Posted on 04/18/2008 8:38:05 AM PDT by DFG
When Texas authorities seized 416 children in a raid on a compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Americans quickly learned that the religious group encourages polygamy and the marriage of young girls to older men. Escape, a memoir published last fall, offers a more detailed portrait of life with the FLDS. In the book, Carolyn Jessop, a sixth-generation polygamist describes her life as the fourth wife of Merril Jessop, who ran the recently raided Texas compound. Carolyn left Merril in 2003, before he moved to Texas, but her memoir sheds light on the man and on the beliefs and practices common within the insular community. Below, Slate flags Carolyn's most intriguing, strange, and heartbreaking allegations.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I have delt with these types of cases first hand as a
ret. legal support asst. with the county attys.
Child abuse is damn ugly.
These children are living in an extreme dysfunctional setting. They have no freedom, no one to speak for them
on their behalf.
They are learning a perverted belief under the name of religion.
The whole setting reminds me of when I was in East Germany
in the early 1980s when Russia still controlled and the extreme lack of freedom.
Absolutely, since no one has provided scripture that calls polygamy a sin.
You sir, have a problem with your reading of my statement. To be clear allow me to restate the original statement "Personally, I WONT call polygamy a sin because I can not find a single statement in the Bible that does so."
You have yet to provide a scripture that calls polygamy a sin. What you have provided is your interpretation of a text that you CHOOSE to take to the ABSOLUTE and EXCLUSIVE meaning not found in the original scripture. By your reasoning, drinking any form of alcohol is banned by the bible because of the many references to drunkenness.
So before you move on, you need to first show me a single scripture that calls many wives a sin. In fact, all you have done is tried to assert your opinion that to "multiply wives" means more than one.
Further, you need to stop trying to cherry pick only half of the scripture. the scripture goes on to say "...that his heart turn not away:..." The point is that not having more than one wife is a sin, rather that the King in an effort to keep peace in his house will try to please his wives instead of trying to please God. This is the trap that Solomon fell into.
"...neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." By your interpretation, this would mean that the King must be a pauper. Yet we know God granted to Solomon great wealth. Was it a sin for God to do so?
Since the God I worship can not sin and has no part of sin, I say no. So once again, I return to my original statement.
Personally, I WONT call polygamy a sin because I can not find a single statement in the Bible that does so.
Are you telling me that with 60 (only a hypothetical guesstimate) adult males at the compound and lets say ten (another guesstimate) underage pregnant females, that no charges could be filed against the men in mass, such as conspiracy to commit or cover up a felony?
What about the women? Couldn’t similar charges be filed against the adult females?
Just how much DNA do you think it would take for that charge to stick?
“There is no mother child bond. The children are given to different mothers in this cult, and many children did not know who their mothers were, hen asked to identify them, and pointed out several women.”
How do you know all of this? I’ll ask you the same thing as I did of ansell2. Do you have first hand knowledge of this? It seems to me the arrangement you describe is the liberal utopia of “it takes a village.” /sarc
Thank you.
They have to PROVE that the adult males fathered children with underage females. They have to prove which ones are the actual rapists.
I don’t understand why people think this process can be rushed. They need to build a good case.
Actually, that’s probably the motive of the “DO IT RIGHT NOW” crowd. They WANT the government to goof, so they can send those poor babies back to the sexual slavers.
Yep, that’s me, I’m just dying to see all the statutory rapists get off. You nailed me. Your insight is second to none. I hope everyone sees just how insightful you are. That would be fitting.
They aren’t families with mom’s and pops together.
The children are taken from their mothers and passed to others, sometimes to more than two.
Which you and I find reprehensible. There is still a familial bond between these children and their moms (mean to be plural for each child), or just the adults they were used to having contact with. I would submit this is still a culture shock to them.
“They aren’t families with mom’s and pops together.
The children are taken from their mothers and passed to others, sometimes to more than two.”
http://wwwwakeupamericans-spree.blogspot.com/2008/04/forgotten-children-of-flds-polygamist.html
“News reports are coming out now that say some of the children in Texas state care cannot even name or point out who is their actual mother is and they continue to give authorities different names.
Meisner said child welfare officials still can’t find birth certificates for many of the children, making parentage and age determinations impossible. She said many of the children don’t know who their parents are and many have the same last name but may or may not be related.
...
Many of these children associate more than one woman as their mother and cannot even provide information such as their own birth dates.”
What I was saying is that it's just a lifestyle that isn't politically popular. It's not a matter for gov't raids if minor women have sex with multiple minor men, spread STD's as a result of that behavior, produce children or abort them, etc etc etc. But, much less destructive behavior is somehow rationalized as justifying govt raids because it occurs in a lifestyle that people have an emotional reaction against (polygamy).
Are children produced by random alley-cat behavior somehow the product of 'better' behavior than children produced in an FLDS 'farm'? We may not like the lifestyle but to take children away from their mothers and turn them over to the state is not the answer.
It was a bogus argument on Ansel's part.
Here is another little revealing piece of background on who was behind those walls in Texas.
Washington Post:
"ELDORADO, Texas - The secretive and insular community established near this West Texas town by a radical offshoot of the Mormon Church is considered by the sect's members to be a holy shrine populated by its most fervent adherents and is propped up financially by members of the group living in other states, according to law enforcement officials and former members.
Interviews with law enforcement authorities and former members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints depict the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which was raided last week by Texas authorities, as an outpost whose adult residents were considered the sect's elite. They were handpicked by the church's leader, Warren Jeffs, who was convicted last year in Utah of being an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her cousin.
Jeffs dubbed those chosen for the ranch as the "elect" or "heart's core," selected to live in the "holy land," as he called the compound. The adults were his most loyal followers and the young children were the least "contaminated" by the outside world, former church members say. According to court documents, adherents living at the ranch practiced the most extreme tenets of FLDS doctrine, including forcing girls as young as 13 to "spiritually marry" older men for the purpose of bearing their children. (excerpt)
This is not about “family”, with a mother and father, but about a sex crazed sect raising children to be without the love of a real mother. Real mothers are made to give up thier own children and to take others children, and the children are swapped by orders of the cult leader.
No one can call foul over “breaking up of families”, as they are not “families”, but just slaves to the “dirty old men’s demons”.
Yet the legally unwed spiritually married mothers or surrogate mothers (underage or not) were collecting welfare payments on these unidentified children for the benefit of the cult leaders.
I have to say that I see the polygamist males who abuse these young women to be operating on a criminal level far above anything the young men in your example would be breaking.
That's why I support intervention here, and only have a passing interest in reducing the incidence of under age intercourse as a general rule.
One must be stopped and the other should be stopped, by different means.
Hope this makes sense.
The children who have already been taken from their birth mothers and passed to several different ‘foster mothers’ will be conditioned for another “mother”, anyway. But they will not be raised to be the sex slaves of the vile cult, raised to breed girls for sex.
See if this makes any sense to you:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2003504/posts?page=149#149
YEs.
So the only difference will be that the children’s new foster mothers will not raise them to be the sez slaves of the sects leaders.
Good point.
Well, since that isn't the context of the FLDS raid, it is not applicable. NO FLDS women are being forced to have an abortion. These people love their children and certainly aren't aborting them.
"I tell you, I've a lot of comments on the threads posted by Metmom (thanks MetMom for those links). This comment of yours here pretty much takes the cake for "The Most Clueless Award." Listen, some of these girls "accept the lifestyle," as you say, the same way, Patty Hearst "accepted" the lifestyle of a kidnap victim by a radical organization and the next thing we saw, she was holding a gun in bank heists."
Um, you're the one whose clueless. These girls aren't being kidnapped and forced into a lifestyle foreign to them by anyone except by the state of TX.
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