Perversion of Truth: The FLDS Crisis in Texas

While I'm aware that there is no one block of mainstream Americans (or Canadians, since they're a part of this too), there are a set of elements in the media and in law enforcement / judiciary who are meant to speak with one voice for all of "us" as a block to "them", the FLDS.  At this point, these Representatives of us have created so many manipulations and perversions of the truth that they far better exemplify The People of the Lie (a concept created by The Road Less Traveled author M. Scott Peck) than do the FLDS people that they are trying to bring into line.  The FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs may have magnified the distrust that the FLDS reasonably feel after being persecuted for more than 100 years, but it took our legal representatives to make his prophecies come true.

(Image: girls being removed from their home on the first day of the raid.  Underage girls were taken and only their mothers were allowed to accompany them, so it is possible that the white haired lady in the background was being separated from her entire family.  Image from the FLDS website.)

I have recently seen and heard news articles criticizing a lifestyle which would result in women with such drawn and haggard faces.  To get up every morning, face a crowd of people who have taken your children, and do it with precisely placed hair and not a tear shed before the enemy takes a level of courage I cannot imagine.  There are photos available from happier times.  There are also photos available of young mothers in tears and supported on the arms of their elders.  CNN published an fashion article criticizing the hairstyles of the women, which it claimed were identical.  This text ran with a  photo of a group of drawn and haggard women, each with unique and complicated up-do.  The minutia of the lies is absurd.

The telephone call supposedly prompting the raid did not come from within the FLDS property (CNN reports, and has been reporting since last week), something investigators surely knew before the raid occurred.  The stated purpose of the raid was to follow up on the topic of the phone call, statutory rape of girls given in marriage.  The actual purpose of the raid appears to be the dismantling of the FLDS community, as evidenced by the fact that all children down to infants-in-arms have been removed from their parents.  In a move of relief, the judge has allowed nursing mothers to return to their children twice a day so long as they are supervised by a religious authority (she's suggesting the LDS oversee this in order to pull the women from the FLDS, something that baffles the LDS leaders who have made it clear they want no part in this).  In other words, the mandate the mainstream public was willing to give to the Texas authorities to protect pubescent girls has been expanded all the way from infants to the re-training of grown women. 

In a recent CNN online article about Carolyn Jessop, author of Escape, her tale of leaving the FLDS with her eight children, readers turned on her in their comments postings.  When a woman on the one hand talks about the supportive underground network of women within the FLDS community that she was privy to, and on the other hand claims that no one helped her with her children, not even on the days of their births, until the day she left the community and was provided a moment of rest by the first non-FLDS woman she housed with, you know she's playing tricks with her story.  Carolyn Jessop, by the way, is in Texas providing "cultural competency" to authorities for the sake of the people she has supported herself by vilifying.

One thing Carolyn Jessop claims is that the community used children as a threat to women: if you fail to follow the dictates of Jeffs, your children will be taken from you.  It took a woman not even of the community, a woman playing a hoax of unimaginably cruel proportions, and the willing accomplices in authority down there in Texas, to turn Jeff's prophecy into reality.  The compliance of the women over the last three weeks, starting with their willingness to leave their homes, has been called "voluntary," but what can voluntary possibly mean when their nursing infants are being held captive?

Another FLDS community has existed in the Canadian province of British Columbia since the days when polygamy was banned from the main LDS church (dismantling families obedient to that prophet and leaving their children illegitimate).  Yesterday the Attorney General of British Columbia was interviewed on the news show As It Happens.  He stated that the only difference between his response to that community and the response in Texas was that there had been no under-aged complainant in British Columbia.  At the time he said this, he had to have known that there is no underage complainant in Texas either.  He also stated that the American Consulate in British Columbia has been in contact with them over the years wishing for American citizens of the FLDS to participate in the American Census.  This the FLDS has been unwilling to do, fearing that the information would be used against them.  Probably fearing that the American and Canadian authorities were in cahoots to dismantle their community, which in fact they are.  The AG, by the way, is primarily concerned with the legality of polygamy.  His concern with statutory rape, like that of the Americans, is only in that it provides a legal hook for dismantling a polygamous community.

In Texas, failure to census has resulted in DNA testing of the entire community, the first legally enforced DNA testing of any community in the world.  While some of the actions in Texas mirror human rights violations in other countries --such as communities in South America where all children were removed from their parents and adopted out to more politically compliant families or aboriginal women in Australia who were removed from their tribes to be re-educated by white Protestants-- the DNA testing puts America on the cutting edge.  No one could call the fears of the FLDS irrational any more.  And as far as the AG of British Columbia is concerned, the Canadians have every wish to out-do America in this respect.

Groups who can see themselves ending up in this group are expressing concern.  The LDS church has refused to have anything to do with it.  Perhaps that Baptist church that allowed their sign to fly over the buses dismantling this community on the first day of the raid will someday regret their decision.  Rick Fisk is anti-charity in his evaluation of the FLDS, but he's outrage at the current events equals mine.  LDS blogger Russell Arben tried to be even-handed on Day 1, but eventually he had to agree that the details weren't making the Texas authorities "look very good" (and he links to other LDS bloggers on this topic).

(Image: Some of the firepower that was brought in to remove the girls from their homes.  Also from the FLDS website.)

The homeschoolers are worried that the attack on the FLDS can be turned into an attack on home and private schooling in general.  And the breastfeeders are pissed.  This has become an attack against women as decision makers in their own lives and against the power of women as mothers as much as it has become an attack against a polygamous society.  It is peculiar that the men and teenage boys have been left out of re-education.  Is it that men are considered uneducatable?  Or is it that women are still chattle, only to be controlled by the Texas authorities rather than by the conscience of their own religious sentiment?

At the FLDS website Captive FLDS Children you can donate directly to the FLDS organization.  Quite frankly, the finances of the FLDS leadership are curious and I'm not sure that is the best way to respond to the specific outrages of this event.  I have heard reports that the ACLU is providing legal support, but there is no information about this matter on their website.  For now, all a citizen can do is read the news with a critical eye, provide outrage when we are lied to by our own representatives, and demand that human rights abuses like this not be perpetrated in our name.  What's going on down there in Texas is being done to "them"; it must not be done in the name of "us."

Comments

[Johnna Cornett]

brilliant analysis, cactus.