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Worshipping God, One Wife at a Time

Jill

Well, I guess fundies do get laid after all.

I probably shouldn’t make a joke, since it’s a really sad article. Especially when it’s a joke that isn’t even really mine.

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.

“Just yesterday I got word of one of my students who had stopped attending classes: she has been pulled away from her husband and assigned to another man,” said Carolyn Hamblin, a counselor and assistant dean at the Colorado City branch of Mohave Community College.

“It just breaks my heart,” said Ms. Hamblin, a follower of the mainstream Mormon faith, which renounced polygamy in 1890 as a condition of Utah’s statehood.

Every part of the community, from the school board to the police force, is run by church members.

Mr. Goddard has also moved to put the school district in receivership. Five years ago, church leaders ordered all families to withdraw their children from the one big public school here, kindergarten through high school, in favor of home schooling or church schools. The public school instantly lost about 1,000 students, more than two-thirds of enrollment. Yet the church, whose followers account for a majority of the voters, continues to control the school board and – until recent legal action by Mr. Goddard – the school purse strings, which are now frozen.

Mr. Goddard said that while teachers had gone weeks without pay, church officials in control of the district had used public education money to buy a $200,000 airplane and had funneled school funds and property to the church. They also have an administrative staff of 23 people, compared with 6 at other school districts of the same size, he wrote in a report to the Arizona Education Department.

via Gawker (which, if you don’t know already, is addicting and amazing. Amazing.)

UPDATE: Speaking of nutty religious stuff, an Alabama church has ended its practice of encouraging kids to eat live goldfish for Jesus.

16 thoughts on Worshipping God, One Wife at a Time

  1. This town was also profiled in Jon Krakauers book “Under the Banner of Heave”. They are freaky, scary nuts, and because there are enough of them in a relatively unpopulated area, they are locally powerful.

    yuck

  2. 70 wives?!? How do you keep track of them all? I also read “Under the Banner of Heaven” – some of those “wives” are underage girls who are sexually abused.

  4. You people are ignoring the *real* problem — the innate inferiority of public schools!

    Spending money on aircraft, disappearing money in mysterious transactions, bloated administrative staffs . . . .

    The Democrats built their vaunted public schools, and this is the inevitable result . . . of Republicans taking them over.

  5. Thank God the authorities are FINALLY doing something about it! They’re nothing but a cult of sexual abusers and perverts.

  6. Thank God the authorities are FINALLY doing something about it! They’re nothing but a cult of sexual abusers and perverts.

    Hey, who are YOU to dictate what a man and a few dozen women may do behind closed doors?

  7. Why can’t the authorities find Jeffreys? They don’t seem to be trying very hard. I would think they could get him on some sort of welfare fraud/sex abuse charges.

    I’m assuming they haven’t moved in in force because they don’t want another Waco. But they shouldn’t just sit there and let New Gilead be built right under their noses, either!

  9. Jeffreys lived like a theocratic feudal lord in Colorado City. Not just assigning “wives” but really assigning girls to the men in the community, (including one of the city cops). He literally lorded over the property use, the political offices, and the scams that some in the community ran on government agencies. He is not only a criminal but a despot.

    He is a religious extremist without respect for people’s rights and freedoms. Somewhere to right to of our non-mormon fundie christians, but not very far….

  10. Speaking of nutty religious stuff, an Alabama church has ended its practice of encouraging kids to eat live goldfish for Jesus.

    So when a church does it is “nutty”, but when Fear Factor does it, is cool?

    Or is Fear Factor “nutty” also?

  11. Well, I’d say that Fear Factor is nutty too. Eating goldfish is pretty weird. But at least on Fear Factor, all participants are over the age of 18, go on the show for the express purpose of doing gross/crazy/scary things, and aren’t being coerced into doing anything. In the case of the church, these are kids who (a) don’t have a choice whether or not to go to church, and (b) are being coerced by adults into eating live goldfish. There’s value in getting over your fears — but I don’t think telling kids, “Eat this live fish for Jesus” is the best way.

  12. Fear Factor is merely stupid. Nutty is those who watch such drivel.

    If the authorities know these things are taking place, they need to do something about it and put these abusive men in jail. The cover of using a “church” for this abusive behavior should not be allowed to stand either. This is not a religion; it is a cult, and a very abusive one at that.

  13. The Alabama church takes proselytization to the level of predatory cult behavior, which is sort of creepy, like “candy, little girl? creepy.

    The Fundie Mormons in Colorado City are much worse.

  15. Making Light had a bunch of stuff on these creeps about a year ago. A number of the teens both male and female have managed to escape over the last few years and gotten remarkably little support from the state. Glad someone’s finally paying more attention.

  16. I lived in Salt Lake City for 12 years and there are at least 2 “families” that I not only knew of but had seen all around our neighborhood. One of my friends lives right next door to one of five houses that the Kingston Clan occupy, and right at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon was a huge fenced in complex that was formerly occupied by another large clan (not sure which one), complete with schools. So this is not just going on in remote areas but right in a major city and everybody there knows it, and nobody does anything about it.

    Krakauer did a great job of highligthing just how crazy these people are, and the insane amout of abuse it deals to the young female members. There are two cities (one in Canada and one in Mexico) where people often go that are feeling the heat so to speak, and it is likely that Rulon Jeffs is in one of these cities. I really thought the book would kick up publicity and force Utah to start dealing with this but to no avail.

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