A Deeper Conversation About the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints
By Sara Robinson, Orcinus
Posted on April 25, 2008, Printed on April 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://dneiwert.blogspot.com//83517/
So far, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the state of Texas's raid on the
Fundamentalist
Church of Latter-Day Saints compound in Eldorado, TX has been focused on
just a couple of
narratives. The first, of course, is the state's dogged and thorough --
and long overdue --
attempt to prove that the church's young women have been systemically
***ually abused by the
men of the group; and that this abuse is not just rare, but rather an
inherent and accepted
feature of the group's social order.
The other is the cultural curiosity of the sect's women in general. We see
them, looking like
they just walked out of the 1890s in their bizarre high hairdos, pastel
prairie dresses, and
sturdy shoes, and wonder how such a group of fossils (let alone tens of
thousands of them)
could still exist in modern America. It makes for great TV; but I often
look at these women
(most of whom have never watched TV in their lives), and feel like they're
lambs being dragged
out in front of media wolves they've never learned to recognize or fear.
In a world when all of
us seem to be in permanent rehearsal for our own 15 minutes of fame, these
women are so
unprepared for all this that they're downright fascinating.
These are the two current storylines the media is focused on -- at least,
so far. In time,
though, if the re****ters and investigators stick around, they might find
other things to talk
about. A careful reading of Daphne Bramham's excellent The Secret Lives of
Saints reveals that
there are plenty of other questions we should be asking about the FLDS --
and months worth of
stories we're not hearing about right now, but which need to be discussed
and generally
understood if the country is going to deal with the group appropriately
and effectively.
And the country will be dealing with it -- probably for quite some time to
come. Throughout its
60-year history, the FLDS has dealt with prosecution (or persecution) by
seeding itself into
new states, laying down roots for new communities that it can migrate to.
(Eldorado itself
started out as one of these.) New compounds are coming together now in
Idaho and South Dakota;
and there are rumors of others being staked out in Colorado and Nevada as
well.
Hildale/Colorado City may have been effectively taken over by the state of
Utah, and Eldorado
is in crisis; but with somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 adherents,
this is a group that's
not going to pass from the American scene any time soon.
One of the things we need to understand is just how the FLDS managed to
stay so far under the
radar for so long -- and what twisted consequences were allowed to follow
from that lack of
oversight. Bramham shows that they did a stunningly effective job of
building their own
self-sufficient infrastructure of community institutions -- hospitals,
police forces, courts,
financial trusts, schools, and employers -- that allowed the church to
function without
interacting with the outside world any more than necessary. Most of the
group's institutions
were designed to mimic and supplant outside authority well enough to keep
the group (and
especially its treatment of women and children) hidden from the prying
eyes of outsiders. And,
for 60 years, those who were responsible for providing higher-level
oversight for all these
institutions have almost always been somehow induced to look the other
way.
In the existing FLDS communities in Utah and Arizona, state authorities
have already begun
investigations on many of these fronts -- not least because they are the
stuff on which further
legal battles, and the future of the sect, may turn. However, keeping the
FLDS at bay in the
years ahead will require county, state, and professional authorities
everywhere in North
America to stop averting their eyes, stay on their toes, and show a strong
willingness to
challenge these attempts to build this kind of sheltering infrastructure.
And there are other, less obvious reasons we need to be keeping an eye on
them, too. Here's the
first half of my motley list -- a few assorted areas of interest I'd be
poking at more deeply,
along with questions I'd be asking, were I a New York Times front-pager, a
TV talking head, or
a public official in any county or state where the FLDS has set up camp.
The list is long, so
I'll discuss a few today, and then follow up with the rest by Wednesday.
For-Prophet Health Care
FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside
the community as
possible, so they're not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To
this end, pregnant
mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months,
so they can be
attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own
hospital -- built
partly with public funds -- that has employed only doctors and nurses who
have pledged their
first loyalty to the Prophet.
As a result, the group's women and children get much of their primary care
from people who feel
no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state
record-keeping
requirements, or any of the existing mandated re****ter laws. (Most people
in these communities
have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that
results is why the state of
Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it
cannot be taken for
granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places,
exist at all).
The FLDs has also co-opted mental health services into another form of
wife abuse. In
Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare
unhappy women crazy.
Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on
anti-depressants; and that women
who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been
committed to mental
hospitals in Arizona by the community's doctors. According to Bramham, the
fear of being
labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent
threats the community
has used to keep women in their place.
Of course, this misuse of mental health care has turned into one
non-obvious but critically
im****tant cultural land mine for the Texas authorities who are trying to
figure out how to deal
with their FLDS wards. Along with everything else, they're trying to work
with women who've
learned to see mental health evaluations as tantamount to an incarceration
threat -- are thus
predisposed to regard gentile doctors or social workers as a mortal enemy.
It's not making
things easier.
Based on this long history, counties and states that find themselves
hosting FLDS compounds
need to be keeping a close eye on how these communities manage health
care. Who provides it?
Are they keeping good records? Are they following the law? Do they adhere
to accepted standards
of care? Are they holding the line as our first line of defense against
child abuse -- or are
they helping the community hide its abusive secrets? If the state
officials in charge of
supervising hospitals and doctors had stepped up and asked these questions
decades ago,
thousands of women and children might have been spared generations of
abuse.
Cops and Courts: No Law But God's Law
Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they
historically
controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado
City area. Though
these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally
public courts, they
weren't concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the
law according to the
FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective
recourse to the laws the
rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have
their property seized by
nominally "official" cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil
government, for
violating church laws.
Like African-Americans in the slavery era, women who tried to run were
captured by these police
and returned to their husbands for punishment -- or taken to the hospital
for the dreaded
mental health evaluation. The police force's main job is to be the muscle
that enforces the
Prophet's control of the entire community. When the Prophet decides that a
man no longer
deserves his home, these are the cops who enforce the eviction. Appealing
to the FLDS judges
has been useless: due process as we understand it doesn't even enter into
the conversation.
There is progress on this front. The state of Utah began to move against
the Hildale police
force in 2005, revoking the certification of its polygamous chief. Sam
Roundy admitted that
he'd investigated over 25 ***ual abuse cases in the past decade --
including one that involved
the rape of an eight-year-old -- and never re****ted it to child protection
authorities. (He
pleaded ignorance of all mandated re****ter laws.) However, Roundy was
replaced with another
polygamous officer who immediately sent Warren Jeffs a letter pledging his
loyalty, and I found
no word that he's left office since. Later that year, the Utah Supreme
Court also disbarred the
local polygamous judge, which paved the way for reform of the local
courts.
But the Saints are now in many places besides Utah; and officials in these
other states
shouldn't be surprised if they try to hijack cops and courts and replicate
this system wherever
they go. In Utah, decades of failure to attend to this effectively
deprived tens of thousands
of people of their civil rights. It can't be allowed to happen again.
Death Among the FLDS
These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own
crematorium), which
opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates -- and
ensures that no
questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed.
Given the genetic
instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be
wise for them to have
the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to
be asking questions
about who's in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and
what kinds of records
are being kept.
The Fatal Flaw: Inbreeding Takes Its Toll
One of the most striking things about the FLDS is that certain surnames --
Jeffs, Blackmore,
Fischer, Jessop, Barlow, Steed -- occur over and over again. In a
community of over 40,000
people -- many of whom share fathers, grandfathers, or uncles -- the
degree of blood
relation****p between any two people is likely to be very close indeed. In
fact, over half the
people in Hildale/Colorado City are blood relatives. So it's not
surprising that, starting in
1980, the tragic results of three generations of tight inbreeding began to
appear.
That was the year the first Colorado City child was diagnosed with
fumarase deficiency -- a
genetic disease so rare that only a handful of cases had ever been
diagnosed worldwide. The
disease causes severe mental retardation, seizures, hydroencephaly, growth
failure, and
physical deformities. Two of the FLDS's old-line families, the Barlows and
the Jessops, both
carry the recessive gene -- which is now present in several thousand FLDS
members who trace
their descent to those two founding fathers. By the 1990, Bramham writes,
the twin FLDS cities
had the highest concentration of children with fumarase deficiency in the
world.
There are also signs of widespread hereditary eye problems among the
current crop of children,
along with evidence that that the community has a higher-than-average
infant mortality rate.
Arizona coroners recently -- and finally -- got involved in investigating
these. But there's
plenty more here for public health officials to look at; and it's becoming
clear that the
custom of close intermarriage needs to end on genetic grounds alone.
Sara Robinson blogs at Orcinus.
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