A disturbing trip to Bountiful - abuse in the name of God

Toronto Star - March 30, 2008

An angry B.C. journalist demands to know who is going to protect the young from the polygamists

by Kim Hughes

Book Review: The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's PolygamousMormon Sect by Daphne Bramham - Random House Canada, 464 pages, $32.95


Suggesting a North American religious group is like the dreaded Taliban is a grave accusation. Fighting words, you might say, and sure to spin heads.

But Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham has plenty of strong language for the polygamous Mormons of Bountiful, B.C., Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Ariz. – members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS for short.

In her riveting and unsettling book, The Secret Lives of Saints, Bramham variously calls them extortionists, misogynists, racists, child abusers and, most disturbingly, pedophiles. She says the Taliban has nothing on the FLDS where revolting attitudes toward women and children are concerned.

Though she concedes that "credit" for the "North America Taliban" designation belongs to Utah Attorney General and FLDS nemesis Mark Shurtleff, Bramham's book is a forceful corroboration of the comparison.

Not for nothing did American FLDS leader Warren Jeffs occupy a spot opposite Osama bin Laden on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List before his capture outside Las Vegas in 2006. He would eventually be found guilty of two counts of rape as an accomplice.

Yet as Bramham demonstrates time and again throughout The Secret Lives of Saints, nobody save a few vigilant reporters, prosecutors and escaped former FLDS members seems especially outraged about the plural marriages, child brides, cultish schooling and us-versus-them mentality of the sect.

Not even criminal activity, it seems, can shake our collective torpor or challenge us to question where freedom of religion ends and fundamental human rights begin.

Winston Blackmore, the so-called Bishop of Bountiful and Canada's self-appointed polygamy poster boy, has publicly admitted to having sex with minors on Larry King Live and elsewhere but has barely faced censure, much less charges or prison time.

The B.C. government, for its part, has taken hand wringing over the issue of prosecuting polygamy to a new level.

Meanwhile, Bramham writes: "Jeffs and Blackmore continue to direct and control almost every aspect of their followers' lives. With the increased prosecution, Jeffs has ordered many of his followers to leave Utah and Arizona and move to several new communities, including the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch near El Dorado, Tex., where he consecrated the first fundamentalist Mormon temple while he was still a fugitive.

"Blackmore has moved many of his followers to Idaho and has made numerous trips to fundamentalist communities across the United States and Mexico to gather more faithful to his flock.

"Girls are still being forced into marriages. Boys are still driven out to make the polygamous arithmetic work for the older men. Neither boys nor girls are getting an adequate education in either country. And Arizona's attorney general admits that reintegrating the communities into the mainstream after years of isolation and theocratic rule is still years away.

"How is it," Bramham asks in her prologue, "that two nations, so clear-sighted in recognizing human rights atrocities in other countries and so fearless in taking on tyrannical rulers on the other side of the world, have been so blind to the human rights violations committed against their own women and children?"

How indeed, and from that starting position – with dukes held high – Bramham takes readers through a brief history of Mormonism, following the fork in the road that occurred at the end of the 19th century when "the mainstream church renounced polygamy (and) dissidents splintered off and continued to practice plural marriage ... continuing to hold to founder Joseph Smith's revelation that men must have multiple wives to enter the highest realm of heaven."

As Bramham illustrates, there are huge and very troubling problems with the one man/multiple wives equation. For starters, there are fewer women to go around, meaning younger males further down in the FLDS pecking order are necessarily marginalized and, Bramham contends, cast out of the community – once their cheap labour has been cruelly exploited by FLDS-run companies.

Since procreation is the name of the FLDS game, those of child-bearing age are coveted, leading to truly icky scenarios where very young women are paired up with very old men. Families with children numbering in the double-digits are expensive; many live in poverty even as the husbands "bleed the beast" – FLDS vernacular for leveraging government assistance. Of course, those church tithes are expected to keep rolling in.

Bramham also cites documented cases of rare genetic mutations among FLDS members, a byproduct of a closed community marrying and reproducing. The family tree dynamics of such arrangements are pretty mutated as well.

"When the ceremony concluded, the men went back to their priesthood meetings, and the new bride, Ray's sixth wife, found herself alone outside in the shade, uncertain what to do next. It gave her time to contemplate the complex family genealogy that had just become even more complicated. She was Winston's stepmother and stepmother to her own two stepmothers which, most confusingly of all, made Debbie her own stepgrandmother."

But the real rub with the FLDS is the age of the brides. And it is here Bramham is most pointed and visceral.

She writes: "In 1999 at the age of thirteen, Ruth was driven north from Colorado City, across the world's longest undefended border, to Bountiful. She was too young to drive, too young to buy cigarettes or liquor. Yet a few days later, she was married in a celestial ceremony to Bishop Winston Blackmore's nephew.

"Even though Ruth was a first wife, the marriage was still illegal. She was too young to have been married without the written consent of a B.C. Supreme Court judge. And even though Canada's age of sexual consent is among the lowest in the developed world, Ruth was still too young to be deemed legally able to consent to intercourse. Urged on by religious leaders, her husband was a child-rapist."

Chew on that for a moment. Or this: American FLDS leader Rulon Jeffs (Warren Jeffs' late father) "accumulated more than 60 wives. Two young girls, sisters named Edna and Mary, are said to have been given to him by their father ... as a gift on his ninetieth birthday."

Clearly, such actions have to stop. While the story of Mormon Fundamentalist beliefs and actions has been broadly told – notably by Jon Krakauer in his 2003 title Under the Banner of Heaven and in various documentaries and television exposés – Bramham's book adds a Canadian perspective.

Moreover, she makes us angry, never more so than when drawing searing portraits of those abused then discarded by the FLDS. When it comes to provoking change, anger trumps ambivalence every time.

Kim Hughes is a Toronto freelance writer and editor.

This story was found at:

http://www.thestar.com/
entertainment/article/407189