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TechnoratiPolygamy by any other name
A religious sect is being prosecuted for under-age sex and marriage. A lot of other people should be feeling uncomfortable.
An extraordinary child welfare case is unfolding in the United States of America -- or at least that part of the US where the children in question have been living in a community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Starting four years ago the sect built a small gated town outside Eldorado in West Texas and proceeded to live according to their belief that men must have at least three wives to reach heaven. To reach their quota men have to take young girls as wives and surplus adolescent boys have to be evicted periodically.
Early this month, however, law enforcement agencies swooped on the YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch and carried off more than 400 children to protect them from the sexual mores of their elders. This week the children, who range in age from infancy to 17 years, have had DNA samples taken as a means to establishing their parentage and they are now being shipped off -- in most cases without their mothers -- to various temporary destinations. The trauma for the younger children and their mothers must be considerable.
It is difficult, however, to feel sympathy for the leaders of the sect and its Eldorado branch. The idea of middle-aged men taking young teenagers as wives, as appears to be the case here, is repellent to Western instincts refined by Christianity. No wonder it is illegal. Marriage is meant to be a covenant between equals, not a form of paternalistic clan-building, even though the latter may be dignified with religious concepts.
Yet we have to admit that marriage in the mainstream of society presents a confusing picture: so often preceded by youthful experimentation with sex and cohabitation, so often followed by infidelity, divorce and remarriage. And more divorce and more remarriage. The President of France has just taken a third wife and the world in general seems amused rather than scandalised. Popular media present a daily parade of so-called celebrities who have just divorced or just remarried for the umpteenth time and this is considered entertainment. Polygamy, anyone?
As for under-age sex, it is so common that most people just shrug it off and insist that the authorities deal with the consequences. Haven't we lived with the idea of teenage pregnancy for decades? Aren't there over 700,000 of these pregnancies each year (2004 figures) in the USA and isn't the median age of first intercourse there 16? Do we not now offer to vaccinate 11- and 12-year-olds against the disease they are most likely to get when they begin, as their elders expect, to experiment with sex?
About six months ago a middle school in Maine, Eastern USA, made national headlines when parents objected to a plan for the school nurse to give out "a full range of contraception" to children whom she considered needed it. Most middle schoolers are aged 11 to 13. All the same, about 13 per cent of them reported being sexually active in 2005. Who are they having sex with? Who cares, so long as the evidence can be buried by means of a morning after pill or an abortion?
In view of these patterns of mainstream sexual behaviour the official crackdown on the FLDS community is not only extremely heavy-handed; it is also futile and somewhat hypocritical. If the authorities are serious about saving young girls from sexual abuse they will have to put half of America on notice of prosecution. If they are worried about the effects of on children of men begetting children by several wives concurrently, they should worry even more about those who take wives/partners and beget children serially, because they vastly outnumber the individuals who formally embrace polygamy.
The polygamy effected by cohabitation, divorce and remarriage causes widespread misery among children. A report published last week in Britain found that a quarter of children under 16 regularly feel depressed, and the leading cause of their unhappiness appears to be family breakdown. "Young people don't like being in different homes on different days of the week and get upset by strife between their parents," commented one of the experts on the report team. A new study from the US shows that adolescents living with half-siblings or step-siblings tend to do worse both in their studies and behaviour at school. These "blended families", says researcher Kathryn Harker Tillman, "may not be in the best interests of the children involved", and yet they are very common.
No doubt the polygamous parents at YFZ Ranch would compare the situation of their own children favourably with the brokenness and forced togetherness of so many households in the mainstream. Of course, we do not know how happy or otherwise the children and young people of the sect are -- yet. But we do know a lot about other children and we know that they many are suffering because of the sexual mores of their parents. What are we prepared to do about these children?
Prosecution of the FLDS sect would be mere tokenism if it did not signal an awareness that society needs to do much more to protect all children from sexual precocity and the breakdown of monogamous marriage.
Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.
I thought I heard on television last night that all young girls must have sex with their fathers fist and if they happen to get pregnant they abort the fetus. Does anyone know anything about this? That was the first I had heard of that and it blows my mind.
Dora
CenTexAggie makes some good points. I agree with Ms. Moynihan that marriage shouldn’t be used as a means of “paternalistic clan-building,” but to say marriage is meant to be a covenant between equals goes too far. Often spouses vastly unequal in many respects obtain legitimate benefits from marriage that they otherwise couldn’t obtain. Ms. Moynihan’s comparison of serial marriages, the norm in our society, to polygamy is interesting. One effect of the FLDS group’s polygamous structure appears to be avoidance of divorce. But we must be careful not to leap to cause-effect conclusions. Children of divorce may have lower academic achievement and more depression, but the causes of divorce, not divorce itself, probably account for this. Staying married without addressing the problems might be even worse (I speak from experience). I don’t see being in different homes on different days of the week as a major social issue. The strife among parents, however, is another matter. I’m from Texas.
Ms. Moynihan rightly states that the official crackdown on the FLDS is heavy-handed (I wouldn’t call it futile), and is somewhat hypocritical because the state doesn’t seem to focus equal attention on widespread violations of age of consent laws outside of the FLDS. But the age of consent law has to be enforced or changed. If Texas is going to enforce the age of consent law, there was no choice – the authorities had to move against the FLDS. It would be interesting to see what the FLDS group would do if they maintained all their practices except those that violate age of consent laws. They already technically comply with bigamy laws by refraining from deceptive acquisition of multiple marriage licenses. I’d be inclined to grant them the privilege of living that lifestyle, as long as they comply with the law, in the interest of religious liberty. By the way, I belong to no religious organization.
Ronk:
“And you didn’t even mention the legal absurdity of people in parts of the US having supposed “husbands” and “wives” of the same sex and children having supposedly “two mothers” or “two fathers”.”
I believe she specifically -avoided- what you take to be ‘legal absurdity’ by the comment “Marriage is meant to be a covenant between equals”. So unless you plan on convincing me that homosexuals are ‘less equal’ than heterosexuals, you can stop spouting -your- absurdity.
I applaud the author for not adding disparaging comments about homosexuality to an article where homosexuals are not present or discussed, as Ronk would. Thank you.
What’s amusing here is the attempt to relate these Mormons to secular society. With these people, as with Mormons of old, it’s all about sex and power. It rests upon the gratuitous idea of the inferiority of women. In order to make girls available to older men competing males, teenage boys, are driven from the pack. How are they different in kind to the Mormons of the middle of the 19th century? They have a society structured like a pride of lions or a pack of wolves.
I do sympathise with you SandsTex; we Catholics have to put up with dozens of assorted little schismatic and heretical groups claiming to call themselves “Catholic”.
But come on now: these “FLDS” blokes are apparently staying true to what all Mormons believed and did, until the main Mormon leaders agreed with great reluctance and under great pressure from the civil authorities, to abandon polygamy. It is accurate to describe the “FLDS” as generic “Mormons” or “a Mormon sect”.
It’s surprising how many people, media included, still believe that this polygamist sect is somehow a part of the ‘Mormon’ religion. It is not a Mormon sect, they are not practicing Mormonism. FLDS members are not Mormons. They do not practice Mormonism. FLDS are not a part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are not LDS. For further clarification, go to http://www.lds.org and click on Newsroom.
More than just arresting people and charging them to court. I think that it is high time for America to run a self check on itself to make sure that she is not heading towards self destruction. America needs to set a lot of things right.
YFZ is just one example of what people can think of in terms of wanting to do it their own way. I’d say that if you don’t stick to your religious beliefs you end up making your own beliefs. Pastoral care in every religion needs to be addressed. The laity should also lend a hand.
And you didn’t even mention the legal absurdity of people in parts of the US having supposed “husbands” and “wives” of the same sex and children having supposedly “two mothers” or “two fathers”.
The Mormon sect has obviously got things very wrong. But they would have every right to complain that they are being unfairly singled out for prosecution, when millions of other “normal” Americans get away with murder.
I get the impression that the author of this article understands this case to be a (selective ?) attack by the state on the sexual mores of the adults at YFZ Ranch. It also seems implied that if the state doesn’t have a plan to address the totality of this problem then what is the logic of this particular effort ? Be that as it may, living in the Austin, TX area this case is regular front page news and the situation is actually a bit more complicated and, frankly, tragic than alluded to.
Certainly the YFZ ranch attracted attention when it was built, at least partly because the “theology” of this sect includes sanctioning sex between middle-aged men and underage girls. In other words, statutory rape - for which current sect members have been convicted in court.
So when authorities received two phone calls from someone claiming to be 16 year old female resident of YFZ Ranch, alleging physical and sexual abuse at the hands of a sect member previously convicted of such offences the state judged it had probable cause to intervene. Imagine the outcry if the authorities had not acted on a such a report from a victim and allowed the situation to persist ?
The tragedy is that there is now some evidence that the calls prompting the intervention may have been made by someone completely unconnected to this sect and with a history of making spurious reports such as this.
Just because “traditional” marriage is in trouble does not lessen its importance or make this scandal less troublesome. No-fault divorce is one of the worst things ever enacted into law. The breakdown of the family is responsible for so many of our social ills, as the article itself points out. To deprecate it is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
I grew up surrounded by members of this particular brand of Mormonism. I grew up in a Mormon family with a polygamous history. It seemed like everyone in town was my cousin! What amazes me by this whole thing is how this has suddenly become “news”. As a counselor who works with children and families, I have to say that this kind of behavior appears in many forms, most of which are protected in a politically correct culture bereft of values.
Get to heaven . . .need three wives?
Look it up under G for Grace, FLDS guys. Charles+
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