Guess what? Another day, another piece of evidence proving the REPUBLICAN POLYGAMY AGENDA. Last year, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (see disgusting picture below), held a town meeting and was implored to save underage girls from being sexually abused and traded between Fundamentalist Mormon Polygamy communities. Hatch refused to even hear about it, saying he knew "fine people" who were polygamists.
REPUBLICAN SEN. HATCH: "I KNOW POLYGAMISTS WHO ARE FINE PEOPLE"
ST. GEORGE, Utah - Sen. Orrin Hatch, attending a town meeting in southern Utah, found himself pressed by anti-polygamy activists to take a stand against the practice.
Bob Curran, director of the anti-polygamy group Help the Child Brides, asked the Utah Republican on Thursday, why, only an hour away, "thugs" rape children and nothing is being done to stop it.
"I'm not here to justify polygamy," he said. "All I can say is, I know people in Hilldale who are polygamists who are very fine people. "
http://www.polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2003%2049ap.htm
Curran said girls as young as 13 and 14 were forced into plural marriages with older men in the nearby twin polygamous communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
Another speaker, Sonya Blancke, said she was dismayed that polygamists were able to break the laws.
Hatch said, "I wouldn't throw accusations around unless you know they're true.
Hatch said he could not take unsubstantiated claims and enforce law, and he would not "sit here and judge anybody just because they live differently than me.
"There will be laws on the books, but these are very complicated issues," Hatch said.
Now that a crack has appeared in the Republican-Christian Right coalition, don't you think it wise that we Kossacks look into this potential Web issue. Remember that the Christian Right is more afraid of polygamy in their communities than anything else, including married gay people!
It is fear that organizes the Christian Right and gets them to the polls. When they feel their culture is threatened, they ACT. I have now talked to a second Christian fundie about this, and they immediately were very concerned and wanted to know what the Democrats would do about polygamy. Very interesting!
I said Dems will uphold the law on this and the Republicans are looking the other way, letting polygamists get welfare for their wives and children, and that at the rate of 10 children per wife, they will soon spread past the 30 states they just exploded into, that there could be nearly half a million Mormon polygamists, both regular LDS and FLDS.
He just said "My God" and walked away dazed. I'll see him tomorrow and hit him with some printed articles on Republicans subsidizing Mormon polygamists with welfare.
More about Hilldale:
There are an estimated 10,000 members of the Johnson/Jeffs clan in Colorado City and Hilldale, with followers also living along the Wasatch Front. Although this group doesn't marry as closely as the Kingston clan does, they do intermarry. According to Chapman, one of the leaders tells members that
it's all right to marry relatives as close as cousins, and uncles to nieces. Like the Kingstons, they are also producing children with genetic disorders, such as Tourette's syndrome, as well as dealing with some communicable diseases because polygamists don't inoculate their children. Ross Martin, public information officer for the Utah Department of Health, says whooping cough is currently spreading through the community.
Chapman describes a world for girls in which there is no semblance of childhood or innocence. The prevalence of pedophilic behavior dominates the culture. The victims are forced to revere their abusers. "It would be difficult to pull a girl out of Colorado City who hasn't been sexually assaulted," she claims. "I know girls as young as 9 years old who have been forced to marry."
Besides sexual abuse endured by girls, they're also condemned to a life of child slavery. "Like other girls my age, I was cooking meals for our entire family (of 36 people) and sewing clothes by age 13," Chapman recounts. "At age 10, I was baking a dozen loaves of bread at a time."
Beatings by her father and one of his four wives were common occurrences; Laura and her siblings bore welts over minor infractions. "No mother can protect her own child from the other mothers," Chapman explains.
Born the 25th of her father's 31 children, Chapman's earliest memories are of molestation by her father. "I can remember my father molesting me as early as 2 years old, waking up terrified with him in my room. That lasted until I was 13," she says. Between the ages of 13 and 15 she was routinely molested by some of her brothers. "When I confided to my mom what my brothers were doing we had to go to my father about it," she remembers. "He told my mom he wanted to talk to her alone and when she came out she said, 'Your father says we have to let [brothers] be who they're going to be.'"
When she was 4 years old, one of Chapman's step-brothers tied her to a bedpost and attempted to rape her. "Afterward I was crying and so my father told me he would slap me until I stopped crying, which he proceeded to do," she remembers. "My mother made herself busy in the kitchen so she wouldn't have to watch."
Using the word "father" for the man who is responsible for Chapman's paternity, is done only in that context. According to Chapman, these men are not fathers in any other sense of the word. Neither are they husbands, spiritual advisors or community leaders as they pretend to be. Instead, TOP's members maintain that these men are pedophiles the worst kind of predator.
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/1247/chapman8.htm
NO TALK ON THIS DIARY PLEASE OF IT'S OK TO LIVE WITH WHO YOU WANT. Talk about that on your own diary. This diary is about the Republican Polygamy Agenda as a wedge issue. Thank you.