Posted on 05/26/2008 10:16:42 AM PDT by MizSterious
| David Staples |
| The Edmonton Journal |
Canadian politicians are refusing to enforce anti-polygamy laws and crack down on men with multiple wives, Vancouver journalist Daphne Bramham said Sunday.
"Politicians are too gutless to do anything about it," she told the national conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists in Edmonton.
Teenaged girls are sent back and forth between fundamentalist Mormon colonies in Canada and the United States to be little more than "concubines" for older men, Bramham said.
An elder prophet in the community decides who will marry whom, insisting upon forced marriages, which are illegal in Canada, she said.
The practice of polygamy turns women and children into property and must be stopped, Bramham said.
She urged Canadians to decide what limits they want to put on such religious beliefs and practices.
Polygamy is also common in parts of the Muslim world, where men can have up to four wives.
"How is it that ... we can allow women and children to be reduced to chattel in the name of God?" Bramham asked.
"Islamic women are really worried about this. Many Islamic women came to this country so they could escape being under sharia law, so they could escape being chattel by a patriarchal religion."
The issue of prosecuting polygamists has been most controversial in B.C., home of a polygamous colony in the southeastern town of Bountiful which has grown fourfold to 1,200 people since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms became law in 1982.
The Charter greatly encouraged polygamous males to think that what they were doing was legal, protected as a religious right, Bramham said.
Children in Bountiful are taught that outsiders are godless and sinful, and can be treated with deceit, Bramham said.
"They believe that the government is the agent of Satan, and it's OK to bleed the beast and suck money away from Satan and his followers."
Community leader Winston Blackmore has 26 wives and 116 children, said the journalist, who has written a book, The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Poly-
gamous Mormon Sect.
Blackmore has several links to Alberta. One of his wives lives in Cardston, while dozens of his sons work for a stipend at Blackmore's logging and trucking operations in Sundre, 100 kilometres northwest of Calgary.
The belief among fundamentalist Mormons is that a man must have three wives in order to enter into the highest realm of heaven.
It is much more difficult for a woman, Bramham said.
"The only way to be invited is if you give yourself mind, body and soul to your husband and keep sweet. Don't ever say anything bad. Don't be jealous of the other wife because the husband is sleeping with her all the time and not you. If you're really good, your husband will invite you. And then, for all of your troubles, you get to serve him for eternity."
B.C. government officials have moved slowly to deal with Bountiful, Bramham said. Government ministers constantly refuse to be interviewed on the issue.
In 1990, the B.C. attorney general's office decided it couldn't prosecute Blackmore because the law against polygamy would be deemed unconstitutional.
After Bramham campaigned for action in her Vancouver Sun column, the RCMP investigated Blackmore, but prosecutors have advised them not to lay charges, arguing Canada's upper courts should first rule on the constitutionality of polygamy.
Feminist legal scholars believe equality rights for women and children will allow the courts to uphold anti-polygamy laws, so the prosecutions should proceed, Bramham said.
FYI ping
Not a shred of proof.
Color me shocked....
L
“They believe that the government is the agent of Satan”
It’s hard to argue with that part.
I am old enough to remember when court decisisions were handed down in the mid-1970s telling the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. federal and state governments that they had no role in legislating "behaviors" and "personal choices" that those who predicted polygamy and anti-family behaviors would be all but impossible to stop. Now we are seeing schools "teaching" that queers buggering queers is "just another lifestyle choice".
I don't look for any of the legislators nor any of the governors or the President to stand up and tell the courts to, in polite British English, "bugger off" and stop the national suicide pacts being mandated by a bunch for fruit-loopy boys and girls wearing black robes.
It is time to get serious about fornication . These sham marriages are not fooling anybody . If the behaviors can not be stopped , the state can at least regulate them and convert them to a revenue stream . Like annual fishing licenses .
This the same Canada where disapproving of homosexuals in print is felony hate speech that’ll land you in prison. No stretch at all to see polygamy will soon have the same protection.
Ping
They ignore polygamy because of the success of homosexuality and other forms of sexual activism. I do find polygamy the least offensive provided there is no evidence of abuse. I did not support the raid on the FLDS in which children were removed because it appeared the case for abuse was without merit and very weak also I saw it as more an attack on their beliefs and culture than an effort to “help the children”. Children in much worse states are left with truly bad parents all the time. No one is raiding inner city projects last time I checked or Muslim compounds nor would they. They raided the FLDS because they were an easy target. I don’t agree with polygamy but then again I don’t agree with gay men adopting little boys to secretly have sex with but it still happens. No one is up in arms about it either. We will have to wait a generation before the harm done in the intention of tolerance and protecting the feelings of homosexuals.
If you don’t believe the silent abuse isn’t happening in this country then you are naive. The only reason rampant child abuse by the gay community isn’t an issue is because it isn’t often reported.
Hmmm, I think I’ve seen this movie before:
1) You can’t change a polygamist and it’s abusive to even try.
2) Polygamists should have equal rights! It’s about social justice!
3) Polygamists are just regular people oppressed by the polyphobes!
4) Hey, there are plenty of polygamists in the Bible so don’t get all religious.
Anything I missed?
dung.
I thought Hugh Hefner got this all straightened out in the 60’s.
Re: Court decisions in the 70s telling government it could no longer legislate behaviors.
Too true. And within a very few years we had AIDS.
Not that the liberals would ever admit a connection.
Just passed the kook 101 course I see!
Here’s a Canadian article from 2004:
Mormon Sect’s Power Struggle Splits BC Town
TROUBLE BREWS in Bountiful, a community of fundamentalist Mormons scattered about the rolling valley lands south of Creston, B.C., a town best known for its popular Kokanee beer. The commune’s founders moved almost 60 years ago from Alberta, seeking the splendid isolation of the Kootenay Mountains to live “the Principle” - the practice of polygamy. The belief that men must accumulate “plural wives” to achieve salvation is a central tenet of their faith.
It estranged them and thousands more in the United States from the mainstream MORMON CHURCH, which ended the practice in 1890. Polygamy also violates laws in both Canada and the U.S.
Still, the Utah-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), to which all of Bountiful’s estimated 1,000 fundamentalists once belonged, has grown into a multi-million-dollar corporation, with about 10,000 members in the church-controlled twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., and mysterious new enclaves under construction in Texas and Colorado. But the fundamentalists also inhabit a world of legal trouble. Allegations of child abuse, forced marriages of underage girls, and of trafficking “wives” across the Canada-U.S. border have triggered investigations in B.C. and Utah. And Bountiful is also torn by a battle for spiritual and economic control between two powerful men, each claiming the loyalty of about half of the commune’s members. Warren Jeffs, 49, claimed the “prophesy” of the FLDS in 2002 after the death of his father and former leader, Rulon Jeffs, who had been debilitated by a stroke. Insiders say Warren used his father’s weakened state to position himself as leader by deposing a popular potential rival: Winston Blackmore, 48, a millionaire businessman who was bishop of Bountiful.
Jeffs exerts godlike control over his followers. His increasingly erratic message is laced with blatant racism and apocalyptic visions - all the more disturbing since he now runs Bountiful’s provincially funded school. Blackmore, meanwhile, who also claims the loyalty of a growing number of disaffected U.S. fundamentalists, says, “There is a very real potential for violence, and not on our part.” Those under Jeffs’s sway, he told Maclean’s, “could do anything, and would do anything - and I mean anything - they thought they were supposed to do.”
TROUBLE IN TEXAS
Since the arrival late last winter of the “marrying people,” as one of Eldorado’s more eccentric citizens calls them, there’s plenty to talk about in this tiny west Texas town, if not much to see. The polygamous enclave of the YFZ (Yearning for Zion) Ranch is marked by nothing more than a “No Trespassing” sign on a locked gate off a country road. A long lane undulates over rocky rangeland, past stunted mesquite and juniper trees and ubiquitous prickly pear cactus. There may be 50 fundamentalists in there, says the local sheriff; or 200, says the local newspaper editor. They were chosen by the prophet - Jeffs - from the enclave on the Arizona-Utah border and likely also from Bountiful, where believers have contributed truckloads of lumber and prefabricated buildings to the cause.
Jeffs never gives interviews, leaving others to speculate. Is he building a refuge from legal troubles, or preparing the most faithful for the fiery apocalypse he has long predicted? The church’s lawyer, Rod Parker of Salt Lake City, says the group hasn’t offered a reason for moving into Texas (there is also a second new enclave near Mancos, Colo.). He speculates the leadership is seeking more freedom and privacy. “I think they were looking for a place where they had more control over the comings and goings of people, especially from the outside,” Parker says. He adds that public concerns whipped up by recent church activities are “over the top.” Still, the goings-on, beyond a guard hut barely visible on the horizon, are the stuff of worry and fear.
The 1,900 folks of Eldorado are annoyed and offended that this group of polygamists - the women dressed in pioneer garb, as if they’ve stepped off a wagon train - won’t make eye contact, let alone acknowledge a “how y’all doin?” They’ve certainly shown no need of flowers, jewellery or small talk, all available in abundance in Cathy Niblett’s shop in the business district. “Texas hospitality is worldwide known,” she says. “We’re courteous and expect the same.”
Texas law enforcement officials are watching, too. There’s talk of a kidnapped Canadian woman and her three sons out there, of forced marriages amounting to child rape, of obedience unto death to the prophet. Jeffs is under investigation by the Utah attorney general’s office and faces civil suits in the state, including one that alleges he and two brothers repeatedly sodomized a nephew - allegations Jeffs has denied. Jeffs has avoided being served with a summons by shuttling among his enclaves, says Sam Brower, a private investigator who has tracked Jeffs for months on behalf of the law firm mounting the civil cases.
Brower isn’t alone in fearing that attempts to apprehend Jeffs may trigger a dangerous reaction. “Backed into a corner, there is the potential for all kinds of violence on the magnitude of Jonestown,” he says, evoking the 1978 mass suicide in Guyana where 900 American cult members died on the orders of leader Jim Jones. Brower spends several days each week in the fundamentalist enclave of Hildale-Colorado City, and has extensively interviewed current and former followers of Jeffs. “I know there’s people who will die for him, lie for him, steal for him,” he says. “I’ve heard people say they’d kill their family if Jeffs asked them to, that’s how strongly they believe.”
His fears are shared by child victim advocate Flora Jessop, 34, who fled the Arizona-Utah enclave as a 16-year-old bride. The only thing more dangerous than arresting Jeffs is leaving him be, she says from Phoenix, where she works to rescue children from the sect. “It’s not a matter of if there’s going to be violence, it’s a matter of when,” she says. “Things are going to continue to deteriorate to the point where there’s going to be a lot more innocents hurt.”
Folks in Eldorado, fluctuating between bemusement and worry, are prone to black jokes about Waco, Texas, and the disastrous 1993 FBI raid that triggered the blazing end to David Koresh’s armed fortress. That’s one subject that can turn Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, an amiable man, as prickly as a cactus pear. Ill-advised federal raids are no longer likely, nor is there evidence to warrant police intervention, he says. “The dynamics of this are totally different than Waco.” Doran’s crash course on cults and fundamentalism began in March, when news of the ranch was broken by his friend Randy Mankin, owner and editor of the Eldorado Success. Since then, Mankin and his photographer wife, Kathy, haven’t wanted for news. Trouble is, it isn’t just a story, says Randy. “I’m concerned for my town.”
The sheriff has had limited success building bridges to the group. One member with whom he established some rapport was then excommunicated and his wives reassigned to other men. Without jurisdiction to patrol private ranches, at least without probable cause, Doran makes regular overflights of the fundamentalists’ 1,700-acre dusty domain. They’re plenty busy for a group expecting to soon be lifted to a better world as non-believers burn in the hellfire of Armageddon. He estimates they’re spending, in the nearby city of San Angelo alone, US$1 million a month on supplies.
Doran scrolls through dozens of aerial photos. They show the progress of a spreading road grid, hotel-style housing, huge storage and meeting rooms, and the foundation for a structure so massive it proved a puzzlement until the Success reported speculation that it is to be a limestone temple. “They have lights set up, they work 24 hours a day,” says Doran. “They’re just like ants.”
SONS AND DAUGHTER
The battle for control of the fundamentalist church has torn a swath through Jane Blackmore’s fragile new life. A slight, intense 48-year-old with jet-black hair and sad, dark eyes, she sits in her Cranbrook home - 90 minutes and a world apart from her past as the first of an estimated 26 wives of Winston Blackmore. She is a nurse and, until her recent divorce from Blackmore, she served as midwife in Bountiful, a role she still fills on occasion. She has admitted in the past to aiding births for mothers as young as 15. She’s delivered many of her ex-husband’s estimated 80 children by other wives. These aren’t subjects for today, she says firmly. If authorities do investigate Bountiful, she says, “I’ll be willing to do my part.” Jane left her husband, lost her faith and walked away from the cloistered world of Bountiful, but it is the disappearance of her 23-year-old daughter Susie and her young grandsons that most troubles her.
Susie, like most teen girls in Bountiful, and like Jane herself, married young to a man assigned by the church. Her appointed husband was Ben Johnson, a devout fundamentalist whom Susie, then 17, hadn’t met. “She flew with her father to Salt Lake City, met him and married him five minutes later,” says Jane. They settled in Colorado City, where Johnson later took a second wife. Trouble began when Jeffs gained control of the church. Johnson is an ardent follower.
He limited Susie’s contact with her parents. This spring, the family vanished altogether. Jane, and her sister Debbie Palmer, herself a former plural wife who fled Bountiful in 1988, have reported Susie’s disappearance to police and plied their contacts - to no avail. Sheriff Doran finally had a phone call from Susie this summer, after pressing people at the YFZ Ranch for an explanation. She told Doran she was “on a mission,” but refused to reveal her whereabouts. She phoned her mother at his urging but said little except that she wanted to be left alone.
Jane and Debbie fear Susie is among the “chosen,” whom Jeffs says will be lifted to a better world, and they suspect he is using Susie to strike back at his rival, Winston Blackmore. “She’s truly in a lot of danger,” says Palmer, co-author of Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy, a book due for release late this year about her own troubled childhood in Bountiful. Under Jeffs, the church has veered in even more bizarre directions, she says. “The teachings of the group have deteriorated in such a radically extreme manner that it’s almost unrecognizable.”
The sisters say Johnson is a leader of the Sons of Helaman, a church group for teen boys in the twin cities that has, under Jeffs, taken a sinister turn as a youth militia. The Sons have authority to barge into homes, reporting to the hierarchy such “iniquities” as televisions, radios, novels, the wrong music, even the wearing of red, says Shem Fischer, one of dozens of twin city churchmen who’ve lost homes, families and livelihoods after falling out with Jeffs. “I’ve heard that now this young group of boys has been introduced to firearms; they learn how to shoot, do weaponry and explosives,” says Fischer. He now helps run a Utah-based group resettling some 400 so-called “lost boys” who were cast out of the church - in part, he says, to ensure a supply of young brides for the FLDS leadership.
Jeffs’s erratic actions have driven some U.S. members into a community of a few hundred fundamentalists in northern Idaho, across the border from Bountiful. Some, like Ezra Draper, 32, and his wife and four children, lost their homes in Utah for rejecting Jeffs’s extremism. Draper considers Blackmore the legitimate leader of his church, one now twisted beyond recognition. He stands in downtown Bonners Ferry, where he now works in retail, looking defiant and a bit lost. “The F in FLDS has switched,” he says, “from fundamentalist to fanaticism.”
WORLDS APART
Trouble circles Winston Blackmore after years of running his world - and a lucrative array of Creston and area businesses - with absolute dominion. Bountiful, where “keep sweet” has always been the guiding mantra, is bitterly split. Jeffs’s followers attend a separate school and largely shun those loyal to Blackmore - neighbours who often are, quite literally, their Mormon brothers and sisters. Nor is the larger Creston community as predisposed as it once was to accept polygamy as a victimless, if quirky, lifestyle. Creston Mayor Joe Snopek, a long-time defender of Blackmore, concedes that the impact of the rift is manifesting itself in drug and alcohol use among some of the group’s disaffected teens. “That,” he says, “was unheard of before.” A recently formed Creston women’s group - Altering Destiny Through Education - is drawing attention to Bountiful’s independent schools. They do little, the group says, except prepare girls for early marriage and boys for stoop labour. “I don’t give a damn about their religion,” says member Deb Quesnel. “They need to educate those children properly so when they grow up they can make an educated decision.”
Then there are the investigations. The RCMP - at the urging of B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant - is reviewing its handling of former allegations of abuse in Bountiful before deciding if a full investigation is warranted. Past cases went nowhere; then, as now, few stepped forward to say they were victimized, and legal opinions suggested polygamy laws wouldn’t survive a constitutional challenge based on freedom of religion. “We’re looking at it with fresh eyes,” says RCMP spokesman Sgt. John Ward. A B.C. human rights tribunal, meanwhile, will hear a complaint of sexual discrimination by Debbie Palmer and a group of B.C. women. Among the allegations: that teenage girls are swapped across the border to become wives, and that they’re coerced by the threat of eternal damnation “to become concubines in harems and bear many children.”
Blackmore proves an elusive interview, though he offers a few cautious email responses. The direction the church has gone under Jeffs, he says, “has no precedent in the history of Mormon fundamentalists.” As for the RCMP: “If Canadian authorities were to investigate everyone that others considered were involved in illegal and ungodly activities, it would take them 100 years to finally get around to us.” Some of Bountiful’s plural wives have spoken out in his defence. They placed an ad in the Creston paper in October, saying the only violation of their rights comes from “the false accusations of a few self-serving activists,” fanned by a media frenzy. “We have all the freedom in the world,” says Cherene Palmer, 57, a mother of 14 and one of Blackmore’s wives. “Our religion is no more a cult than any other.” Nor, she insists, would the women of Bountiful tolerate abuse.
Marlene Palmer, 46, looks up from her computer in the Creston headquarters of J.R. Blackmore & Sons, Winston’s family business. A smile belies an edge of frustration in her voice. She is a mother of six, and a plural wife to a man she won’t name. Like many Bountiful men, he is legally married to one woman, while subsequent wives are married only in the eyes of the church, making polygamy tough to prove. And why should it be prosecuted if the women know and accept each other, she asks. “Men haven’t been monogamous, truly, for hundreds and hundreds of years, but usually the other women don’t know about each other. There’s a mistress here, there’s a mistress there,” she says, shrugging at the hypocrisy of it all.
Unlike Eldorado, no gate blocks the road to Bountiful. But it remains a closed society, crowded by an uncomprehending world and backed against the unyielding mass of the Skimmerhorn Mountains. Parked on a hilltop, a visitor wonders what to make of the place. Down the road, a little girl in a long pioneer dress plays alone under a tree in the yard of Blackmore’s motel-like compound. Scudding grey clouds and a weak, setting sun change the view moment by moment. Look, and the scene is suffused in a pastoral, golden glow. Look again, the light has drained, the fields are cast in shadow, the mountain is a looming, malevolent force.
Two women of Bountiful stop their van to see if anything is wrong. Just looking at the view, they’re told. They smile because for them, at this moment, there is no doubt. “Oh, yes,” the driver says, “beautiful, isn’t it?”
‘UNTO DEATH YOU MUST OBEY’
When Warren Jeffs wrested control of the school at Bountiful, B.C., from Winston Blackmore - it received about $460,000 in provincial funding last year - notice of a staff meeting carried a picture of the self-proclaimed prophet and his new mandate: “One Vision. One Plan. One Man.” It’s a particularly bleak and bloodthirsty vision, and one that U.S. anti-polygamy crusader Flora Jessop, herself a former fundamentalist Mormon, says Jeffs teaches via tape-recorded lessons to children on both sides of the border. The following, from transcripts provided by Jessop, are selected teachings of Jeffs in the mid-1990s, during his tenure as principal of the fundamentalist Alta Academy in Utah (it has since closed). She says the tapes are still used today.
On women:
The curse placed on women was that when they had children, they would suffer nearly to death. The blessing on the woman was - and the only way she could ever be happy was - that she would let her husband, a faithful man, rule over her.
On race:
The black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth.
When people fall away, they become dark and filthy and low, just like the Lamanites on this land. We know the Indians became just like animals, dark and filthy and low, because their forefathers apostatized.
On the final days:
So great are the events ahead, the destruction, the judgments that the Lord will have to take a hand in our defence ... send fire from heaven if necessary to protect us, and lift us up off the earth.
On the wages of sin:
Will you please believe, dear young people? To be immoral - for boys and girls to join together - you are worthy of death in the eyes of the Lord. We should consider any disobedience to the prophet as though it was death.
On obedience:
Know this, whatever happens, stand by the prophet and do his will. Even unto death you must obey, and you will get the reward in the next life, greater than if you didn’t suffer persecution.
On modesty:
When you get undressed, even to cleanse your body with a bath, do it quickly. Get dressed quickly and consider that even your eyes should be guarded.
On violence:
I want to remind you what the prophets have taught us, that whenever a man of God is commanded to kill another man, he is never bloodthirsty.
‘A SYSTEM THAT IS SUPERIOR’
Winston Blackmore, in his own words, as published in the North Star, his online newsletter:
On himself:
I was born one of 34 children of Joseph Raymond Blackmore. I am his 13th child and his eighth son. Two boys born before I was died in infancy. One younger brother also died. I have 30 living siblings.
On marriage:
It is a crying shame that every two-by-four in the country will gather to help a woman leave her husband but not one of them will help her go back to him.
On freedom and polygamy:
Not one single, miserable, promiscuous or fault-finding citizen can show us a system that is superior to our way of life. Show us. Show us the society that has no errors, no infidelity, no problems, no vices, no moral problems, no social problems, no divorces, and we will join it when you do. Until then, mind your own business and we will mind ours.
On Warren Jeffs (veiled inferences):
It is laughable, if not cryable, for a man to think that he is in possession of the power of God, when the road he travels down is strewn with the bodies of those he has excommunicated, broken and left to suffer, spending the rest of their lives single, lonely and desolate. So how do you tell if a man holds the Priesthood? It is sure easy to see who does not.
[C]an you imagine that any sane man who enjoys all that I enjoy would want to trade my sweet ladies and children for the opportunity to belong to a church who trades wives around like they were cattle, and whose deposed male members have nothing more to look forward to for the rest of their lives but singleness, loneliness, heartache and despair, and praying night and day for deliverance which will never come.
On proper dress:
I am also confident that you have done, or are doing, your annual school sewing. I do hope that you have designed your children’s clothing to be modest and appropriate for the times and seasons. If so, I commend you.
On pending investigations:
Like all persecution, I am sure that we will get through it. This is all about discrimination. You will be discriminated against.
Maclean’s December 13, 2004
Author KEN MacQUEEN
The Canadian Encyclopedia © 2008 Historica Foundation of Canada
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012694
BTTT
This is the predictable outcome to the argument that any sexual practice between “consenting adults” should be allowed without any interference from society or the law.
Eventually you hit the wall of sexually mature, legally immature men and women and polygamy. Most human beings can engage in sex once they’ve reached puberty. Then what? If sexuality unfettered by restraint is a human right, then why should anyone prevent sex between a teenager and an adult? Of course, there are many good reasons not to allow that kind of behavior, but once you’re committed to sexual expression as a human right, it’s hard to come up with a good reason. As long as it is consenting, why not? Different states have different ages for the age of consent, which seems to indicate a lack of consensus on the issue. Why not just make consent the standard?
Polygamy works in the same manner. Polygamous societies are hellholes for women and children, but once you are in favor of free expression, it’s again difficult to articulate why it would be bad.
We might just decide that both of these things are just fine behavior and allow them. I just don’t want to be alive when it happens.
I wish there was some other term to use besides polygamy. Polygamy isn’t legal so technically, what these people are practicing isn’t polygamy.
It sort of legitimizes adultery by sugar coating it and making it sound more acceptable.
Perhaps they could call them FLdS adulterists.
Actually, you answered the question yourself.
The fact that polygamous societies are hellholes for women and children is good enough reason to say polygamy is bad.
If a moral reason isn't good enough for someone, then the practical outworkings of such a society ought to be enough to convince someone. But sadly, we're seeing that isn't even enough for some people.
Good point. As as is true of the fLDS now--being such "adulterists"--'twas also true of the 19th century & early 20th-century LDS...they, too were "adulterists" because polygamy was also illegal in Canada, Mexico, Utah territory, & Utah state where they practiced it!!!
Somebody who was "First Counselor" to three different Mormon "prophets" in the late 19th century, George Q. Cannon, whose sons became publishers of the LDS Church-owned Deseret News said before the turn of the century into the 20th:
"The world doesn't believe in breeding, but we do."
A mainstream Mormon belief in "breeding" only bred women-as-breeders' mentality in which women & children were treated as "chattel" long before the fLDS was ever a distinct name.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.