FLDS founding patriarch Rulon Jeffs with his last two wives — sisters Edna and Mary Fischer — on their wedding day. He received the pair as a 90th birthday present.
The recent raid on a fundamentalist Mormon sect in Texas has been all over the news, and it’s a tragedy from all angles — sad that it happened in the first place, sad that there are hundreds of children with no place to go, sad that only the women and girls are having their faces shown on TV while the men who exploited them maintain some privacy. But as Sara Robinson points out, there’s a lot more to the story than just the headlines about polygamy — this is about a right-wing cult’s ability to completely separate itself from the rule of law and the protections and oversights that our society is supposed to afford all its citizens.
The FLDS had its own hospitals, which it used as tools of social control:
FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they’re not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital — built partly with public funds — that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.
As a result, the group’s women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).
The FLDS has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community’s doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.
And their own police and court system:
Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they historically controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado City area. Though these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally public courts, they weren’t concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the law according to the FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective recourse to the laws the rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have their property seized by nominally “official” cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil government, for violating church laws.
And women who tried to escape were dragged right back to their families, or to the hospital for a mental health examination.
There’s not even oversight for the dead:
These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own crematorium), which opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates — and ensures that no questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed. Given the genetic instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be wise for them to have the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to be asking questions about who’s in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and what kinds of records are being kept.
Lots of disturbing stuff. Read it all.