A Brief History
On April 3, 2008, an army of law enforcement descended upon a polygamist compound with snipers, machine guns, SWAT equipment, a helicopter, and even an armored personnel carrier!
Digging Deeper
Child welfare workers and enforcement officers were among the police, surrounding and sealing off the compound.
Law enforcement had been alerted by a call purportedly from a teenage girl kept in the compound as a child bride, or as some would describe, a sex slave. Getting a warrant to conduct the raid was based on the calls from this person who turned out not to be even in the compound, or the state for that matter!
Still, the warrant was valid and police poured in and removed 533 women and children from the compound and took them into protective custody while the investigation began. Most of the children were ordered returned to their mothers in the legal wrangling that followed.
The so called YFZ Ranch (Yearning For Zion) was populated by a religious sect that was an offshoot of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) who had left the LDS when under pressure from the US government the LDS renounced “plural marriage” and ex-communicated any member that persisted in the practice of multiple wives. The sect call themselves the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) and engage in polygamy.
In order to keep the sect viable, with men having 3 or more wives it is necessary to evict young men for the slightest offense against church teachings to keep the ratio of women to men high enough. Likewise, in order to keep young girls from leaving the sect without marrying the practice of marrying juvenile females to men is commonplace.
Huge legal battles and battles for public opinion raged over the seizing of the children, and law enforcement officers had to take hundreds of DNA samples for testing to determine who exactly was parents to whom. Church members claimed religious persecution, and child protective personnel claimed children were being sexually abused.
The compound included a 29,000 square foot home for church president and prophet Warren Jeffs, as well as homes for the congregation, sewage treatment, and electricity production. Approximately 700 sect members lived there.
Authorities said 31 of the 53 girls between 14 and 17 taken from the ranch were either pregnant or already had children. Several of the main male members of the church were tried for rape or contributing to rape and were sent to prison. Church president Warren Jeffs was convicted in Utah and imprisoned, but freed later when his conviction was overturned on appeal. Sent to Texas to answer charges there, Jeffs was convicted of sexual assault on a child and sentenced to life plus 20 years!
Obviously, there are problems for society if one man takes several wives, as there would be many men left with no wife! That simple math seems to have eluded the FLDS, but something else has not eluded them. That something is the cracked conclusion to this story! Church members are taught to have as many mothers as possible apply for food stamps, welfare, and other forms of government hand outs since by law only one wife can be legally married to one man and all the other wives/mothers are technically single moms!
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What do you think of plural marriage?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Cook, M. Bridget and Rebecca Musser. The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice. Grand Central Publishing, 2013.
Weyermann, Debra. Answer Them Nothing: Bringing Down the Polygamous Empire of Warren Jeffs. Chicago Review Press, 2011.
