Posted on 04/23/2008 1:30:49 PM PDT by Between the Lines
Colorado Springs, CO and Eldorado, TX - This is not the first time Rozita Swinton has made up a good story and called authorities. But it’s definitely the first time one of Swinton’s calls produced a mass raid on over 400 people. Swinton, 33, is now facing charges related to the April 3 raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, owned and occupied by members of Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints. Rozita Swinton may have set the whole raid off by calling a San Angelo crisis center on March 29, saying she was a young girl named Sarah who was being abused.
Rozita Swinton is a soft-spoken young woman with what police call “a baby voice”. She’s her neighborhood delegate to the Obama campaign. She is single, without children, pays her bills and works for an insurance company. By all accounts, she is a giving person, allowing her roommate to move in after the Eldorado raid had begun. But Swinton has called in false reports before, tying up police and social resources for weeks at a time.
In June 2005, Swinton was arrested in Castle Rock, Colorado after she called an adoption agency posing a teenaged pregnant girl. Swinton told the agency and police that she was young, pregnant, alone and thinking of killing herself after leaving the baby at a fire station. There was no baby. There was no teenager. There was only Rozita Swinton, who had no explanation for what she’d done. Police charged her with filing a false police report, and she is on probation for that case.
In February of this year, a swarm of Colorado Springs police officers went out looking for a thirteen-year-old who said she was locked in a basement. Nope - it was Rozita Swinton again. That case is still pending.
Flora Jessop, a former FLDS member who escaped and now runs a crisis center, says that Swinton repeatedly called her posing as a young abused girl. Jessop said she first got a call March 30 (the day after the San Angelo hotline call) from Swinton, who said she was an abuse victim named Sarah. Swinton had done her research, but missed a few key points over the 30-50 hours of phone conversations Jessop taped. And the man Sarah claimed was her husband is a well-known polygamist FLDS member who doesn’t live at the Eldorado compound at all. That was one of several clues that led authorities to Swinton’s door.
Is Rozita Swinton a wingnut, or a misguided angel of mercy trying to save the abused children of the FLDS? Investigators are still looking for Sarah, on the off-chance that she does exist. But Texas Rangers have already been to Colorado, where they found books and “items of interest” in Swinton’s apartment. The hotline call has been traced and appears to come from Swinton. On the other hand, there is evidence of prolonged and ritualized sexual abuse on the Yearning For Zion compound, even down to a marital bed in the temple itself and many minor children who are pregnant or have had babies by much older relatives. Rozita Swinton may be a nutball. She may also have saved over 400 lives.
Heroine or criminal or both, Swinton remains under investigation by multiple agencies today. She is charged with false reporting in Colorado and may be facing probation violation charges and other charges as well. I don’t know what I think about this one - what do you think?
First implication I've seen that this was a life-or-death matter.
Criminal!
Well she sounds nuts, but watching and listening to those people of the LDS is just Ca-reepy! They talk like zombies.
It's looking more and more likely that she's both. If she did indeed place the hotline calls, there's some truly awesome irony in all this. Those hundreds of children who have been rescued from a vile cult that abused them and subjected them to endless sermons ranting about how the "negroes" are all agents of Satan, owe their rescue and future freedom to one of the black people they were taught to fear. But a totally loony one, given that her previous hoax calls apparently weren't attempts to help any real people. Eventually, the kids will all need a few extra rounds of therapy to wrap their heads around the Rozita twist to their life stories.
I think we have to wait until this part is known for certain:
“Rozita Swinton may have set the whole raid off by calling a San Angelo crisis center on March 29”
Read up on all the mystery graves in the Utah-Arizona FLDS community. Way more children’s graves than can be explained by any natural causes.
Crazy on crazy incident.
(1) The FLDS community is the world epicenter of fumarase deficiency - a genetic disorder that produces extreme retardation and severe deformity.
(2) LDS doctrine permits the abortion of deformed children.
I wonder if FLDS doctrine permits the exposure of deformed children?
Also, ask yourself how you'd feel if poor li'l Rozita had claimed to be an underage rape victim in your basement.
Hasn’t there been news of a rare set of genetic disorders in their community that are lethal / severe retardation?
I’ve heard the FLDS actually take good care of the fumarase deficiency children. According to reports I’ve read, there are a lot of child deaths from work accidents, run over by farm equipment etc. There may also be some related to things like training babies not to cry by beating them and then sticking their faces underwater while they’re out-of-control crying from the beating. And infants and toddlers who die of treatable medical problems that aren’t detected until too late, because they’ve been terrorized into not crying when something hurts. Probably plenty of suicides of adolescents and adults too.
Let me preface my comments with the fact that I think these FLDS people are very odd indeed and I have no relationship to anything even related to Mormonizm. I also do not believe that Polygamy should be legalized.
However, this whole issue is very disturbing and should be a wake up call to ALL parents who raise kids in conservative religious homes — especially “home schoolers”. I know Evangelicals have a severe distaste for anything Mormon — observe their silence about this issue. But, let it be known, those Evangelical home schoolers will be next.
The worst thing about this case is that it is completely Un-American. When Abraham Lincoln was asked what he proposed to do about the “Mormons” — he said, “I propose that we do nothing”. Lincoln understood that in a somewhat pluralistic society, where freedom of religion is paramount, you are just asking for trouble when you stick your hand in a nest of otherwise happy bees because you think they are strange / odd maybe even duped. Our nation was founded on principals that allow all of those things — they are left to personal choice - if you want to be duped it is your free choice. Especially in our current degenerate society where anything goes — perversion of every type, shape and form is held up in the highest esteem. Why focus so much attention and resources on a few scruffy FLDS adherents. Why would bureaucrats risk the potential career limiting embarrassment of snatching children from their parents on such shoddy evidence and a hoax phone call. Evangelicals beware — there is something more at work here. Let us reason together.
Did they attack this group due to it’s propensity to let young girls marry (not legally but practically). This Angie Voss woman said there are 5 girls under 18 that are pregnant or have had a baby (Texas law does allow marriage at 16 with parental consent – before 2005 the age was 14). Assuming 100 adolescent girls, that means that the teen pregnancy rate in that community is somewhere between 2% and 5%. The Texas State teen pregnancy rate is 6.3% down from 7.8%. I would hazard to say that in the inner city of Dallas the teen pregnancy rate is probably close to 25%. We recently heard that a whopping 25% of the nation’s teenager girls have venereal disease (a national disgrace) — I would bet the FLDS girls have none. Why does the CPS not round up all of the children in the inner-city communities en-masse as well? When a homosexual catholic priest gets caught with his pants down, why doesn’t the CPS snatch all of the children in the parish – they all are at risk of abuse? Why did the CPS round up the children of even the monogamous couples with only toddler children? Why not just round up the families impacted by the 5 girls? Why separate nursing mothers from babies?
I find it particularly ironic that most of this nation’s school systems sex education classes virtually provide “how to do it guides” for children much younger then any FLDS pregnant teenager along with free condom gift packages. But, of course, this is government sanctioned so it is okay. It is all very clinical and good for society.
Did the FLDS ranch get raided for Polygamy? I can’t imagine so. That practice has been legal for all practical purpose for years. Polygamy appears to carry the same legal weight as Adultery (which is still illegal in most states) — after all if you can’t charge an Adulterer how can you possibly charge a polygamist (especially when there is no legal marriage contract). After all, in our society a polygamist is just an adulterer who makes a long term commitment. If not, then why is Elliot Spitzer not behind bars for Polygamy — after all he kept a conjugal relationship going with his wife and at least one paid concubine that we know about. New York’s version of the CPS should be making a night raid on the Spitzer residence and snatching their children. If polygamy is the issue then we need to round up the children of all of the politicians in Washington that keep or have kept concubines on the side. Besides the fact that every major Muslim community in this country practices polygamy — A large percentage of those Somali cab drivers that you use are also polygamists (oddly enough the government even helped most of them bring their extra wives into the country).
The CPS bureaucrat Angie Voss made the comment that when a man falls out of favor and leaves the FLDS group he will sometimes leave his wife/(family) behind and the women will be reallocated to other men. How preposterous that such a thing would be done....Shameful….Repugnant…. Perhaps this is the real reason for the raid?
Is this really much different then our society’s wife swapping practice that we call divorce and re-marriage? When we analyze it, let’s face it, the substance is the same.
Is it because of the forced arranged marriages that this group, of people has lost their children? I don’t think so or else I am sure the CPS would be rounding up all of the East Indian children and Moslem children in the state as well. I have more than once seen stories of an East Indian girl coming to a fatal end because she did not cooperate on an arranged marriage. Maybe the CPS is just a little more afraid of these communities. After all this Angie Voss woman said she even felt afraid in the relatively peaceful (virtually weaponless) FLDS ranch. She would have to get her pants (I am sure she wears pants rather than a dress) laundered if she tried this kind of thing in one of those two communities.
No my friends, there must be other reasons for this attack. Religion and secondarily parental rights — pure and simple. This massive response is an attack on religious freedom and parental rights. You evangelicals better hold your nose and start speaking up in their defense or your home school families will be next. You don’t have to defend their polygamy to defend their parental rights. It is in your best interest.
People use cell phones with area codes from all over the place. She claimed to be using a cell phone that was shared by men in the community who leave the compound to work. Since there’s also a compound under construction in Colorado, it wouldn’t be particularly odd for some of those phones to have Colorado (or Arizona, or Utah, or British Columbia) area codes. I think I read that most of the lines at the domestic abuse shelter she called don’t have caller ID.
Secondly, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself.
What were the historical circumstances?
The Civil War.
After Buchanan botched the whole Utah Territory situation following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Lincoln's focus was "first things first" - he did not want to create a new Confederate ally and a third front in the Civil War.
After the Civil War, the US government put an end to the illegal LDS theocracy in Utah.
Lincoln was dead after the Civil War..
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