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Tue 25 Oct, 2005 10:05 am
Mr. Jeffs, age 45, has as many as 70 wives, people who have left the church say. He teaches that a man cannot get to heaven unless he has at least three wives. And because there are not enough women to meet the demands of men who want eternal life, brides are constantly being reassigned.
Mr Jeffs has left Colorado City AZ and is believed to have relocated in Eldorado Texas. Mr Jeffs is the spiritual leader of a mormon sect. The sexual abuse charges on which he was indicted in June maintain that he forced a 16-year-old girl to marry a 28-year-old married man.
Members of the sect say they are the true followers of Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism 175 years ago. About a third of the residents are on food stamps, and the welfare rate is one of the highest in the West. The followers, who account for most of the twin towns' 8,000 people, justify taking public money with a term used by Smith's own followers: "bleeding the beast" - that is, taking from a government under which the early Mormons were often persecuted.
"It's just like the mob," said Gary Engels, a former police detective who has been retained by county officials to investigate child abuse accusations here. "The church is able to keep iron-fisted control even though the top leaders are fugitives."
Church leaders - and officials of the mayor's office, the Police Department and the school board, all of whom are followers - declined to be interviewed. The police, as well as church body guards in white pickup trucks, followed a visiting reporter and a photographer around town for several days. the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, continue to defy the law, the authorities and dissidents say: under the direction of leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, women are still being removed from their husbands and assigned to other men, and girls under 18 are ordered to become brides of older men on a day's notice, all despite the presence of full-time outside law enforcement.
WOW! I wish I could say more, but it is really sick that this happens in our own back yard. And we sit and talk about how backward all the Middle Eastern Countries are when we have groups perpetrating the same sort of defamation of women on a large scale and forcefully taking control of local government. Fundamentalist is the word indeed!
Must be a drag to be a single guy in a poly-g community.
Dang, I can't get anybody to marry me.
Can you imagine the plight of the poor girl who can't find a husband?
She must be REALLY fugly.
or like really old, maybe over 17.
yeah, that's pretty old.....