently that group moved to Nevada, but they're still doing
their thing.

Evangelical Christian groups across the country, and the Salt Lake
City-headquartered Mormon Church, are waging a fierce political war
against another unconventional form of marriage -- pushing states to ban
gay marriage and even urging constitutional amendments against it. They
don't, however, have much to say about polygamy.

The most widely accepted estimate -- made by Kathryn Daynes, a Brigham
Young University professor, and other experts -- is that the U.S. has
between 30,000 and 50,000 polygamists. Most live in Utah, where the
general attitude toward polygamy stems from the Mormon Church, whose
formal name is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS.
That church's founder, Joseph Smith, had 27 known wives and many overs,
some reportedly as young as 13, when he inspired the church's rapid
initial growth in the early 1800s in the Midwest. After Smith was
murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844, his successor, Brigham Young,
escaped U.S. laws by moving the Mormon Church's headquarters to the Salt
Lake Valley, which at that time belonged to Mexico. Young established a
powerful theocracy he called "Deseret," and later became the first
governor of the federally recognized Utah Territory. He took more than
50 wives and proclaimed that "any man who denied plural marriage was
damned."

The federal government forced the Mormon Church to publicly abandon
polygamy in the 1890s, passing laws that threatened the church's power
and refusing to grant Utah statehood unless polygamy was abandoned. But
the Mormon Church has never removed Smith's polygamy directive from its
"sacred covenants," and polygamy is still a part of the religion's
concept of the afterlife. Today, more than 65 percent of Utah's
residents are Mormons, and they pretty much run the state government, as
well as most of the local governments that allow organized polygamous
sects and so-called "independent" polygamists to live openly. The
Associated Press recently found that Utah had prosecuted only two
polygamists in the past 50 years in cases where no other crimes were
involved. Three other news operations, including USA Today, uncovered
just one such prosecution or none at all. The idea is treated so
casually that Utah brewpubs sell Polygamy Porter, a popular dark ale.

The prevailing attitude in Arizona, where nearly 6 percent of the
residents are Mormon (three times the national average), is similar. The
independent polygamists are often adults freely engaging in "plural
marriage," and many Utah and Arizona authorities simply regard it as a
"lifestyle choice." Yet there's ample evidence that some polygamists --
particularly those organized in fundamentalist Mormon sects like the
FLDS, which began as a few dirt farmers in Short Creek in the 1930s --
engage in underage marriage, rape and even incest.

The most aggressive action either state ever took against polygamists
occurred back in 1953, when Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle denounced FLDS
leaders in Short Creek as "white slavers" and dispatched more than 100
county deputies, state troopers and National Guardsmen, who removed 263
FLDS children and arrested dozens of men. Three busloads of accompanying
journalists framed the story differently, describing it as a
heavy-handed government separating devout adults from wailing children
in cardboard shoes. Most of those children and adults simply returned to
Short Creek later, and the bad publicity ended many of the
anti-polygamists' careers, along with Pyle's ambitions for the
presidency.

Little action has been taken since then. The most famous modern non-FLDS
polygamist, Tom Green, ruled over a collection of dilapidated trailers
in western Utah. For years, local authorities, including Juab County
Attorney David Leavitt, knew about Green -- but they ignored him until
he appeared on national TV shows like Dateline and The Jerry Springer
Show to talk about his 10 wives (one of whom was a 13-year-old
stepdaughter), his 25 to 30 kids, and the wily system he'd devised to
defraud taxpayers into supporting his family. Green was finally arrested
in 2001, and Leavitt recruited Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff to
help with the case. Both Shurtleff and Leavitt -- like most of the
police, judges and prosecutors who deal with polygamy in Utah -- are
devout Mormons descended from polygamists; both had attended school with
polygamists or knew some personally; and both hesitated to prosecute a
"lifestyle choice."

Both of those prosecutors concluded that the child brides and welfare
fraud made the Green case impossible to ignore. They spent $100,000
nailing Green, and convicted him of bigamy in 2001 and child rape in
2002. But Juab District Court Judge Donald Eyre said he was impressed by
the "devotion" of one of Green's wives, and Green served only five years
in prison. And David Leavitt -- whose brother, Michael, served as Utah's
governor from 1993 to 2003 -- lost his 2002 re-election bid for county
prosecutor; he said later the case "cost me my job."

Utah's first noteworthy prosecution of an FLDS polygamist occurred
around that time. Rod Holm, a Short Creek marshal -- badged in both
Hildale and Colorado City -- already had two wives and 18 children when
he "married" 16-year-old Ruth Stubbs in 1998. Stubbs later described a
lifestyle that echoed the accounts of other FLDS women who escaped.
Ordered to marry Holm, she had to ask permission to do the simplest
errands. She was forced to work 14-hour unpaid shifts in FLDS
businesses, knowing that her own children were often smacked around at
home by other family members. FLDS women, who were often kept pregnant
for as long as they were fertile, sometimes had more than a dozen kids
each. In 2001, Stubbs, who was pregnant at the time, fled to Phoenix,
Ariz., with her two toddlers.

When the FLDS went to court in Utah to get custody of Stubbs' children
-- a common tactic that intimidates women into returning to the sect, or
prevents them from fleeing in the first place -- Stubbs received pro
bono help from Tucson attorney Bill Walker. Walker was alarmed by the
sympathetic statements that a Utah state court judge -- James Shumate in
St. George, the city nearest to Short Creek -- issued from the bench:
gratuitous, folksy homilies about family honor that implied that Stubbs
was unbalanced, rather than Holm. Although Walker had informed Utah
state prosecutors about Holm, they didn't indict him on criminal charges
until after Walker allowed Phoenix TV reporter Mike Watkiss to interview
Stubbs. The painfully graphic interviews were carried by TV stations
from Denver to Los Angeles.

A St. George jury convicted Holm of unlawful sexual conduct and bigamy
in 2003, but his sentence was even lighter than Green's: one year of
work release that allowed him to leave jail during the daytime, handed
down by Utah State Court Judge G. Rand Beacham. Judge Beacham was openly
sympathetic, stating from the bench that no sentence was likely to
change a man's religious convictions, nor should any government agency
try to do so. That prompted Utah Assistant Attorney General Kristine
Knowlton's blunt acknowledgment: "Polygamy is not on trial. Mr. Holm is
on trial."

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