Most anyone who knows me, knows I really don’t have time for TV. I usually only watch the news and maybe a scandalous Reality TV show or two, but in the months since I’ve been exposed to TV again (since I got to Utah), I’ve really found I don’t really watch it at all.
I often get my daily fill of the news at work, during my down time.
I start my everyday with MSNBC and Googlenews.
Today, my choice of news was the Polygamy Scandal.
Now usually, I’m much to lazy to blog about what I’m feeling, but for one reason or another, my brain is slightly taken over by this scandal.
I know, I know, this story has been in headlines for awhile now, and I have noticed it, but until now I haven’t read much into it.
I often get calls from home, checking to see how I am. Lately, a favorite tagline has been:
“So is Utah upset about the Polygamy stuff? You know…the Mormons and what-not?”
I just respond with the fact that I have no idea and it’s none of my concern.
Today, I read up.
...........
I can’t help but have every inch my heart hurt.
These children have never known anything but the confines of their cult land in El Derado . They don’t know who our President is, who Elvis was, that there is a war going on…anything. Now I know, a lot of that is negative anyway, but to be stripped and cut off from the events that are making history in our everyday society is…unheard of. Though it can be negative, war and other daily happenings, I believe, is a healthy dose of the obvious diverse society our Lord has created. The girls, subject to being child brides and teen mothers…never fully embracing a long lasting, mistake-making, lesson-learning childhood; a childhood that would prepare them for the world of adult hood. Just confinement, strict exposure to the few purposes that women serve on the “Yearning for Zion Ranch. The boys, molested and born into the role of a perpetrator. I imagine the sweet young soul of a young boy like my nephew, being crafted into believing it’s okay to commit such acts of sin against women, and even worse, that God was thankful and encouraging of those duties.
13 years old…and a mother.
416…children in a state of disarray.
350+…lawyers representing these families.
I understand the battle for civil rights, and the arguments as the whether it is just to take these children without clear cut evidence, but I can’t help but beg for an exception to our civil liberties.
But then what kind of country would we be, in our laws and judicial system if we allowed exceptions to our laws? Sigh, a faulty one, I know.
I almost have a bit of sadness in my heart for these mothers as well. These women were raised the same way their children are being raised, and they parent the only way they have ever been exposed. Essentially, we can take some of the blame of their shoulders. Truly, they have never (and don’t take that emphasism lightly) never known any other way. This is what is right to them, just like our morals and standards are justified to us. They do share a similar emotion as say a “normal mother” in that being they have had their child/children taken away. There is no stronger emotion and attachment then to a mother and her child, and I feel for the separation they are experiencing.
I just wish that these women could be exposed to the general consensus of what is wrong and what is right. I am not one to judge, but deep down I want them to know what it is really like to feel the Lord Jesus Christ and what his word is. I want them to feel him in their hearts and realize the gifts they are stripping from their children and themselves. I just want them to have a better life and knowing of the Lord.
My heart is so angry with the “leaders” of this church. How dare they take it upon themselves, as a message from God nonetheless, to decide that a young girl is ready for sex after her first menstruation. Becoming grandmothers and even great grand-mothers so young…it’s terrible. They use these girls as vessels for sexual gratification and as only profitable in making children.
Moreso, I’m outraged with those who defend these actions through the debate of comparison. Some ask to compare these children to those in modern day society; those with STD’s and participating in unholy sexual acts; that the compound was beneficial in some way. Wrong. It is one thing for a grown, mature, adult woman to choose a polygamus relationship, or a teen to herself make that decision, but it is a completely different argument when a young woman on the verge of puberty is thrown at a grown man…under the disguise of religion, under fear of eternal damnation, to participate forcefully in sexual acts. They are assured that this truly is the way our beautiful Savior would want to them to live. Refusal is the key to being a pox on your family and being banned from eternal life with the Lord. There is simply no comparison. These men, BELIEVE they are ordained by God. I can’t breathe when I think that right here in the United States of America, there are “daddies” trading their daughters away like baseball cards. It's slavery and a full system of organized crime right in our backyard. Comparison is not an argument.
Next, the debate of whether it was just to take the children from their home. Those ideas, opinions, outbursts that these children have been kidnapped by the state is complete flippin blasphemy. When did a rescue mission to save children from the monstrosities being committed upon them by old men…become kidnapping? When did kidnapping become so easily confused with saving the mothers and children from an endless cycle of abuse and sexual sickness? What if your child was thrust into a “spiritual marriage”? Into manipulation, entrapment, guilt, and forced to distrust anyone outside their compound? There is simply no comparison to kidnapping, none at all. Polygamists break the laws of our country by raping young girls for their own pleasure why young men watch as a learning lesson. The justification in removing the children is not an argument, it was a blessing.
These people, these who are fighting that the state is in the wrong, the one’s who accuse my ideas of being those of a Socialist, take any chance to protest our government. Please believe that I too don’t agree with some aspects within our judicial system. However, to suggest there is no concrete evidence whatsoever to take children away, that this is one more chip away at our rights bestowed upon us by our Constitution, is absurd. You protesters, have you not done your research? Please don’t tell me I am jumping on the propaganda bandwagon, when you yourself are chomping at the bit to find some way to discredit our government. I can assure you, you will need to find it else where; find some other news story to light on fire. Do you not know the fact that these people justify incest through their belief in the Adam/God doctrine? That they find justification in the murder of a run away woman through the doctrine of Blood Atonement? Or maybe that the males rationalize putting their families on welfare instead of financially supporting them to “bleed the beast”. Don’t accuse me of my bandwagon membership until you read the Utah and Arizona Attorney General's Office Report on the abuse of children of polygamous cults. Kidnapping? Abduction? Bottom line, Our rights, religious freedoms…are abolished when we harm another person.
I’ve gone off topic, I know. I started this blog explaining the anxiety, sickness, and sadness I felt for the life these people have never known, the life they are experiencing, the life without a true understanding of the Lord and the atmosphere of pain each person involved is feeling. It’s emotionally frustrating for me to accept the idea that until this community steps over that fine line of the law, flamboyantly, our constitutional law protects their right to commit their widely unaccepted acts…in the name of religion. Sure, their children are taken away for now, but throughout history, The Supreme Court of the United States has consistently ruled that an anonymous tip (the justification behind the raid) is never a form of probable cause. These children, will most likely go back. On paper, the YFZ Ranch is essentially just another religious community, who like many other religious communities, chose to live a life that is different from our mainstream culture. Until a formal trial is held, with more then an anonymous tip, the sect is free to exist.
It kills me inside. It really does. Please, if you read this, pray. Pray for the education and freedom needed for these people to be released from their cult; from the only sickening standards they have ever known. Pray that the Lord be with these children as they are exposed to a society, a truly foreign world, to which they have never known, and that as they make transitions, their foster families accommodate and love them. Just…pray.
Stories like this, can truly make you thankful for another day in suburbia.
