Article skates over the fact that some of these boys are are taken at night and left in the desert to die. AP article here.
Stories like this make it very hard to maintain my good, culturally relativistic, accepting attitude towards others. Am I the only one who read this story and had a loud voice in the back of my head shouting “KILL IT WITH FIRE!” ?
Every day I become less and less tolerant to religion and religious people. If it’s not somebody fucking cheerfully away in an orphanage it’s shit like this. And how the hell can somebody allow himself to begin “…assigning more wives to his trusted church leaders…”?
Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males — the expulsion of girls is rarer — also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives. State officials say efforts to help them with shelter, foster care or other services have been frustrated by the boys’ distrust of government and fear of getting their parents into trouble. But help for the teenagers is improving. In St. George, a nearby city where many of them wind up, two private groups, with state aid, have opened the first residence and center for banished boys. It will offer psychological counseling and advice on things they never learned, like how to write a check or ask a girl out politely, as well as a transitional home for eight who will attend school and work part time. The polygamous settlement is largely controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and allies of its jailed prophet, Warren S. Jeffs, who is about to stand trial on charges of sexual exploitation. It makes sense that if the older men are marrying the younger ones, there would be a “young woman” shortage–I never thought of that! Is Jeffs the real-life equivalent of the Harry Dean Stanton character on BIG LOVE?
CBC did a special on this too. http://www.canada.com/globaltv/globalshows/globalcurrents/polygamyslostboys/index.html
Daisy, my understanding is that Jeffs was one of the real life people “sampled” for Big Love. But Roman Grant is not nearly as evil as Jeffs (hard to believe).
William, No you’re not the only one who has to suppress violent instincts. One thing amazes me, though: isn’t there a parent who will say to one of those creeps I rather be in hell with my child than in heaven with you!? I suppose what’s happening is branwashing of women and a bunch of old men who see their chance at getting as much young tail as they can… It’s evil. Religion my tochis.
William, No you’re not the only one who has to suppress violent instincts. One thing amazes me, though: isn’t there a parent who will say to one of those creeps I rather be in hell with my child than in heaven with you!? I suppose what’s happening is branwashing of women and a bunch of old men who see their chance at getting as much young tail as they can… It’s evil. Religion my tochis. I think you’re being charitable. This isn’t brainwashing, these are logical conclusions based on a worldview. This is the end result of any dualistic society. There is right and there is wrong. If you violate the norms, even if it is by your mere existence, than your behavior shows you are lacking and you must be purged. Remember, the crimes these boys commit prove that they are worthy of excommunication, which in turn means they are not worthy of heaven, which means that they are no longer worth time. After all, they’re now the province of the enemy.
The flexible and adaptive nature of the human mind lends it unfortunately to being bent and perverted in infinite ways. The FDLS exemplifies the extreme of brainwashing/sabotage of the development of individuality. Although in more peaceful and ancient cultures, group identity over individuation works, it works because of the cooperative struggle for survival and well being often overcomes the most oppressive behaviors or rules. The FDLS functions on a linear platform that cannot last and will collapse as it is beginning to now. It does not function for the mutual survival of a group or community but solely for the attainment of power by a few privileged members over a larger oppressed majority. Also, the isolation demanded in order to continue will be the death of them as well, like many other groups that attempt to continue on with their oppressive customs while surrounded by a social order based on individual liberty. What spooks me the most is that such an extreme deviation from the concept of human rights and self determination and patriarchal control might be hard to completely overcome for those who leave the sect. In other words, my expectation would be that a number of the “Lost Boys” will still hold onto very patriarchal and conservative views of women, social order and family dynamics for the rest of their lives.
It makes sense that if the older men are marrying the younger ones, there would be a “young woman” shortage–I never thought of that! I would think, if the older men were marrying the younger men, that there’d be no shortage of young women. (It’s late, and I’m being a grammar asshole)
It must be stressed that many boys were raped, especially by the head rapist, Jeffs. I wish the Times would have reported on that, especially since child rape of, at least, one boy (I believe) is one of the charges against Jeffs. When patriarchy (authoritarian rule) hurts men and boys as well, it is universally other men who are the abusers. And sadly, most of the boys hurt grow up to be men who lash out at women and girls. One need not look any further than our own jails, in which the majority of the violent criminals were either raped or physically abused (universally by men) and they lash out overwhelmingly at women and children, especially girls. God, how horribly depressing.
I watched a short HBO special that touched on this a couple of months ago (from the producers of Big Love, naturally). I still remember one of these “lost boys” speaking about how he’d run away as a teenager along with his friend, who was being expelled from the community. The kid casually mentioned that runaways were common, mostly boys, since the girls who tried to leave were “usually dragged back.” The casualness of it was absolutely chilling.
Undoubtedly some of these boys will unfortunately seek to emulate their abusers someday. After all, isn’t the solution to be one of the old men in charge instead of being abused by them? These kids will need a lot of therapy to break the cycle. Can you imagine what the authorities would do if a woman with multiple “husbands” started throwing her children out on the street and sleeping with multiple much younger men/boys to whom she was not legally married? She’d never make it to trial ALIVE. Things would not have gotten to this state if the authorities had not been turning a more or less blind eye for decades. You can bet if this was a polygamous Mrs. Robinson it would have been stamped out a long time ago.