The Pink Flamingo :: All You Need to Know About the FLDS Cult (and It Isn't Nice)

“…FLDS conditioning begins at a young age, when children are taught the outside world is evil, says the author. Instead of hide-and-seek, children play apocalypse. Girls learn they're worthless and must blindly obey their husbands, most of whom are chosen for them. Women are admonished to "keep sweet," to stay in harmony with their husbands, who are their priesthood heads and whose will they must not only obey but also anticipate. Their salvation is at stake. A woman gains eternal life only through her husband, and at his whim, she lives in paradise as a goddess or spends eternity as a servant to his other wives. Little wonder more antidepressants are sold in southern Utah and northern Arizona, where the FLDS is based, than almost anywhere else in the country….”

A WEALTH OF INFORMATION
The Shield of Achilles has more on the pathetic women of this cult. The FLDS (Fundamentalist Church – of the LDS) has a web site up defending their cult and protesting the capturing of their children.   There are a number of “conservatives” who are concerned about the raid on the compound outside of San Angelo and the denial of Constitutional rights for the criminal practitioners of the cult. That’s fine, but what they also need to know is authorities in several states have been trying to ‘bust’ these people for years. Texas Polygamy   has been following the storyline for several years.   They have an excellent discussion about the rights of the children over the rights of the parents.

The problem is there is an entire group of very conservative, well meaning LDS blogs that are supporting the FLDS cult. I find this rather strange. They are hiding behind “Mitt Romney” badges, AS IF Mitt Romney would condone this sort of practice. Evidently they are not interested in the truth about this cult that brings such dishonor on a great religion. They are aided by rampant Ron Paul supporters who find something sinister in the way the evil US government has raided these innocent people.   The children were so happy before the raid - right? The problem is the supporters of the FLDS mothers, don't seem to be interested in the wealth of information provided by women who have escaped the cult.

There is a bottom line here. Yes, the adults have rights, the parents have rights. If they want to live in a dangerous cult, fine.   BUT – the children also have rights. "Innocent" in the world cannot mitigate the abuse FLDS women and children suffer. There are liberals and conservatives so busy looking after the rights of the adults, so busy complaining about All the romantic defense of the FLDShow badly their rights have been violated.    These children need to be protected. I am not into the State stepping in to a lot of things, but they did the right thing here. Too bad Arizona and Utah can’t get the courage to step in and conduct the same raids.

There is one thing that concerns me, though. If possible, I don’t think I would put the children in non-LDS homes. I think the children should be with normal LDS families and brought into the normal LDS fold, and taught their main-line religion.

Evidently in some locals authorities just haven’t had the courage to bring the cult to its knees. The cult is rich and powerful with anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 heavily armed members scattered throughout several states and into Canada. I have a friend who said his Texas Ranger buddies are literally throwing the book at these people. Don’t expect any leniency in Texas as you’ve seen in places like Arizona where spineless politicians have waffled on promises made to informers, and basically allowed the cult to continue as before.

The current criminal activities of the FLDS cult are nothing new. As Warren Jeffs rots in jail, his family testifying against him, and 400+ children are now in foster care, maybe the tide is turning against this deplorable fundamentalist cult. There are still hundreds of children living in abuse and bondage at FLDS cult enclaves scattered through-out the west.

The cult has several locations strong holds, in Utah at Hilldale, in Colorado City, AZ, and the current Texas stronghold. The origins of the cult go back to one of the darkest moments in LDS history. Their history is one of violence, murder, arrests, flight, and child abuse.   Until the “rescue” in Texas, not one state has had the courage to try such an undertaking.

VIOLENT ORIGIN OF CULT
From Tom Zoellner’s 1998 article:

“…These Mormon polygamists actually have a history though that goes back to 1847, during the early days of Mormon pioneer and leader Brigham Young. Back in Young's time he came to Pipe Springs and saw its vermilion cliffs, He supposedly then did something that would later be claimed as somehow prophetic. Brigham Young said, "this is the right place [and it] will someday be the head and not the tail of the church [and]...the granaries of the Saints.''

Mormon leaders later sent the notorious John D. Lee into the same area to evade federal law enforcement. Lee was wanted for the mass-murder of 120 settlers traveling from Arkansas on a wagon train through Utah. They were apparently killed because due to their status as unbelievers. John Lee took two wives into hiding with him and started a ferryboat business and settlement. That settlement is still known as "Lee's Ferry." Lee himself was finally caught and executed in 1877.
Lee's Ferry and the so-called "Arizona Strip" became a preferred hiding place for polygamists. The practice of polygamy was eventually stopped by the Mormon Church largely in response to government pressure in 1890, when then President Wilford Woodruff received a "revelation" to end it. Later in 1904 the LDS church pragmatically enlarged that ban and officially disavowed multiple marriages.

The Arizona Strip polygamists would then claim that church President John Taylor, while staying in Centerville during the summer of 1886, had a discussion with God and Joseph Smith about polygamy. They claim God told Taylor to keep polygamy alive, but in secret. This hidden, but true church, would be somehow vital to God's plan. The town of Short Creek, which is now called Colorado City in Arizona was founded in 1913 by Jacob Lauritzen, a cattle rancher. But it eventually it became a stronghold for the Lee's Ferry polygamists, who were excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1935 after refusing to sign an oath against polygamy.

During the Great Depression men from Short Creek came to Salt Lake City for work. They found sympathizers there such as Nathaniel Baldwin, an assembly plant owner who gave them work. John Y. Barlow and his friend Joseph White Musser also became involved. These men later formed the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (FLDS), which would be led by Barlow.

The FLDS Church set up shop in Short Creek, largely due to its isolation. Buffered by the Grand Canyon and with a hundred miles of barren desert between them and the nearest law enforcement in Kingman, Arizona, they felt comfortable there. These polygamists also knew they were near a Stateline, which could easily be strategically crossed if there was trouble.
The Short Creek polygamists brought in more men with their wives by pickup truck to their growing kingdom, which they called "The First City of the Millennium." A "charitable philanthropic trust'' was set up called the "United Effort Plan," which controlled much of their assets. But Short Creek was a burden to the welfare system of Arizona's Mohave County. Many polygamist women and children collected welfare and whatever was available through government relief.

The Mohave County attorney and the sheriff pressed charges against two polygamist leaders, who were sent to prison for two years. The FBI later raided Short Creek in 1944, and 15 more men were sent to prison in Utah. Nine of those men were later released because they signed a pledge to give up polygamy. But most simply broke that promise and returned to the practice shortly after their release. The welfare problem became worse and Jesse Faulkner, a superior-court judge in Kingman, complained that there was a "taxpayer emergency'' regarding polygamist demands upon school facilities, even though they did not pay property taxes. Cattlemen were upset because the did pay grazing fees, which were allegedly used for polygamist schools.

Arizona Governor Howard Pyle hired private detectives to investigate Short Creek. Subsequently, on July 26, 1953 Pyle ordered a massive police raid. He said, "Here is a community...dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become mere chattels."

Polygamist men from Short Creek were jailed in Kingman, while their plural wives children stayed behind. Arizona officials took days to sort through the families, determining who was related to whom. The LDS Church-owned Desert News supported this government action. But the raid became a public relations nightmare for Pyle, when people saw newsreels of children separated from their parents. The net result was only one year of probation for 23 polygamist men. But the negative publicity ironically helped Short Creek avoid interference from law enforcement for many years to come.

The FLDS Church then sought to eliminate any connection to the "Short Creek raid" by renaming their town Colorado City in Arizona and Hildale in Utah….”

FOLLOW THE MONEY

“…The prophet, 92-year-old Rulon Jeffs, died on September 8 (2002). A power struggle to assume control of tens of millions of dollars' worth of assets in addition to dictatorial power as the leader of the cult is now under way in Colorado City and the adjoining polygamous town of Hildale, Utah….”

WELFARE FRAUD
They are also taking donations at this site. We hear talk of the wealth of this cult, but in a 2002 article by Rick Ross, he exposes the way the cult has become masters at milking federal funding with over 32% of the households living in poverty in Hilldale, UT. In Colorado City, AZ, something like 61% of the families were living in poverty. The Rick A Ross Institute has a wealth of information about this group. Their site appears to be updated frequently.

Women have been trying to escape this cult for years. Evidently back in 2002, when AZ Governor Janet Napolitano was the state’s AG, she did not properly investigate or assist women who were begging for help to leave the cult in Arizona. From what I gather she basically ignored allegations of child abuse for political feasibility.

“…While the Attorney General's Office can avoid prosecuting street crime cases that are typically handled at the county level, the memo states that criminal allegations involving the Department of Economic Security are far harder to ignore. "AG jurisdiction involving DES function appears to be unavoidable," the memo states. There are plenty of indications that there are grounds to take action. "Welfare fraud in Colorado City is widespread," the memo states. "Polygamous wives and mothers, many underage, are assisted as single individuals." Mohave County officials estimate that Colorado City gets about $8 in services of every tax dollar paid. The average elsewhere in the county is $1.25.

"Inescapably taxpayers have ended up in support of this cult's lifestyle," the memo states before concluding that the attorney general has the responsibility to enforce welfare laws. "Our jurisdiction in the disposition of state and federal funds through state offices is obvious," the memo states. The Attorney General's Office is also responsible for enforcing the state Constitution -- which outlaws polygamy.

Outlawed or not, there is tacit support for plural marriages from even mainstream members of the Mormon Church, the AG memo asserts. The Mormon Church banned polygamy in the 1890s as a condition of Utah's statehood. But the ban wasn't accepted by more conservative members of the church, who continued the patterns in remote enclaves, mostly in Utah and Arizona.

"Mainline Mormon ambivalence stems from the fact that multiple wifery is one of the eternal principles' of Mormonism," the memo states. "Having multiple wives prepares men for celestial status." By focusing on polygamy in the isolated FLDS community straddling the Arizona-Utah border, former governor Pyle ended his political career….But as the state's top prosecutor, Napolitano has failed to prosecute a single case stemming from a two-year investigation into a cult her own investigators say is engaging in violence and subjugation of women and children. This is no longer simply a question of lifestyle and religious freedom.Napolitano's special investigations unit reveals a town in the iron grip of brutal leaders who have engaged in illegal acts including rape, incest, assault, weapons violations, kidnapping and fraud….”

Rather than encouraging appropriate legal action to protect young women from being repeatedly raped by their fathers, Napolitano's special investigations unit appears more concerned with keeping the allegations out of the press and dodging its constitutional duty to enforce the law.

RARE BIRTH DEFECTS
There is a rare birth defect that effects the children of the FLDS community. Called Fumarase Deficiency, it causes severe mental retardation, epileptic seizures, and the children cannot care for themselves.
Phoenix New Times

“…Some fumarase deficiency children, he says, develop a small degree of motor skills over time: "They don't remain infantile their entire life. They do develop to some degree, but it's way behind their peers." Dr. Tarby, who routinely treats fumarase deficiency children at a state-funded clinic in Flagstaff, says, "They are funny-looking kids [with] biggish heads and coarse, thick features." Their brains, he says, "are strangely shaped" and are frequently missing large areas of brain matter that has been replaced by water. An MRI of the brain of one fumarase deficiency child showed that more than half the brain was missing. Tarby says most of the children "can say at least a word or two," but that all of them "have severe mental retardation" with IQs of less than 25. Some of the kids can walk, but others have a difficult time even sitting. The children who can't walk, the medical experts say, have most likely suffered strokes during severe seizures. Despite the secrecy in the community over fumarase deficiency children, Wyler says he has observed his ex-wife's sister's children and others on several occasions. "People don't like to talk about their fumarase babies for obvious reasons," Wyler says. "I don't know how many who die within the first two or three years that we don't even ever know about." Wyler says he has seen some fumarase deficiency children who can walk, but others can barely move and spend their entire lives prone. Children of the latter variety, he says, "can't crawl. They can't sit up. They are lucky if they can even move their head and eyes a little bit."…”

CONTROLLING THE WOMEN

"...Clothing and hairstyles actually vary from sect-to-sect among polygamists. The one in Texas requires women to wear pastel prairie dresses modeled after 19th century Mormons. Most of them wear their hair in a loose braid and are covered from their neck down to their feet by the long dresses.

Jessop told co-anchor Julie Chen, "It's a style that's evolved over generations, actually," Jessop said. "This clothing started being restricted after the 1953 raid (on a polygamist compound in Colorado City, Ariz.). And at first, it was just that women couldn't wear pants any longer and they had to wear a dress or a skirt that was a certain length, and long sleeves and no low necks. Their hair had to be combed on top of the head. It couldn't be left hanging. Then, every five or six years, there would be another restriction added. And eventually, the restrictions just were so limited that there's only about one pattern that you can make a dress out of and there's only a few colors, pastel colors, that you can use. No prints, no plaids, nothing with flowers. And then the hairstyle is just another situation that's evolved over time."

The polygamist women, Jessop noted, have "limited" say in the way they dress: "You have so many limitations on what you're allowed to do, and then, if you want to do something different than the standard hairstyle, then you may get away with it, and you may not. But one thing is it's going to have to meet standards. And the standards are, your hair has to be up. It can't be loose and it can't be hanging."..."

I cannot see a modern women, LDS or not, defending these people. What the the FLDS men are doing to the women in their community is just as bad as what the Taliban did. They have made their women worthless. From Oricus:

"...Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet."

At the very least, women who do decide to leave the sect leave without money, skills, or a friend in the world. Most of them have no choice but to leave large numbers of children behind -- children who are the property of the patriarch, and whom many of them will never see again. If a woman is even suspected of wanting to leave, she's likely to be sent away from her kids to another compound far yonder as punishment for her rebelliousness. For a woman who's been taught all her life that motherhood is her only destiny and has no real intimacy with her husband, being separated from her children this way is a sacrifice akin to death.

At the very worst, death is indeed what awaits them. The FLDS preaches "blood atonement" -- the right of the patriarchs to kill apostates who dare to defy them, usually by slitting their throats. And they've done it: Krakauer hung his entire book on the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her year-old daughter, who were both killed by her husband's brothers because Brenda rejected (and mocked) her husband's desire to take plural wives. (Warren Jeffs also liked to rouse people out of their beds in the middle of the night for dramatic mass meetings testing their readiness for the Final Judgment -- meetings that had dark shades of Jonestown.) Brenda is the only one known to have been killed, but others who've left report being threatened with the same fate...."

INCEST VICTIMS
I do find remarkable how people are standing up for the rights of the adults in this community (esp the men) who will go to any lengths to dominate, control, and molest the women of the cult. Women have no rights in this community.

THE LOST BOYS
During the past years, the FLDS cult has “excommunicated” several thousand young boys. They are no good, competition, and will eventually fight for control of the cult. Like the animals they are, the male leadership of the cult has sent these boys out to fend for themselves.

“…Observers say the boys at the West Texas compound are believed to be favorites of Warren Jeffs, the so-called prophet of the FLDS even as he serves time in prison for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin. But in the sect’s much older communities near Salt Lake City and in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., welfare workers have long known about boys separated from their families, put out on the streets and considered “dead” by their loved ones after drawing the ire of church leaders.“Many of these boys come from good families. But their fathers know that if they don’t put their child out on the street, his entire family will be put out on the street,” said Shannon Price, director of the Diversity Foundation in Salt Lake City that helps victims abused by the polygamy faith.The FLDS has traditionally kept the number of boys in their polygamist communities low. That way the male leaders can have their pick of young “plural wives,” without the worry of younger competition, said Brenda Jensen…many “have just been discarded on the side of the highway. … Many have turned to drugs and alcohol and end up on the streets of Vegas.”…”.

The women are brainwashed. They are controlled. They are abused. Evidently there has been this unwritten law to leave polygamists alone, but with the increasing sex abuse and brutalization of the FLDS members, authorities are finally starting to act. After fleeing the cult, they must fight to take their children with them.

They are dropping their lawsuit against Warren Jeffs. More about them here.

AND THEN THERE IS THE ABUSE
Childbrides has a list of articles about the FLDS church and the abuse girls have received in the church.
Carolyne’s story: LA Times article. Local law enforcement ignored the abuse and lets it continue.

“…Among sect members, girls as young as 13 are forced into marriage, sexual abuse is rampant, rape is covered up and child molesters are shielded by religious authorities and law enforcement. Boys are thrown out of town, abandoned like unwanted pets by the side of the road and forcibly ostracized from their families to reduce competition among the men for multiple wives. Children routinely leave school at age 11 or 12 to work at hazardous construction jobs. Boys can be seen piloting dump trucks, backhoes, forklifts and other heavy equipment. Girls work at home, trying to keep order in enormous families with multiple mothers and dozens of children who often eat in shifts around picnic tables. Wives are threatened with mental institutions if they fail to "keep sweet," or obedient, for their husbands.
Warren Jeffs, a wiry third-generation church member, is the sect leader — a post that carries the title "prophet" and gives him virtually absolute control over the most intimate conduct.

Jeffs orders marriages, splits up families, evicts residents and exiles whomever he wants with no regard for legal processes. He even tells couples when they can and can't have sex. But Jeffs is now a fugitive, listed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and accused by state and federal authorities of rape, sexual conduct with a minor, conspiracy and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Former members say he continues to exert influence nonetheless.

Some who fled the community in recent years are coming forward to tell investigators harrowing tales of repression and abuse inflicted behind a facade of pious devotion to faith and family: Brent Jeffs reported being sodomized repeatedly at age 5 by the principal of his school — an uncle who would later become religious leader of the community — current fugitive Warren Jeffs.Sara Hammon said her father, a prominent religious leader with 19 wives, routinely molested her, even sliding his hand up her dress while on his deathbed.

More than 400 boys, some as young as 13, have been thrown out of town for church infractions such as wearing short-sleeved shirts or talking to girls. Some, referred to locally as "Lost Boys," were dumped along the road with only the clothes they were wearing, and banned from contact with their families. Many of the displaced boys recently filed suit in state court against the church.

Despite years of such stories and allegations, public agencies on both sides of the state line have failed to act or been slow to intervene. The sect's questionable ways were no secret in Utah or Arizona. Law enforcement, social agencies and politicians long knew that polygamy was practiced and that underage girls were married off to middle-aged and older men. Employees and eyewitnesses say many underage marriages were performed in Room 15 of the Caliente Hot Springs Motel in Caliente, Nev., a few miles from the Utah border. The motel was once owned by FLDS leader Merril Jessop. "We've heard about it, and were never able to substantiate it," said Lincoln County, Nev., Sheriff Dahl Bradfield. "But we didn't look very hard." …”

MEDICAL ABUSE
Authorities are concerned that the children picked up by the authorities in Texas have compromised immune systems. It is a given they have never received proper vaccinations or modern medical assistance. I think this should be taken into consideration by those well-meaning individuals who wax poetic on how the rights of the FLDS parents have been violated.

The cult owns and operates its own medical facilities, paid for by the American tax-payer. They employ their own people, and do their own thing. From Oricus:

"...FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they're not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital -- built partly with public funds -- that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.

As a result, the group's women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).

The FLDs has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community's doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.

Of course, this misuse of mental health care has turned into one non-obvious but critically important cultural land mine for the Texas authorities who are trying to figure out how to deal with their FLDS wards. Along with everything else, they're trying to work with women who've learned to see mental health evaluations as tantamount to an incarceration threat -- are thus predisposed to regard gentile doctors or social workers as a mortal enemy. It's not making things easier...."

FLDS RAIDS V. ICE RAIDS
I have been surfing through the various sites some well meaning conservative LDS members have set up to defend the FLDS members, especially the women who are separated from their children. I think we all know my feelings about ICE and the raids they make where they separate illegal immigrants from their children. I honestly think we are dealing with two separate issues here. If I thought illegal immigrants captured in ICE raids were molesting their children and abusing their wives, I'd be all for it. Right is right and wrong is wrong. There are moral differences between what is honorable and what isn't. I am waiting for the whole issue to become cloaked in "freedom of religion". The only thing this has to do with religion is the fact that the FLDS is an excommunicated LDS cult. They are a cult. They are expert at child exploitation, manipulation, and child labor.

I think another serious problem here is the fact that there are people who link the FLDS to the LDS Church. As an Episcopalian, I know how miserable it is, having a few bad apples bring out the crazies who are just itching for a reason to hate your church. I think the best commentary I've read is on Mormon Coffee where is an excellent discussion about the FLDS and Mormon theology.

Turning a blind eye to child abuse is wrong, I don't care how it is romanticized. I don't care who is perpetuated. I don't care if it is secular or religious. I don't care if it is liberal or conservative. I've spent the past two weeks dealing with the aftermath of a 14 year old girl being molested by her father. This is the same thing happening to these poor FLDS children. For anyone to defend this, or to defend the FLDS is immoral. Yes, the cult members are entitled to due process. BUT the children are also entitled to grow up safe, be well educated, and be allowed to live in a modern world with computers, IPods, television and all the problems of it.