Truth, Will, Out
Yet another reflection on that horrific situation with the polygamy/pedophilia "compound" in Texas. Despite figuratively (and morally!) bending heaven and earth to create an environment where they could get away with following their "faith"...
The documents released Tuesday also gave details about the hushed phone calls that triggered the raid, by a 16-year-old girl at the West Texas ranch who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. Days after raiding the compound, officials still aren't sure where the girl is.
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Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and that all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of "emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse."
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"Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the (Yearn for Zion) Ranch in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them," read the affidavit signed by Lynn McFadden, a Department of Family and Protective Services investigative supervisor.
McFadden said the girls were spiritually married to the men as soon as they reached puberty and were required to produce children.
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The girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would "beat and hurt" her when he got angry, including hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby.
The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to "the outsiders' world" but didn't know where.
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In the March 30 call, the girl told the shelter she was being held against her will. If she left, church members told her, "outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and (modern) clothes and to have sex with lots of men."
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The compound was raided Thursday after the 16-year-old girl called a local family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else's cell phone and speaking in hushed tones to avoid being overheard, McFadden's affidavit said.
But check out that last paragraph! Despite indoctrinating themselves and their children that what they were doing was right, and despite the extraordinary-sounding means they employed to terrify their victims of the consequences of contact with "outsiders," and despite the almost constant monitoring, regulating, coercing, beatings, isolation, withdrawal of education (the girl who called may not have been able to spell her own name!), and despite considerable collaboration and/or active engagement by other older women in the cult, word still leaked in that what was going on wasn't just sick and wrong (sensibility and sentimentality aside I don't think outside influence is necessary for practitioners to independently reach that conclusion) but that it was *illegal.* And that there were enforcement agencies that could do something about it. And that there was a phone number one could call to make it stop.
And what's up with that, just like it was (and unfortunately in too many places still is) with slavery is that all paradigms and ideologies to the contrary not withstanding people are still *people,* not domestic cattle, not wild animals, not "inferiors" to other people. Race doesn't matter. Gender doesn't matter. Gender orientation doesn't matter. Sexual orientation doesn't matter. Language, religion, geography, class, education, indoctrination, threats, rape, forced pregnancy, and even torture, kidnapping, and murder don't matter. Nobody wants to be someone else's slave, not for real, not for long.
And so, like the "elders" who perhaps even in good faith to their own indoctrinations ran their little patriarchy like a prison camp, you can either live a whole web of lies, dictatorially and mercilessly and because-thinking-about-it-is-unsustainable-reflexively enforced and propagated, or you can live one simple truth: the extraordinary, radical proposition that people are people.
I've decided that as-yet-unidentified 16-year-old girl counts as a hero in my estimation. She had the courage to exercise agency despite being in (and most likely having been raised in) circumstances that circumscribe her agency far more than most women in Western culture can even imagine, and with far nastier possible repercussions for doing so. I just hope to hell that those repercussions didn't catch up with her in between her phone call and the raid.
Sunflower
[I hope so too, Sunflower. That she seems to be missing is kind of ominous. Her "husband" is on the lam in Arizona where plenty more of his kind can be found in similar sorts of "communities" and "compounds." Even if she's not with him, that kind of cult has a pretty deep network -- she may have been "given" to another "husband" who's more experienced at managing his "wives" a.k.a. human livestock. %!#$@. --fl]