Raping 13-yr Old Girls is Disgusting and Wrong. Full Stop
April 11, 2008
There are times when all other concerns in life kind of fade into the background for a little while. It can be big or small. For good reasons or for ill. And FSM knows I tries to stay away from teh politicz on this blog. Sure, Ed’s already rocking the story and he has a pretty big platform. It is not enough.
This is sick, and every blog in the US should be talking about this.
Today’s AP on this just plain makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck and my gorge rise.
For four frustrating years, an informant fed Sheriff David Doran information about the polygamist sect that built a compound in the West Texas desert not far from his office in Eldorado.
-snip-
Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. A number of teenage girls are pregnant, investigators said. [DM-emphasis added]
It had been no secret that the sect believed in marrying off underage girls to older men, and authorities believed the group was capable of abuse, Doran said.
“But there again, this is the United States,” he said. “We are going to respect them. We’re not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry.”
I don’t understand this. I don’t get it. It makes me disgusted. Maybe because I have a daughter, I dunno. I want to stand these guys up against the wall. I want to do violence against their persons with my own two hands. Thank FSM we live in a society of law where my base instincts for tangible revenge against such a revolting transgression against my values are prevented.
But I still have them.
We are not talking about this enough.
I have a lot of respect for the family unit and for the rights of parents to make decisions regarding how their children are to be raised. Home versus daycare. Vegetarian vs. omnivore. Religious and political beliefs. Politeness, vulgarity and manners. Schooled in public, private or (errrrr, maybe) home. Permissive vs. reactionary prohibitionist on recreational drugs. City, suburban, farm.
I do not have respect for shipping your 13 year old daughter off to get repeatedly raped and impregnated by some 50 yr old pedophilic goat.
This looks to me very much like an interstate conspiracy involving many, many adults to engage in child slavery, abuse and prostitution. There is no room here for temporizing or namby-pamby claims to religious practices.
This criminal organization should be absolutely broken down to pebbles in every way imaginable under the law. People jailed, assets seized. Repudiated. Dissolved. Done.
We are not talking about this enough.
DrugMonkey 
April 11, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Please remember that these are alleged crimes at this time. They have been there for five days and have no real proof yet. It is disgusting if it is true, but I am holding my outrage until I know more actual FACTS.
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April 11, 2008 at 1:39 pm
“no real proof”? Bob, multiple underage girls who are walking around pregnant is quite sufficient for me.
As I said, I am happy that we have a society of law that enforces due process. but “holding your outrage”? come on.
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April 11, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Pregnant teens are all over the country, and it is not proof enough. Maybe some documents or DNA testing….but until then I personally think that this is valid to wait to feel outrage.
I am an atheist who has lived in Utah so I am aware of the FLDS quirks. I have no ties to the church, most are just folks that want to be left alone.
I do not trust overzealous police, they do lie. Just as I didn’t believe the WMD claims (or other hyped Iraqi-9/11 ties) until they were proven or disproved.
I am skeptical of the hype being put out by the Texas police. After five days, they haven’t come up with anything except a mattress.
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April 11, 2008 at 2:09 pm
okay. I’m willing to entertain your hypotheses here.
So this was like a retreat drawing from around the country for girls who “got themselves into trouble” with their similarly-aged boyfriends?
or are you saying that we’re being lied to about the sorts of facts that should be readily falsifiable in coming weeks, i.e., there are not in fact multiple pregnant teenage girls?
any other explanations?
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April 11, 2008 at 2:09 pm
DM-
I have felt like vomiting in the trash can below my desk more than once this week because of this story, it is SO disturbing to me I almost can’t process it.
Purposeful harm of any kind done to CHILDREN should not be tolerated under the guise of religion or anything else. I don’t believe in heaven and hell- but there is a special and very bad place for people who perpetrate violence against children… I believe it’s called jail. I only hope that the authorities in Texas have and are carefully building their case to put the perpetrators of this child abuse away, take away their financial assets, and deconstruct the place brick by brick. I hope that the mothers of these children, once out from under the men in this cult, will have the courage to realize that violence against them and their children is not EVER acceptable- and is in fact a crime punishable by law that has a heavy price for the perpetrators.
Perhaps then we will be strong enough to deal with the human tragedy that these crimes, done in the name of religion, have and will continue to cost.
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April 11, 2008 at 2:21 pm
They do have more than a mattress. A specific complaint was filed by a 16 year old which precipitated the raid. The nature of the informant, however, has not been revealed – whether it was an active member of the cult, or, a more likely speculation that it was a former member that still had contacts within the community. In the latter case, it would be hearsay – not admissable as evidence for a search warant. [not a lawyer, but…]
Another issue that needs to be broought up in this case is the large number of dispossessed boys and young men that were [necessarily] rejected and ejected by the group. You can’t have polygyny without getting rid of excess males, and these guys have no social skills, street knowledge or education to help them in the outside world.
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April 11, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Alleged my ass. This is the doctrine of the fundamentalist Mormons. Everyone knows it. To pretend otherwise is to be complicit.
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April 11, 2008 at 5:16 pm
If this were merely a case of adults choosing to live in polygynous marriages, with both men and women free to leave the religious community, and children provided the basic protections that they have under the law elsewhere, then it would be appropriate for the government to butt out. But this group has forced girls in their early teens to marry older men — sometimes their own relatives. They also do indeed expel boys of the same age — the L.A. Times and various other western newspapers have exposed this side of FLDS life repeatedly.
In other words, they subject underage girls to sexual slavery. They force pregnancies onto “wives” who aren’t even legally mature enough to give consent for sex. They abandon underage boys with no financial support. None of these kids get anywhere near the education they’d need to support themselves if they left — pretty much a moot point anyway when you’re talking about kids too young to even legally get a job.
And it takes some serious organization to run a compound that includes over 160 women and 400 children. This isn’t a small group of cranks mistreating their kids (which would be appalling at any scale) — it’s abuse institutionalized on a large scale for generations, and made into a way of life. Our society has traditionally yielded considerable room to parents to make their own decisions about child-rearing, but social services should — and do — step in when kids are being beaten, raped, or abandoned. We wouldn’t tolerate the sexual abuse of 14-year-olds if it were done for profit by pornographers or pimps. Why should praying instead of paying make it okay?
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April 11, 2008 at 5:25 pm
In a related, and equally disturbing story.
An EIGHT YEAR OLD GIRL in Yemen decided last week to go the Sanaa West Court to prosecute her father, who forced her to marry a 30-year-old man
“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldnt stop the marriage” Nasser said that she was exposed to sexual abuse and domestic violence by her husband.
http://yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=1145&p=front&a=2
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April 11, 2008 at 6:05 pm
DM –
You’re holding back aren’t you? Why don’t you tell us how you really feel about these evil people?
bob –
Pregnant teens are all over the country, and it is not proof enough. Maybe some documents or DNA testing….but until then I personally think that this is valid to wait to feel outrage.
And yet in this case, we have, for starters, the actual dogma of the FLDS, which supports exactly what these fuckers have been doing. We also have an informant inside the compound. We have the phone call of a sixteen year old girl from inside the compound.
You’ll also notice that they have yet to arrest any of the men (unless I’m behind on my news of it). That will come as the results of DNA testing come in.
I am skeptical of the hype being put out by the Texas police. After five days, they haven’t come up with anything except a mattress.
Then it’s quite likely that you have heard little to nothing about FLDS cults. Raping little girls is just the tip of the fucking iceberg. I would recommend reading Escape by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer. I have yet to read it, but I’ve heard that Brian Hales book, Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism offers a pretty good picture of Mormon fundamentalist cults.
Just to offer a glimpse of what life in these cults is like; “Women” are regularly put to breeding as soon as they have their first period. This has been going on for a hundred years or more, with some of these groups. So this is what these women know, what their great grandmothers knew.
They grow up with little, if any contact with the outside. They aren’t even aware that they have legal rights. And they are routinely taught that outsiders are evil and contact with them must be minimal, because it puts their very souls at risk. Men of course, while still at risk, are much “stronger” than the women, better at thwarting the evil of the outside. If women go outside, thus they must have a man with them to keep them safe. Children of course, are not allowed to go out, because they are of course very weak.
It is common for children to have no idea which of their father’s wives is their birth mother. Sometimes the women don’t even know. Children are encouraged to call not only their fathers wives mother, but in many sects this title applies to all the women, excepting those who are no longer of breeding age, who are referred to as grandmother.
There is a lot of inbreeding going on in these cults. Some of them can claim a sharply limited gene pool that goes back to the very foundations of the Mormon faith. With little new blood thrown in, these cults are rampant with fumarase deficiency, as well as other problems related to inbreeding. (ironically, this is what actually spurred my interest in reading about these cults – doing a study of degenerate communities in the U.S.)
What exactly do you expect them to find? Until the DNA tests come back, there is little one could expect. Excepting genealogical records, there really isn’t much to look for. Though given the Mormon predilection for breeding records, they probably kept them. As the leaders aren’t fools, the records are probably kept well hidden.
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April 11, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I also recommend Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer for a look inside this cult.
Actually, I recommend anything written by Jon Krakauer.
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April 11, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I was scrolling to the bottom to make that same recommendation, but McNeely beat me to the punch. These “allegations” will come as no suprise to anyone who’s read Krakauer’s book. After all, this is the FLDS we’re dealing with. It’s like a report that a dog pissed on a fire hydrant, and someone says “wait, let the legal process run its course before we’re sure a dog pissed on a fire hydrant.” No. Dogs piss on fire hydrants. And the FLDS forces underage girls to bear children for 50 year-old goats.
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April 12, 2008 at 12:11 am
Don’t forget that the man who was given as the husband of the girl who called is on the run and in another state. Pond-scum Jeffs and his cult have made the news here for some time for various things, and I’m glad they finally busted these sick bastards.
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April 12, 2008 at 12:40 am
Exactly as some of the commenters said. Unfortunately, detailed articles have been written at length, especially in Arizona, about this cult and about the numerous abuses they are involved in. It’s been going on since the beginning, at this point decades, and it got a lot worse when the older Jeffs died and his even sicker son took over. In addition to polygamy and abuse and pedophilia, they are also funded almost entirely by welfare fraud. Arizona was too unwilling to make a move and it was left to Texas, where some of them had decamped with Jeffs. Texas has been waiting for that girl’s call for years, to give them the needed justification. Everything you have read so far is not only true, it’s the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully we will finally see this cult dismantled.
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