Explained: Texans Yearning for Zion from Foster Care
Explained: Questions from our Forum, Answers in our Blog
One of the latest questions in our "Hey Veracifier, Here's what I think..." thread touches on an interesting subject: the YFZ ranch and the FLDS who inhabit it - or, for the kids, who inhabited it until recently. After falling of the newspeg for the last few weeks, this weekend it was suddenly back on - in the Op-Ed pages, the blogs, CBS's 60 Minutes and even an hour-long special on WEtv last night.
Veracifier reader Mary Johns asked:
So guys, now that it's back into the pages of the Op-Eds, what do you think about what's going down there in Texas with the FLDS at YFZ? Should these mothers and kids be reunited? I can't figure out how to look at the whole thing legally (obviously raising your kids in something that's nothing short of a cult should raise some eyebrows about child welfare) but at the same time, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason to take 400 plus children from their parents and not return them right away. (NB: I did read that the two "missing" kids aren't missing at all, there was some confusion as to the children's mothers because they were listed with another sister-wife's kids... the lists all match up now, they say.) But all the op-eds have been saying the raid was a disaster - the right is mad because the government actually DID something and crossed the sacred threshold of a man's home and hearth, and the progressives are wailing about what the next privacy violation will be. Logically, I'm not so against it, but can anyone actually defend the raid at YFZ?
To start: don't drink the punch.
If you watched Sunday’s 60 Minutes, you were privy to a rare, behind-the-scenes look inside the 1,700-acre Yearning for Zion ranch in El Dorado, Texas, home to some of Warren Jeff’s followers of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints.
They showed heart-wrenching scenes of empty classrooms, empty playgrounds, and empty beds that were occupied by 416 children until they were removed by a Texas SWAT team and Child Protective Services.
A father teared up at the thought of his loved ones – his children and wives – taken, and for what?
The weekend editorials had his side, too. Oregon’s Statesman Journal wondered whose rights will be violated next. Conservative pundit and CBS commentator Ben Stein railed against the raid, as did pieces in Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune. The weblog Indy Bay called it a “San Angelo Witch Hunt.”
The 60 Minutes piece went on to elaborate that the call for help from the underage, abused, and pregnant “Sarah” may have even been a hoax.
But Texas Child Protective Services says that, even if the s.o.s. was false, the problems alleged in the phone call are actually taking place. “Once we got out to the ranch, we found a number of young ladies who were in the same condition as Sarah,” claimed CPS spokesman Darrell Azar late last week. Yesterday, CPS added that as many as 60 percent of the underage girls at YFZ were or had been pregnant.
That condition – young and pregnant – is not unique to the FDLS. Teenage pregnancy can happen everywhere. But for the FLDS, it’s a way of life. And according to Carolyn Jessop, author of the memoir Escape and former FLDS member who escaped several years ago with her eight children, it’s an extremist religion that puts all its children in harm’s way.
When she was 18, Carolyn Jessop was forced to marry 50-year-old Merrill Jessop. (Merrill Jessop, incidentally, is the current leader of the YFZ ranch.) The marriage was arranged by the prophet, then Leroy Johnson, who decided every marriage under the auspices of the word of God: FLDS believe that spirits enter into a holy union before coming to earth and the prophet merely puts two people together who have already agreed to it in heaven.
Carolyn was Merril’s fourth wife; he was married again several times at the behest of the prophet Rulon Jeffs and then his son and successor, Warren. Warren Jeffs is currently serving jail time for the marriage of an underage girl. She was fourteen.
“When Uncle Rulon first came to power,” Jessop wrote in Escape, “girls didn’t marry until they were over twenty. After his first stroke, the age dropped into the late teens. The sicker he got, the younger the brides in the community became.”
In a more balanced look at life inside YFZ on NBC last Wednesday, Today’s Meredith Vieira questioned two FLDS wives about the practice of forced polygamy and underage marriage in their community.
“There is no force in our work. It’s all choice,” one mother named Monica told Vieira. “I have my children, and they mean a lot to me and I know of no force, nothing like that. I have my children that I love and I want what’s best for them, and that’s who I live with, and that’s who I work with, and that’s what I know about.”
“Everyone is allowed to choose,” affirmed Rachel, another mother.
But according to Jessop, just because there’s “choice” doesn’t mean there’s options. Naomi, one of Merrill Jessop’s daughters by another wife, was married to the late prophet Rulon when she was a teenager. After Rulon’s death, Warren re-distributed his father’s sixty some wives among other FLDS men; he assigned Naomi to himself. When Naomi was given the chance to “choose” and refused, she was told that she would be forced to undergo “Blood Atonement” to repent for her disharmony with God – since disharmony with a father or husband or, worse, the Prophet himself, is going directly against the will of God.
The idea of “blood atonement” is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a practice that goes back to the days of Brigham Young but it, like polygamy, is one of the defining features of FLDS that separates those at YFZ from run-of-the-mill Mormons. “I could refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain, in order to atone for their sins,” Rulon Jeffs proclaimed in a series of sermons that were published in 1997. “This is loving our neighbor as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on this earth in order that he may be saved, spill it.”
Not everything’s that ghastly. Much of the danger is everyday, Jessop and other FLDS-escapees explain. There’s Warren Jeff’s rule that it isn’t holy for women and children to physically bond; after nursing, all tender contact between mother and child is strictly forbidden. No hugs goodnight, no kissing skinned knees.
There are the hundreds of young men known as “lost boys” who are forced out of the compound every year for infractions as slight as listening to a CD. (When a society depends upon a surplus of women, it helps to cut down on the numbers of men.)
And then there’s the idea that a girl’s only way into heaven is through her husband. If he doesn’t want her to be his wife in heaven – and he’s got the final say – then she is condemned to spend the rest of eternity as a slave to her husband’s other wives.
To me, that sounds crazy. But that’s their religion – and religion, no matter how crazy it seems, is something protected by the Constitution.
Nevertheless, we do not allow genital mutilation in America, although it’s a traditional religious practice for many the world over. Here, we call it child abuse.
We do not allow the marriage of women under the age of consent. We call that rape.
So what do we call this?
These kids didn’t choose to live there, and it is without question that tugging 400 kids from the arms of their mothers can’t be emotionally healthy for anyone. But this is a case where the sins of the father are visited upon the children. What has sustained as life at the YFZ ranch is subject to religious freedom, yes. And, at the end of the day, we should be subject to our conscience.
We live in a world where we value procedure and process in the law over substance. We assume that if the process is fair, the outcome necessarily is. But we forget sometimes, that in a case like this, there is right and wrong – two things we have tried, very hard, to reason away. In their place, we have opted to venerate things that can be proven over the things that make sense. We have to choose which rights to uphold: those that guarantee the freedom of religion, or those that guarantee freedom to live.
400 children have grown up in a world where families are defined by a union the state has declared illegal, murder is sanctified by a prophet we have jailed, and where their futures consist of forced marriage and forced expulsion for those under the age of majority. You can’t prove that it will happen, but is it something you’re willing to risk?
