I am not a proponent of polygamy or child abuse/rape.
I am a proponent of religious freedom.
Stories like these have generated a lot of publicity due to the reports from several of the wives in the community that they are being abused, detained like criminals, and forcibly impregnated. Nothing is okay about any of that, and all of it should be prosecuted.
The problem is, when it isn't a problem to anyone within the relationship.
Case in point:
http://www.cnn.com/...
Yes, taking a teenage wife is bad. Sixteen-year-olds should not be allowed to enter into wedlock. But if this was to be prosecuted, it should be by the wife-child. But...
The woman, now 21 and the mother of three children by Fischer, refused to cooperate with the prosecution and was among 130 people to send letters vouching for his character to the judge.
"We have a beautiful family together. I love my husband. He loves us and takes very good care of us. The children adore their father ... I don't need to explain my personal life to anyone," she wrote in the letter.
She's 21 now, well above the age of legal consent. Could she be brainwashed into thinking that she's in a loving relationship? Maybe, but that's pushing it.
What really grates my nerves is the tone of the prosecution.
"I don't know if we've sent a strong enough message to these people," said Gary Engels, an investigator with the Mohave County Attorney's office.
...
According to the paper, the judge told Fischer his religious beliefs did not justify breaking the law.
"There is no reason why people in Colorado City, simply because they subscribe to a different religious belief, should believe that they have the right to do something that everyone else in society cannot do," the judge said.
...
"I would've like to have seen him get more time, not so much that he needed to get it, but more along the lines of a deterrent factor," Smith [the county prosecutor] said.
In case you're wondering, "these people" are members of the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints, a group of...well, fundamentalist Latter-day Saints, who are in deep doo-doo for allegations of arranged marriages between teenage girls and married men. Now, to be clear, I am not in favor of either the FLDS or of arranged marriages of teenage girls. My problem is that the family prosecuted and depicted in this story does not fit into the category of "arranged marriages between teenage girls and married men." There was neither coercion nor abuse in this relationship, as all parties testified. Were these people not associated with the FLDS this would not be a story. But because polygamy is not a crime in Arizona, the only way for the locals to prosecute is to find all the polygamists who could be proven to have had sex with someone younger than 18. The marriage is fine, not the sex. The only evidence the prosecution had was testimony by other church members. But I digress.
The issue I have with this is not an age-of-consent deal, it's who has the right to prosecute. If teenage wives and mothers want to accuse their husbands of abuse and rape I support them all the way. When districts take it upon themselves to incarcerate men who have, by all accounts, done no harm to anyone, I have a problem. The judge was right; religious expression does not give anyone the right to break the law. But if the wife and mother insists that no crime was committed, it should be left at that. They aren't saving anyone with this.