Fighting the culture of polygamy

October 10, 2001

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Commentary: By Suzan Mazur
Financial Times

''So what if your choice is to stay in a little holed-up town and do nothing but this all your life and be nothing?"

Shirley Green was speaking. She's one of the wives of Utah bigamist Tom Green, who would be sentenced to five years in prison about a year later.

"Show me where harm's been done," her husband said.

Polygamy is perpetuated one generation after the next in Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, California and elsewhere. The number of polygamists in North America, estimated at 50,000 or more, is doubling every decade. Shockingly, polygamy also is subsidized through federal and state handouts.

Largely a Mormon cultural phenomenon, polygamy deliberately never died with the Mormon Church Manifesto of 1890 or Utah's entry into statehood. They are organized by the hundreds and thousands, in towns incorporated by the government - 8,000 members of the Allred clan, for example, living in Bluffdale, Utah, a few bus stops away from Salt Lake City.

In the American way of polygamy, a teen bride is stripped of her self-esteem and forced to endure plural marriage. What, then, is left to build a life on?

Not much, says Rowenna Erickson, born into the Kingston clan, in which she was a wife for 30 years. She is now a director of the Salt Lake watchdog group Tapestry Against Polygamy.

"It's really rape of a child," Erickson says. "In their first sexual encounter, sometimes with men three times their age, these girls don't even know what hit 'em."

The larger culture of the cults harms both women and children. Women suffer the rigors of multiple childbirth without anesthesia. To beat the system, many are forced to pose as single mothers and apply for food stamps, WIC and Medicaid to survive. Children suffer from poor health care.

Little effort is made to screen for genetic defects. Marks of communicable diseases such as herpes are seen in the faces of too many children. Fearing outside influence, adults deny their children schooling, newspapers, computers and television, hurting their children's ability to compete later for jobs.

What are states doing? There are whispers that Arizona is now proactive on the issue and that agents are ready to pounce on the Jeffs, a polygamist enclave of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just north of the Grand Canyon (see below). Polygamy in Montana is a misdemeanor punishable by a $600 fine. Officials in Utah seem to think the problem can be tackled case by case.

Even that approach is at a prosecutorial standstill: It is almost as if the much-covered conviction of Tom Green is enough for now, with all eyes now on Olympic dollar signs. The state government of Utah appears reluctant to investigate itself, possibly because of the way business and religion are tangled in the state. From up and down the Rocky Mountains, FBI e-mail boxes have been overflowing with pleas from polygamy victims and victims' advocates, so far to no avail.

Utah's Olympic Public Safety Command is training a quick-strike mobile field security force in preparation for the Salt Lake Winter Games. The National Guard and major U.S. law enforcement agencies will be on high alert to respond to violence. Yet the same efforts have not been applied to rescuing those hurt by polygamy.

Truly outrageous is that for decades millions of dollars in government funds have gone directly or indirectly to polygamist cults. Beginning in 1987, nearly $3 million in federal, state and local grants went to the polygamist town of Colorado City on the Arizona-Utah border just to build an airport that serves seven planes.

On the Utah side, the polygamist town of Hildale rents office space to the federal WIC program, while its streets are lined with new homes, thanks partly to its mayor, who sits on the state's housing commission. Colorado City/Hildale is home to the Jeffs. One has to wonder whether faith-based funds should be earmarked for such "churches" that violate federal polygamy laws.

The office of Sen. Joe Lieberman (D., Conn) reports that churches already receiving federal funds will likely remain eligible. It is unconscionable that in the name of freedom America declares war on the Taliban in Afghanistan while it continues to sponsor the polygamist enslavement of our women and children.