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A guest post from DoubleX writer Sonia Smith:
For the past two weeks, I’ve been camped out in a west Texas courtroom watching the trial of fundamentalist Mormon polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop unfold. Sentencing begins today, and Jessop could face up to 20 years in prison for impregnating his underage “celestial” wife in 2004. The victim, 16 at the time of the sexual assault, never took the stand, and all the evidence in the case seemed to indicate that she was Jessop’s willing bride. But what does that even mean in an environment where girls are conditioned from birth to believe that marrying an older, powerful man is the highest honor?
In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, girls are taught that being a plural wife and mother is the only way to reach the highest rung of heaven. In this atmosphere, getting married at 14 or 15 becomes the next logical step in a girl’s life. They are into placed in marriages—"sealed for time and all eternity"—whenever the sect’s prophet deems them worthy, regardless of their age, according to the testimony of former FLDS member Rebecca Musser. Once married, girls must show perfect obedience to their husbands, who are viewed as their only connection to God ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Sonia Smith:
What have I learned over the past week watching polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop’s trial in the sleepy west Texas ranching town of Eldorado? Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints save everything. And now, with the first criminal prosecution of an FLDS leader in Texas, this tendency to hoard every little scrap has come back to bite them. In trying to prove Jessop impregnated his 16-year-old “spiritual” wife in November 2004 at the sect’s Yearning for Zion Ranch, the prosecution is relying heavily on documents seized during last year’s raid. And there are a lot of them ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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This week, I am attending the trial of Raymond Merrill Jessop, a member
of a polygamous Mormon sect in West Texas, accused of sexually
assaulting a child. You will no doubt remember the photos from 2008 of
Texas Rangers storming the compound and carting off hundreds of
children, from toddlers to teenagers. Since then, the members of
Yearning for Zion have allowed select photographers onto the compound to capture innocent moments
– feeding babies, slicing bananas and being generally wholesome, as a
way to win over public opinion. Today, the trial created another
opportunity to contemplate the power of images to manufacture a truth ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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As E.J. pointed out earlier, the hotbed of radicalism otherwise known as "Iowa" is the third state to legalize same-sex marriage. (And let me tell you, it's crazy out here—gay orgies in the parks, polygamists storming the Capitol, abandoned children wandering the streets in various states of undress. .. pictures of the family-destroying chaos are available here.) As with Massachusetts and Connecticut, Iowa imposes no marriage-related residency rules, so the law applies to anyone who wants to visit after April 24, tie the knot, and sue some other state to recognize the contract. Consider Des Moines the Midwest's gay Vegas.
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Hot damn, Emily, that ABC News segment you linked is worse than you described! The creepiest part of the piece is the way in which the patriarch's 17 "wives" are given voice: They're interviewed as an afterthought, at the end of the segment, and then only sitting squeezed between men (are they really going to speak freely?), whereas the men are interviewed individually. (One of Daad's sons enthused that the presence of 17 wives meant there was "no need for a maid in the house!") Gross. And, as you pointed out, Cuomo doesn't give a single nod toward any of the wider questions his story raises.
I blame Jeanne Moos, creator of the "Moost Unusual" news-of-the-weird segments on CNN. I know this could be controversial, but Moos is among my nominations for Worst Woman in the Media. But her little segments are funny, you say! Well, maybe I'm just crabby—and hey, I've written light stories in my life—but I think the high profile of Moos's wide-ranging and meaningless segments makes it respectable for other networks to turn every beat (and not just crime) into a news-of-the-weird beat, in which stories are hyped for their wackiness and not for their implications.
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On Good Morning America the other day, reporter Chris Cuomo, who's covering the "biggest things" in Dubai, did a story on a man who has 86 kids ranging in age from 23 years to 3 months. Daad Abdul Rahamn, 63, has a production line of 17 wives—and he'd like a few more—who are 50 to 20 years old. The most stunning thing about the report is not that there is a man with this kind of harem (Osama Bin Laden is one of 53 siblings), it is the gleeful double-entendre-laden cheeriness with which Cuomo reports this repulsive story. Cuomo takes the stance that Rahamn is quite the stud (Cuomo chuckles when Rahamn reveals he has to pay his kids to leave the room so he has enough privacy to impregnate the wives) and promises to come back when Rahamn (who Cuomo keeps referring to as "Daad" ha-ha-ha) reaches his goal of 100 kids. Apparently there is no one at ABC News who thought that perhaps a voice from a Muslim women's group that is fighting the abuse of polygamy might usefully temper Cuomo's celebration.
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Well, we probably won't be seeing those colorful prairie dresses and perfect tresses on the front page of the newspapers again very soon. I've been fascinated by the Yearning for Zion ranch drama, which I—like Dahlia, in her great piece comparing the seizure of children to the warehousing of Guantanamo prisoners—have been all but sure would end badly: the overintrusive state would sabotage itself, and the insular compound would become more insular and defensive than ever. But to judge by news reports of the deal struck yesterday, I'd say, with somewhat mixed feelings, that the monthslong mess may well rate as a victory for the state, and maybe for teen mothers, too-even if it was a legal travesty.
The real goal all along, or so it seems plausible to me, has been a criminal prosecution of male leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints found to have impregnated, and otherwise mistreated, young adolescent girls bound to them in "spiritual marriages." It was a Herculean challenge, given a community so barricaded against the outside world. But a sweeping raid, however unwarranted it was soon judged to be, forced open the doors long enough to gather DNA and other evidence from the women and children necessary to substantiate any charges. What's more, the judge's order yesterday evidently specifies that the criminal investigation go on, and facilitates it by barring sect members from traveling outside Texas. In addition, it subjects sect members to continued scrutiny by Child Protective Services. Already the prospect of such supervision seems to have elicited an avowal that the sect will cease to condone underage marriage. It's enough to make ignoring legal requirements look like good social policy-fitting in its way, I suppose, when dealing with a community based on polygamy.
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