Friday, April 11, 2008

Texas teen sex cult update

With not much news to report, the Associated Press goes for the feature angle:
All their lives, the girls in the polygamist sect in the West Texas desert were told that the outside world was hostile and immoral, and that venturing beyond the brilliant white limestone walls of their compound would
consign them to eternal damnation. . . .
Child welfare officials seized more than 400 children, most of them girls, in the raid on the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, saying the youngsters were in danger of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
The renegade Mormon splinter group requires girls at puberty to enter into polygamous marriages with much older men and produce children, authorities say. . . .
In 2003 and 2004, Jeffs, the spiritual leader of an estimated 6,000 followers in two adjoining towns along the Utah-Arizona line, plucked children under the age of 6 to bring to Texas without their parents, former sect member Isaac Wyler said.
"Over age 6 they were too contaminated for the world to be of use to God," said Wyler, who still lives in Colorado City, Ariz., and has 39 siblings. "He picked the ones that would be the most obedient, the ones that would be qualified to go to Zion."
Speaking of the "sensationalist view," there's this from LAist:
Authorities who raided the polygamist compound in Texas are now releasing the salacious details of which full-grown man had sex with which underage girl, and it is being lecherously reported -- pretty soon we should have the exact hows, whens, how oftens, and in what positions. Of course, this is all being released out of the public’s genuine concern over those poor, naïve, oversexed, underaged, supple young girls…um…right?
In Hell's Angels, Hunter S. Thompson observed that no editor can resist a good rape story. Add in polygamy, teenagers and religion -- man, if that's not a Newsweek cover and a "Dateline NBC" feature, I don't know what is.

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