The Associated Press

A Texas group practices polygamy... where does religious liberty end and law begin?

Featured Topic | Posted 1 year 49 weeks ago

Feds raid a polygamist's compound: What's wrong with that?

More than 400 children, mostly girls in pioneer dresses, were swept into state custody from a polygamist sect in what authorities described Monday as the largest child-welfare operation in Texas history. The dayslong raid on the sprawling compound built by now-jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sparked by a 16-year-old girl's call to authorities that she was being abused and that girls as young as 14 and 15 were being forced into marriages with much older men.

The members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints spent their days raising numerous children, tilling small gardens and doing chores. But at least one former resident says life was not some idyllic replica of 19th-century life. "Once you go into the compound, you don't ever leave it," said Carolyn Jessop, one of the wives of the alleged leader of the Eldorado complex. Jessop left with her eight children before the sect moved to Texas.

Jessop said the community emphasized self-sufficiency because they believed the apocalypse was near.

So. does the Texas compound have any claim to religious liberty in the United States today? Or was Monday's raid simply a matter of law and order? Is polygamy wrong?

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Ben likes: Twin relics of barbarism

John Eastman/The Claremont Institute

In 1856, the Republican Party -- the party of Abraham Lincoln -- included in its platform a stinging criticism of slavery and polygamy, referring to the two institutions as the "twin relics of barbarism." Slavery was barbaric because it deprived some human beings of their liberty, one of the unalienable rights bestowed on all men, all human beings, by our "Creator," to use the words of the Declaration of Independence. Polygamy was barbaric because, as the Supreme Court later recognized, it undermined the concept of marriage, an institution that is necessary for a free society and therefore essential to the consensual government necessary to vindicate the unalienable rights described in the Declaration.

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Joel likes: Prairie justice

Ellen Goodman

Warren Jeffs is the autocrat and reigning prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a polygamous community of about 10,000 that regards itself as the one true Mormon faith. It survives much to the embarrassment of mainstream Mormons, who gave up polygamy in 1890, and much to the horror of the state.

Jeffs is either deeply creepy or downright evil depending on how you label religious leaders who consider themselves the voice of God and marry multiple women, including 30 of their late father’s youngest widows. He is infamous, among other things, for kicking hundreds of teenage boys out of his community and matching hundreds of their sisters into plural marriages. For those hooked on “Big Love,” Jeffs makes Alby Grant look appealing.

No, polygamy is not on trial. But its history is interwoven with questions of consent. Opponents to plural marriage in the 19th century included women’s rights advocates who equated polygamy with slavery. No mature woman, they believed, would voluntarily enslave herself.

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