A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on April 7th, 2008 in Progressive Faith

There’s no Big Love in Texas, I tell you what. Police raided a Mormon-based polygamist sect’s compound over the weekend. The big issue is that girls younger than fifteen are being “given in marriage” – and by “given”, they apparently mean “here you go, do what you want with her”. Under Texas law, a girl must be at least sixteen years old to get married, even with parental consent. Claire Huffman fears the action will strengthen such fundamentalists.

But my guess is they’re thinking about another raid that happened half a century ago in Southern Utah/Northern Arizona, where state authorities showed up at a polygamist Mormon community in the middle of the night in the summer of 1953, imprisoned many men, and bused off the women and children for more than a year to live in state institutions. The Short Creek raid has been called the largest mass arrest of men and women in America, and was later viewed as a disaster that further isolated polygamist Mormons from American society. That isolation, I would say, bolstered the power of future FLDS leaders like Warren Jeffs, who used the community’s fear of the outside world to control them.

No matter the circumstances, sexual abuse can’t be tolerated. But I wonder about the degree to which authorities reacted in Eldorado with this massive community evacuation. It’s hard to know exactly what is going on down there, but questions of intrusion and authority should be asked, no matter how marginal the beliefs of the FLDS.

I tend to think of myself as being fairly open-minded when it comes to allowing people to practice their religion any way they want. I would even be willing to argue that polygamists should be given their day in court to argue that multiple-marriages should be given legal standing and protection. But I draw the line at fifty-year-old men screwing children. If that was going on in a widespread fashion at “Yearning for Zion“; then it was not only proper for the police to take the action they did – it would be an abomination if they failed to act.

I don’t care how it “bolsters the power” of people like Jeffs, just as I don’t care that it fosters a feeling of paranoia among NAMBLA members when the police crackdown on pedophilia. Because it’s the exact same problem. It makes no difference that this outlaw sect – which has been disowned by the Mormon Church, by the way – dresses up their pedophilia in religious language and only promotes mixed-sex pedophilia. It’s still pedophilia.

The only “questions of intrusion and authority” that should be asked are: 1) Were correct procedures followed to obtain legal search and seizure documents? and 2) Did the authorities act in good faith? Beyond that, it will be up to the courts to determine if the evidence the police had in their possession was enough to result in a conviction. But we simply can’t run around wringing our hands over how pedophiles worry about laws that ban pedophilia. Any faith that teaches the sanctity of pedophilia is anathema to a civilized society. A faithful person can’t turn off their brain when they listen to their preacher. There are things in this world that no reasonable person would accept as being blessed by God – and this has to be one of them.

If that makes me intolerant; so be it. I’d rather be intolerant than a co-conspirator in a child-rape ring.

Technorati Tags: Big Love, Claire Huffman, Warren Jeffs, Yearning for Zion, pedophilia

Sphere: Related Content