Bountiful issue potentially one of child abuse, not just polygamy: watchdog

B.C. authorities must get more aggressive in tackling allegations of abuse in the polygamist community of Bountiful, B.C. — or risk letting Canada become a haven for religious groups that exploit young people, the province’s official child-welfare watchdog said Friday.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond urged authorities to stop looking at the Bountiful issue merely as a question of multiple wives and view it instead as one of potential child mistreatment.

Evidence unearthed in the recent prosecution of Warren Jeffs, leader of a Texas branch of the same Mormon breakaway sect that operates in Bountiful, should be enough to kick-start more assertive inquiries in Canada, she said.

Jeffs, sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault, documented the movement of girls as young as 12 from B.C. to Texas to be married to middle-aged men at his Yearning for Zion ranch.

“We need to get wise to this issue. One of the reasons is that Canada may be seen as a good place to locate [for religious sects that abuse children],” said Ms. Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth. “You have to take a fair amount of leadership to say this might not be about freedom of religion … It’s not permitted in Canada that you proffer your child into a marriage that involves a sexual relationship. It’s anathema to criminal law”

Other revelations from a constitutional court case on polygamy are also fodder for investigation, including testimony that Bountiful parents slap babies and dunk them in water as part of unusual obedience training, said Ms. Turpel-Lafond.

“I’m extremely uncomfortable with this,” said the former judge. “I think it’s abusive. I think we definitely need to investigate.”

Her comments came as the RCMP in B.C. revealed that they are, in fact, investigating allegations that children were taken to the States to be forced into marriage. The force plans to meet with the Texas Rangers, who headed the Jeffs case, though have yet to do so.

Cpl. Dan Moskaluk, an RCMP spokesman, noted in an interview that the Mounties have looked into similar allegations involving Bountiful before, only to hit obstacles in trying to build a case.

“Witnesses and victims have been reluctant to provide evidence,” he said.

The completion of the Jeffs trial, however, has created a “different environment” that the police hope will lead to more co-operation, said the officer. During the so-called reference case in Vancouver earlier this year – held to determine if the criminal ban on polygamy is constitutional – Crown lawyers tabled a list of 31 underage brides allegedly transported between B.C. and the States, including five whom Jeffs himself had married.

Police hope to go through that list and interview each young woman, said Cpl. Moskaluk.

Ms. Turpel-Lafond, whose arm’s-length agency reports to the B.C. legislature, said she has been heartened lately by the approach of Barry Penner. The province’s attorney general indicated in February that he was disturbed and offended by the new evidence from Texas and urged authorities to investigate.

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(Source: National Post
tblackwell@nationalpost.com)

Polygamist Poof - Comedy

Women's hair and the bible - My dad explained that The Greek translation of shorn, is keiro; as in shaving a sheep. the verse had more to do with knowing the head of a woman is her husband, his head is god, and our conditions with our hearts and the lord. It meant a woman shouldn't shave her head, like a man's. Good enough for me at the time! It is interesting that in  I Timothy 2:9-10 it says not to braid your hair. Guess they missed that one.
I have been unable to find the requirements on hair for the AUB. I would assume they would still require long hair. The FLDS requires that not only is hair not to be cut, ever, it is to be up or braided, only for her husband to see. MANY Pentecostal Churches in the areas I lived went by the same standards. I don't feel that it's wrong to keep long hair if you believe that's serving God. The "Poof" is what cracks me up. It must be all the rage! Some don't even tweeze the brow, believing it's more rightous not to. And, it does follow the standard of no vanity, that we all fall into and do sin with. I have to say that. Now, on to some HUMOR!

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Our big, fat, polygamous family

Three years ago Texas authorities caused a sensation in the United States with a raid on the polygamous Mormon sect living at Yearning For Zion Ranch, during which 401 children were taken into state custody. The pretext for the crackdown was not so much polygamy, although it is a crime in Texas, but forced sex with under-age girls taken as wives by older men. In other words, the wellbeing of children was the main issue.

Community leader Warren Jeffs, already in trouble before the raid, is currently in jail on trial in Texas on sexual assault and bigamy charges. If he sits tight a bit longer, though, the bigamy charge may collapse; with same-sex marriage apparently in the bag, polygamy is looking like the next big thing in the United States -- and no-one seems to care what happens to the kids.

While Jeffs has been cooling his heels in clink, television networks have promoted his cause by rolling out shows such as Big Love and Sister Wives. The Browns of Sister Wives, all four of them, have talked about how happy they are with their choice and how well adjusted their 16 children are, and how the children are carefully educated about choice and consequences, and how there are no underage or arranged marriages. Fictional versions of the lifestyle add to the gloss by leaving out what one script writer calls the “yuck factor”.

Now that the small screen has demystified and sentimentalized polygamy it is the turn of professors and judges to legitimize it. And what better time to do so than in the wake of the latest green light for same-sex marriage? Straight after New York conferred the right to marry on homosexuals, Ralph Richard Banks, a Stanford law school professor predicted that polygamy and incest must now be legalized: “Over time, our moral assessments of these practices will shift, just as they have with interracial marriage and same sex marriage.”

Right on cue, in mid-July, the patriarch of the Brown family, Kody Brown, filed a challenge to Utah’s law against polygamy. His lead counsel, Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in the New York Times that the suit is based not on any analogy with same-sex marriage but on the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, that states could not use the criminal code against what two consenting adults -- in that case, homosexuals -- do in private. Privacy is the issue, he insists, not what society finds acceptable.

However, if it comes to acceptability, Turley has an answer ready for critics: society already accepts other kinds of plural relationships. He says: “It is widely accepted that a person can have multiple partners and have children with such partners. But the minute that person expresses a spiritual commitment and ‘cohabits’ with those partners, it is considered a crime.”

We are going to hear this argument a lot more in the new battle for the rights of polygamists. It has been used also by another law professor, Adrienne D. Davis of Washington University at St Louis, in a 92-page article in the Columbia Law Review of December 2010. With interesting timing, the university sent out a press release about the article earlier this month.
 

But Davis, like Turley, prefers not to hitch her wagon to the same-sex marriage star. She says it’s a red herring in the polygamy debate since same-sex marriage is concerned with the couple relationship and polygamy with plural relationships. In fact she is not really interested in marriage at all (“I am no particular fan of the institution of marriage”); a power feminist, she talks, rather, of “intimate relationships” and rules for “bargaining for equality” within them.

Polygamy, with its “multiple partners, ongoing entrances and exits, and life-defining economic and personal stakes”, presents a special challenge in this regard, one which family law could hardly cope with, Davis admits. But, no problem; it turns out that commercial partnership law has a “robust set of off-the-rack rules” that could be adapted to arbitrate the disputes of polygamists. If the power relationships can be regulated -- and she believes they can (lots of work for lawyers there) -- there would be no reason to withhold social recognition from polygamy.

In social revolutions like this numbers are always useful: a million backstreet abortions; tens of thousands of gay couples already enjoying family bliss but without the blessing of marriage; and now, “50,000 to 100,000” polygamists minding their own business but persecuted for merely moral reasons. (A recent Gallup poll shows that 86 per cent of Americans consider polygamy immoral.) The implication is that what so many people are doing, with little evident harm, must really be harmless.

Many feminists, it’s true, are unhappy about the subjugation of women in communities like Yearning For Zion. Then there’s the problem of young girls becoming extra wives, and there have been disturbing stories about what happens to “spare” boys once they reach puberty. Some, simply expelled from their compounds, have been found living rough around rural towns in Utah and Arizona.

Which brings us to the central question about polygamy, or any other variation on the married mother and father family: what about the kids? Is this form of adult intimacy good for them?  One can almost hear Professor Davis sigh as she reluctantly addresses this issue in a section of her essay headed “Children and Other ‘Externalities’…”. “Part of me wants to radically resist the notion that intimacy cannot be theorized without attention to children,” she protests.

Still, she does take a sideways glance at the children and comes up with the same argument as Turley: we already have de facto polygamy, in both the unmarried (single mothers and nomadic fathers) form and the married (divorced and remarried parents) or serial form, and family law accommodates those. Not only that, but the law is developing norms to deal with claims arising from other multi-parent situations: open adoption, grandparents raising children, and “reprotech families” formed by both heterosexual and same-sex couples using donor gametes and surrogate mothers. Why not add polygamy to the “marriage pantheon”?

Well, yes, marital culture is in a mess, but we know that the absence or divided affections of fathers resulting from transient partnerships and divorce create serious risks for children and much actual misery. And we have some idea from the grown children of donor daddies of the problems being generated by the reprotech variants of family life. So, again, what about the kids? Why expand the opportunities to generate emotional and economic problems for them?

All Davis will say is that it is “unclear that polygamy generates more costs for children than the standard alternatives” (to a married mother and father). That’s it: like, “Since when did we start worrying about children?”

She does have a point (I have made it myself), although it is slightly chilling that a woman, in particular, would make it with such detachment. Adults do already make a lot of trouble for their children. But these are pathologies we should be trying to fix, not spread more widely by recognizing another pathway to family chaos on the basis that “it can’t be any worse” than the others. It may be true that the case for social recognition, or at least tolerance, of polygamy is different to the case for same-sex marriage and the claim to same-sex parenthood that goes with it. But they have one thing in common: they both find their place in a decaying marriage/sexual culture where adult desires increasingly trump the needs and rights of children.

Three years after the Yearning For Zion raid, is the welfare of children no longer an issue in the adult scramble for sexual rights?

(Source: Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet. She appears here courtesy of MercatorNet.com   http://www.speroforum.com/)

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The Word of Wisdom (WoW) in Mormon Fundamentalism & the LDS Church Explained. "Sister Wives"

Mormons call non - Mormons "Gentiles"... and in the interest of promoting cultural competency among all  you "Gentiles," here is a post on the Word of Wisdom....

 

The Word of Wisdom (WoW) in Mormon Fundamentalism & the LDS Church –

Doctrines and Covenants, Section 89 – A “Revelation” given through Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet, at Kirtland, Ohio

February 27, 1833

1 A Word of Wisdom, for the benefit of the council of high priests, assembled in Kirtland, and the church, and also the saints in Zion—

2 To be sent greeting; not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation and the Word of Wisdom -

5 That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good.

8 And again, tobacco is not for the body, neither for the belly, and is not good for man.

9 And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly.

Members of the LDS church as well as Mormon Fundamentalists hold the following documents to be inspired scriptures: The New and Old Testaments, the Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrines and Covenants. 

The “Doctrines and Covenants” contains 1) the commandment to engage in polygamy (Section 132) in order to receive rewards in the afterlife, 2) a threat of destruction if a married woman refuses to permit her husband to take other wives, (again, Section 132), and 3) the Word of Wisdom appears in Section 89 – it is an admonition to refrain from the use of alcohol, tobacco, and hot or strong drinks, such as coffee and tea.

Members of the mainstream LDS church adhere strictly to the Word of Wisdom. They refrain from consuming alcohol, smoking cigarettes or chewing tobacco, and they refrain from drinking coffee and tea as these are “hot or strong drinks.” Consumption of hot chocolate, herbal teas, and cola drinks is considered acceptable by most observant LDS church members. Some LDS church members refrain from drinking colas and caffeinated energy drinks because they think that the caffeine content in these beverages would qualify for designating them as “strong drinks.” 

The LDS church views the Word of Wisdom (WoW) as a commandment which must be adhered to in order to obtain a “temple recommend” from the leader of their local church. A temple recommend is a letter which authorizes a Mormon to enter a temple to participate in the Endowment Ceremony. 

Most (but not all) Mormon Fundamentalists do not view the WoW as a commandment, it is viewed instead as a recommendation, as the text in Section 89, verse 2 states “…not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation and the Word of Wisdom.” Therefore, most fundamentalist Mormons feel free to drink alcohol, smoke, and consume coffee, tea and cola. 

Much is made of Robyn Sullivan Brown’s divorce decree wherein her ex - husband required that she refrain from drinking alcohol in front of their children. This should not be interpreted to mean that Robyn is an alcoholic. In all likelihood Robyn does not view the WoW as a commandment because she is a Mormon fundamentalist, but her ex - husband may very well view the WoW as mandatory or at least highly recommended as a health practice. 

Written by "Pretty in Pink" - Another wonderful written piece, THANK YOU so much for helping with these Posts!!!! 

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Holy Mormon Underwear

And here it is... in the interests of cultural competency, an article on holy Mormon underwear!

Fundamentalist Mormons, as well as observant mainstream LDS folks like the Osmonds, wear a special undergarment under their clothing directly against their skin. For most devout Mormons who wear it, the garment takes the place of regular underwear. If conventional underwear is worn, this undergarment is worn beneath their conventional underwear. This undergarment is alternatively known as “temple garments” or the “sacred undergarment” or “holy Mormon underwear” to outsiders. Devout Mormons understand that in only a very few instances might the garment be removed, such as for swimming, showering or bathing, using the toilet, or during sexual intimacy. The garment is worn even during sleep. 

Mormons begin wearing the temple undergarment during their first visit to the Temple or Endowment House, wherein they receive individual instruction on how the garment should be worn and cared for, during the Temple Endowment Ceremony. More about the Temple Endowment Ceremony in a future post. The AUB have their “Endowment House” in Bluffdale, Utah, and no doubt the Browns have undergone the Endowment Ceremony in Utah at the AUB Endowment House. 

According to the LDS Church, the wearing of temple garments serves a number of purposes. First, the garment provides the wearer with a reminder of the covenants made in the Endowment Ceremony. Second, the garment "provides protection against temptation and evil". Finally, wearing the garment is "an outward expression of an inward commitment" to follow Jesus Christ. The garment is thought to "strengthen the wearer to resist temptation, fend off evil influences, and stand firmly for the right."

Devout Mormons believe that wearing the undergarment provides "spiritual protection.^” They also believe that the undergarment provides physical protection, as many devout Mormons credit their temple garments with helping them survive accidents and injuries.

Holy Mormon underwear consists of a top and bottom piece, usually made from lightweight white cotton fabric. There are two styles of temple garments, one for men, and another for women. The garment is white as white symbolizes physical and spiritual purity. Mormons are encouraged through the modest length and cut of their temple garments to always dress appropriately, because if they do not, the temple garment will be visible. The temple garment is not to be altered in any way to accommodate immodest clothing.

The undergarment has four Masonic symbols embroidered onto the white fabric, in the region of the chest, navel, and knee. One of the embroidered symbols is related to the Squares and Compasses, symbols of the Masonic Order into which Joseph Smith, the Prophet of Mormonism, had been initiated about seven weeks prior to his introduction of the Mormon Endowment ceremony. Thus, the V-shaped symbol on the left breast of the garment was referred to as "The Compass", while the reverse-L-shaped symbol on the right breast was referred to by early Mormon leaders as "The Square". In Mormonism, "mark of the Compass" represents "an undeviating course leading to eternal life; a constant reminder that desires, appetites, and passions are to be kept within the bounds the Lord has set; and that all truth may be circumscribed into one great whole"; the "mark of the Square" represents "exactness and honor" in keeping the commandments and covenants of God; the navel mark represents "the need of constant nourishment to body and spirit"; and the "knee mark" represents "that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is the Christ.”

( And a BIG THANKS to a new little helper, "Pretty in Pink" for writing this great article!!!!!! VERY INTERESTING! I know we were all curious..... Thanks PRETTY, I need the help - and I appreciate it!)
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