Warrant Issued for Warren Jeffs.

Looks like a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints prophet and polygamist Warren Jeffs. Which presumably means they finally found someone with the chutzpah to testify against him. That means either one of two things: some heavy-duty witness intimidation is in the offing, or stand by for Waco II.

My guess is these charges are only the tip of the iceberg, since law officers in Arizona have been conducting  fraud investigations on both the church's trust fund and the Jeffs-controlled Colorado City Unified School District. The present charges relate to his child-marriage habit.

Apparently it's a little difficult to get the women and children to testify against Jeffs since his followers are taught to fear outsiders, but several men who have been annoyed recently when Jeffs confiscated their houses, wives, and children have spoken up.  I guess there are a few civil cases pending, including one by teenaged boys forced out of the community.

Jeffs also garnered a little bit of media attention last month when the Southern Poverty Law Center added the FLDS church to its Hate Groups list.

Not because of the polygamy-with-the-kiddies thingy, but because of Jeffs's laconic speeches demonizing blacks.

(I'm assuming it's blacks. I only listened to a little bit of one of them. Not my kind of thing at all.)

Jeffs's group is only one of several active polygamist groups in the U.S., most claiming to be Mormons. Yes, the mainstream Mormon Church does excommunicate all of them.

I've heard estimates of the total polygamist population of the U.S. that range from 30,000 to 100,000. Jon Krakauer recently wrote a book about them.

(Yikes, I've never tried to do so many links before. Sure hope they all work.)

•  As I understand it, this church is pretty

  extreme, but I confess to having profound misgivings about state and federal government harassment and prosecutions of polygamists generally. I find polygamy (at least of the mormon variety) to be deeply sexist, and I can't imagine why women would choose to be in such arrangements, but on the other hand consenual relationships - straight, gay, plural, whatever - are just not the business of the government.

  by spot on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:24:07 PM PDT

  •  this is different

    In this case these are not always fully grown women making independent choices.  Many times these are children given to their husbands at the age of 14 or 15.  This particular community has used violence and intimidation to entrap many of the girls and women.

    by getmeoutofdixie on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:28:14 PM PDT

    •  Two points:

      1) I support far expanded liberties for adolescents, beginning at the age of fourteen, from the right to make choices about where they attend school, their reproductive freedoms, etc. What I don't think the statists of all political persuasions understand is that relying on age of consent laws and age of marriage laws to "protect children" makes young people dependent on the state to act on their behalf rather than giving them a legal and cultural framework to make liberating choices for themselves. This kind of statist thinking also leads to curbs on the reproductive rights of girls and to fundamentalist parents being allowed to send their queer kids to Christian "rehabs" for months or years of "reparative therapy".

      There is no question that girls and women have gotten the short end of the stick legally throughout much of western history, but its also true that young people had a great deal more freedom in this country in many respects prior to the beginning of systematic schooling (in the latter part of the nineteenth century) and the complex of laws enacted aimed at keeping them there. I don't want to hijack this thread for a discussion about education policy (I support vouchers) but it wasn't terribly uncommon for kids (both boys and girls) to take off at fourteen or fifteen, write books, teach school, and explore the country and world. And I'm not sure that our public high schools, which have come in many instances to resemble medium security prisons, are altogether much less oppressive than some polygamist communities.

      2) As I said, this community sounds pretty extreme and contrary to my own values, but it isn't just this particular polygamist community that has been harassed by state and federal government since the founding of this republic. As a general rule, its none of my business, nor or is it the business of the state.

      by spot on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:57:09 PM PDT

      •  respectfully disagree

        I agree that teenagers ought to have many opportunities to make important decisions regarding their lives.  That's why I let mine choose what color to paint their bedroom or which extracurricular activity to get involved in, or whether to accompany me to church.

        Letting my 15 year old decide to get married?  Not.

        That is not a matter of civil liberties, it's common sense.

        by getmeoutofdixie on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:17:30 PM PDT

        •  Is it also common sense that fundamentalists

          should also be allowed to send their high school age kids to strict fundamentalist schools (even if the kids don't want to attend such schools), or send their gay kids to what are effectively private fundamentalist-run prisons where they receive shock therapy and other forms of systematic humiliation in the vain hope of turning them straight?

          The trouble with extending parental rights into adolescence, and denying young people choice on one or two fronts is that it leads to a cultural and legislative climate where young people can be denied freedom on any number of fronts. Liberals shouldn't be surprised to hear that the infantilization of "adolescents" (which is really a recent cultural fiction, created in the late ninteenth as a way of postponing adulthood, and making high school mandatory) leads not just to raising the age of legal marriage but also to parental consent laws for abortion and fundamentalist parents being able to send their teenage sons and daughters to religious concentration camps.

          With more freedom some adolescents would make bad choices, but then again many adults make bad choices and continue to make bad choices for much of their lives. My generation, which is to say generation x (those born between 1961 and 1981) happened to be born and come of age in a time of profoundly laissez faire parenting, and in many respects had more freedom than any generation in American history growing up, yet the rates of crime for second wave xers are very low, and the rates of college graduation historically high (first tier xers have like the boomers much higher rates of crime, but that's largely because roe v wade corresponds with the beginning of the second wave of generation x, so many unwanted and potentially anti-social kids were aborted).

          My point here is that the socialization of kids and the decisions they make later have much less to do with parents and parenting, and much more to do with peers. This is what the literature and research says, even if most psychologists are afraid to acknowledge it publically. The costs of infantilizing adolescents are higher than the risks of not doing so.

          by spot on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:47:28 PM PDT

          •  I agree with you about

            giving adolescents more rights in their teen years.

            However, a small clarification regarding the parenting of Gen X.  I would argue that late Boomers probably had more freedom in their late teens than did late Xers.  In many places, parenting and high schools were getting more strict by the mid-1990s, when the late Xers were in high school.  You had metal detectors, school uniforms, and more censorship(especially of the at the time new internet was attempted) etc. coming into play.  Of course, it depends on where you lived.  There are still areas where high schools are still pretty lax (especially in college towns), but probably won't be within 5-10 years.
            The mass reduction in the crime rate for late wave Xers also reflects the strong economy of the 1990s, IMO, much like the strong increase in crime for the late wave Boomers was in part to the crappy economy of the 1970s.  

            Interesting connection on the Roe v wade and the crime link.  I suppose that there were a lot of "unwanted"/anti-social kids who were not aborted in the 1990s and 2000s who would have been in the 1970s and 1980s.  That would suggest that youth crime would increase, but it is likely that these Millies/Homelanders would not be treated like unwanted children.  
            

            by IhateBush on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 10:09:40 PM PDT

            •  No. You're absolutely right. Late, late xers had

              it about as bad as millies, but I think I managed to graduate from high school just before boomers went completely insane. In fact, at my high school graduation party (in the first half of the 1990s) the teachers, parents, and administrators (including the assistant headmaster, who had been the guy who was also telling you to wear matching socks and cut your hair) were getting wasted with us, and conveniently not noticing the copious amounts of weed, opium, acid, and various other drugs that were being consumed in their midst (I had to drive over the Santa Monica Mountains the next day still tripping).

              by spot on Sat Jun 11, 2005 at 12:11:48 PM PDT

            •  My experience may have been a bit atypical

              (my school was the rival school of the one Brett Easton Ellis went to, and where the characters in Less than Zero were supposed to have gone), but I actually don't think it was that atypical. When I was in college people told me crazy, crazy stories from all over the country.

              by spot on Sat Jun 11, 2005 at 12:19:44 PM PDT

      •  Your views

        as I understand them in the second paragraph of point (1) seem rather romantic. Can you say more about this?

        My experience of 14 & 15 year olds is that they are nowhere near ready to embark on the kinds of adventures you mention. Maybe in the past,though I doubt it, and certainly not today. They are vulnerable and not fully formed emotionally or intellectually. But I agree that they should have expanded liberties in certain areas.

        High school, perhaps it should be abolished as the president of Bard has written--Botstein, I think his name is. But I think it is a far-out analogy to compare high schools to polygamist communities. I've been a teacher in inner city New York. It did not resemble a prison--physically or spiritually. Nor did the dozens of other schools I visited in the course of my work.  Despite their many failings, the goals of high schools are to open minds. Polygamists, from what I have read thus far, do not share that ideal.

        by Snoutboy on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:35:06 PM PDT

        •  I've been a teacher, too...

          That's why I didn't bother to respond to the comment above. I'm also not crazy about high schools as they function today, but given a choice between putting my nieces into a public high school or putting them into a polygamous marriage, I'd opt for the former in a heartbeat.

          by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:39:19 PM PDT

        •  What I was trying to say in the first paragraph

          was that the kind of paternalistic, statist legal and cultural framework that currently underlies adolescence in our society may give parents and or the state legal recourse to keep adolescents from marrying, but liberals shouldn't be surprised when that same paternalistic logic leads to parental consent laws on abortion and fundamentalists being able to send their gay kids to religious concentration camps for "reparative therapy" without any legal recourse on the young person's part. Liberals and conservative both wish to have the kind of statism they like without the kind of statism they don't like. The world doesn't tend to work that way. I support a different kind of legal and cultural framework for empowering kids so they don't choose to remain in those sorts of communities.  

          There is profound variation in human experience, and while it is certainly true that a majority of fifteen year olds of George Washington or Abe Lincoln's generations weren't out captaining whaling ships or leading expeditions out west, there were many young people that age who did leave home, and there are many, many kids today mature enough to handle many more freedoms and responsibilites. On almost every measure, teenagers are more physically and psychologically resilient than their adult counterparts, overcoming traumas at a much, much higher rate than folks of their parents' age. And as Mr. David Bowie once said, "they're quite aware of what they're going through."

          As far as education goes, the paddle may have been largely banished from the system a generation ago, but public schools (especially public high schools) have become increasingly authoritarian over the past twenty years, with armed guards, locking gates, metal detectors, video surveillance, athlete drug testing (with federal calls for random student drug testing), zero tolerance and lockdown. Why not just dress the kids in orange jumpsuits and be done with it? To say nothing of the system's failure to properly provide even basic education to too many (especially poor) kids, the vaguely stalinist bureucratic culture, the fact that too many kids of all races and classes and regions, both gifted and troubled, are allowed to fall through the cracks, or the vast web of rules and regulations that prevents real human interaction between young people and adults, or all the ways the system reinforces class differences, and suppresses creativity and critical thinking.

          As I said, I don't want to hijack this thread for a discussion of education policy (although if someone wants to start another education diary that would be great), but I recognized most of these things in early adolescence and left the system (out of my own volition, and without parental urging) for a small independent school in LA. It was an amazing, enchanted place where kids were treated and respected as young adults, where creativity and individuality and critical thinking were sacred (it was my experience there that led me to support vouchers). Not surprisingly, when treated as young adults teenagers tend to act like them. A number of kids as young as twelve and thirteen would go off to be foreign exchange students. There were kids there who took off to backpack through Europe or parts of Latin America with their friends at sixteen. There were times I would take the afternoon off (which wasn't forbidden), go down to Topanga beach, swig a bit of scotch from the flask, and sit on the beach reading Fitzgerald and smoking menthols. Freedom is a good thing.

          by spot on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 08:29:13 PM PDT

          •  Would you support vouchers

            for fundamentalist reform schools which are the concentration camps that you talk about?

            I can support vouchers to a certain extent, for all public and charter schools, and perhaps for non-theocratic private schools.  But once you add these theocratic brain-washing "Christian" madrassas, I can no longer consider vouchers.  Those guys are evil, no they are worse than evil.  

            by IhateBush on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 10:14:50 PM PDT

            •  That's the only thing that gives me the willies

              about vouchers (which incidentally I think should be progressively funded, and the unions replaced with a guild system like in Hollywood), but I'm not sure that you could discriminate on sectarian grounds if you're prepared (as I am) to offer vouchers for mainline Catholic, Protestant, and independent private schools. But that's why I believe high school age kids should be able to choose their own schools, even if it goes against their parents's wishes.

              by spot on Sat Jun 11, 2005 at 11:59:12 AM PDT

              •  When you say progressively funded

                do you mean, give a poor child 20,000 dollars, while a rich child is given 4,000?

                And what do you mean by a guild system?

                by IhateBush on Sun Jun 12, 2005 at 10:18:19 AM PDT

          •  Well I think

            that this was extremely well said. Since we're tossing song quotes around, there's "your age is the hardest age/everything drags and drags" from The Replacements "Sixteen Blue." I never really questioned that that doesn't have to be the case.

            By the way, I sat next to Thurston Moore on Metro North on the way back from CT to NYC one Mother's Day in the 90's. Had a nice chat. I asked him why he hadn't been playing Teenage Riot--it was just after their tour opening for Neil Young. He was like "Oh, yeah. I don't know." Consummate artist. Always looking forward.

            by Snoutboy on Sat Jun 11, 2005 at 06:23:25 AM PDT

            •  Thanks. I love Sixteen Blue, and just the other

              day listened to Androgynous, Unsastisfied, and Sixteen Blue on repeat while I was driving. Great Thurston Moore story (especially the Metro North part...I'd pay money to run into Kim Gordon buying lipstick at the White Plains Galleria).

              by spot on Sat Jun 11, 2005 at 12:04:12 PM PDT

  •  I don't think it's consensual.

    Check out the sources I posted. Most people in the Short Hills Community are functional illiterates. They're born into the church, and they're told everyone outside it is evil. And they don't have the resources you have (ie literacy) to find out otherwise. Then the girls are married off at 12 or 13... quite a bit below the age of consent.

    Anyway, Jeffs is not being harrassed or prosecuted for his religion but for defrauding the school district, defrauding his followers (literally of everything they've worked for all their lives, okay, he takes away their houses), and arranging sexual relationships between underage girls and much older men (including himself).

    by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:31:22 PM PDT

    •  P.S. the illiteracy

      is something I read in one of these articles. Schooling is discouraged past elementary school, and the school district has gone into receivership after being milked dry to buy private vehicles and a plane for Jeffs's cronies.

      by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:35:20 PM PDT

  •  I certainly agree with you

    especially that people should be allowed to enter into any type of consensual relationship, including polygamous ones, and ought to be allowed to have such relationships recognized.

    But I draw the line at theocracy and cults.  Some are bluntly a threat to civiliization in many ways, and many are child abusers and murderers as well.  It is why I take a much tougher stance against Islamists than do many on the left, and am actually quite disappointed that liberals don't denounce Islamism(which we share nothing with) as hard as we denouce the "Christian" fundamentalists.

    The real issue here is the welfare and the choice of the kids and others in this cult, not that Jeffs is a polygamist, but rather that he is a child molestor, rapist, and murderer.

    by IhateBush on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 10:33:59 PM PDT

•  About time

  I recently read Jon Krakauer's book about Mormon Fundamentalism. It's more than just polygamy, it's rape. Girls are "married" off at fourteen years old. Question: how is it that these groups operating in the open don't come under any real prosecution in states like Orrin Hatch's Utah? Is it really that noone will testify against them or is there a tacit acceptance of this illegal and immoral behavior?

  by Snoutboy on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:30:47 PM PDT

  •  Tacit acceptance and

    as you probably remember from Krakauer's books, there were some raids in the 1950s which left a very bad taste in people's mouths. After all, nobody wants to break up existing families simply because they happen to have a few extra mommies in them.

    by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:32:44 PM PDT

    •  This is seriously

      some sick stuff. I don't understand how lawmakers in these states are not held accountable for this happening right in their own backyards.

      by Snoutboy on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:37:01 PM PDT

•  The Phoenix Times

  has a good in depth series of articles about Polygamy in Arizona by John Dougherty.

  It goes into detail about the control Jeffs has on Colorado City and how he does it all at taxpayer's expense.  

  by Ted Hitler on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 06:47:22 PM PDT

  •  They're on the move

    Utah and Arizona have turned up the heat, so the FLDS church has started pulling up roots and moving to Texas and Nevada. I hope AZ authorities share information with the other states.

    by DJ Adequate on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:04:18 PM PDT

    •  Texas, Arizona and Utah

      are cooperating in an attempt to get Jeffs on everything he's doing. Sure hope they can do it without anyone getting charbroiled.
      But all it'll mean for his people is another Prophet will move in.

      Myeldorado.net is covering it pretty well. Have you checked out their Jeffs archive?

      by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:08:55 PM PDT

•  Jeffs is scary

  Jeffs is paranoid, and I really worry about what could happen. They've been sued successfully in court, and have started to dismantle building rather than comply;

  http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0602colocity-ON1.html

  Jeffs hasn't been seen publicly in over a year, and is probably hiding on a new church ranch in Texas to hide from Utah and Arizona authorities. There were rumors of a planned mass suicide earlier this spring, but nothing came of it.

  Of all the polygamous groups, the FLDS and the Kingston clan are the worst. The Kingston's are more secretive, though, and may be a harder target than Jeffs.

  by DJ Adequate on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:02:45 PM PDT

  •  The Eldorado paper sez

    that they do not think Jeffs is in his Eldorado, Texas enclave. I hope they manage to pick him up on the street.

    Yeah, the Kingston people are very scary too. And even more inbred.

    by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:06:39 PM PDT

•  About time,

  after decades of child rape, welfare and school fraud, and suspicious deaths of teenage boys who competed with church leaders for the girls the leaders wanted to rape and marry.

  This is America -- no church can run any town the way the Jeffs cult runs Colorado City, it's just plain wrong.

  by devtob on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:26:44 PM PDT

  •  Wow.

    I had not heard about that case. It looks like nothing was done with her complaint, eh?

    For someone who grew up in Short Hills and had never left it, it would be difficult to realize that it was unusual for 53% of the dead in the cemetery to be children under 10.

    What people don't realize when they talk about "choice" is that choice requires knowledge. People born and raised in a community that they never leave, and to which they are told all alternatives are evil, and people who are never taught to read, make their "choices" with their eyes shut and their hands tied.

    by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:37:11 PM PDT

    •  And of course this

      is why ShrubCo has been pushing the dumbing down of America for decades.

      by nargel on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 08:38:25 PM PDT

•  Good--saw a documentary on this

  sect recently, essentially a cult--lot of sexual abuse going on here, no education for girls past early adolescence, a lot of intimidation, and that's not even  addressing the breaking up of families and appropriation of wives and kids by Jeffs himself.  Boys aren't getting any choices either.  Thought I was watching a piece on the Taliban!

  by bibble on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:42:02 PM PDT

  •  I know they're supposed to be getting some

    kind of schooling, but the articles say almost the whole town is illiterate.

    by SensibleShoes on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 07:50:40 PM PDT

    •  The documentary I saw on this--

      which dealt mainly with the sect as it started in Utah, but then also covered the move into Arizona by the even more radical fringe, talked about the educational system as self-generated--not somehow under oversight by the state--so they just teach the beliefs, and the old ways--all the kids in the documentary had such empty, sad eyes--it was very creepy.

      by bibble on Fri Jun 10, 2005 at 09:42:56 PM PDT