Daphne Bramham - The secret lives of saints: child brides and lost boys in Canadas polygamous Mormon sect

CONTENTS

For my parents, Donald and Lydia

BLACKMORE FAMILY TREE

PROLOGUE

I n early November 2001, a month after the United States, Canada and a coalition of countries attacked Afghanistan in search of Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden, President George W. Bush talked about the kind of life women and children were leading under the tyranny of the Taliban.

Women are imprisoned in their homes, and are denied access to basic health care and education. Food sent to help starving people is stolen by their leaders. The religious monuments of other faiths are destroyed. Children are forbidden to fly kites, or sing songs, he said. A girl of seven is beaten for wearing white shoes.

A few weeks later, Laura Bush filled in for her husband on his weekly radio spot. All of us have an obligation to speak out, she said. We may come from different backgrounds and faithsbut parents the world over love our children. We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanitya commitment shared by people of good will on every continent.

That day, the U.S. State Department released a report that said the Taliban regime systematically repressed all sectors of the population and denied even the most basic individual rights. It restricted access to medical care for women, brutally enforced a restrictive dress code, and limited the ability of women to move about the cityIt perpetrated egregious acts of violence against women, including rape, abduction, and forced marriage. The report went on to say that women were allowed to work in only very limited circumstances, noting that restricting womens access to work is an attack on women today. Eliminating womens access to education is an assault on women tomorrow.

The State Department and the Bushes were referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan, but they might well have been talking about women and children in the United States and Canada living under the tyranny of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the largest polygamous sect in North America. Prophet Warren Jeffs controls every aspect of the lives of more than eight thousand people, from where they live to whom and when they marry. Jeffs has banned school, church, movies and television. He has outlawed the colour red and even forbidden his followers to use the word fun. Along with his trusted councillors, Jeffs has arranged and forced hundreds of marriages, some involving girls as young as fourteen and men as old as or older than their fathers and grandfathers. Many of the brides have been transported across state borders as well as international borders with Canada and Mexico. He has taught racism and discrimination against Negroes, which is why the FLDS is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

The roots of the FLDS are in Mormonism, although the name itself is a recent one. When the mainstream church renounced polygamy in 1890, dissidents splintered off and continued to practise plural marriage. Some men sequestered their illegal families, making contact with other fundamentalists only when they or their sons needed more wives. Others banded together to follow a prophet who claimed to hold the keys to the priesthood, having received a revelation from God that he was to be a leader of men loyal to the Principle of Celestial Marriage. The fundamentalists believe they are the only true Mormons because they continue to hold to founder Joseph Smiths revelation that men must have multiple wives to enter the highest realm of heaven. There, in the celestial kingdom, they will become gods, and their wives goddessesalbeit goddesses who must serve at the table of their gods for all eternity.

Polygamy has been illegal in Canada and the United States since 1890. But fundamentalist Mormonism is thriving in Utah, Arizona, Texas and British Columbia. There are dozens of different groups and thousands of so-called independents, which makes it impossible to know how many fundamentalists there are. Estimates range from thirty-seven thousand to one million across the continent, yet politicians have been loath to do anything about the people who call themselves Saints. Politicians have not just looked the other way, they have in many instances made it easier for the Saints leaders to intimidate, control and abuse their followers. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Bountiful, British Columbia, and in the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

In 1992, the B.C. government refused to enforce Canadas law by charging the bishop of Bountiful, Winston Blackmore, with polygamy. Citing studies by several leading legal experts, the B.C. government said the law would not withstand a challenge under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which, along with the national Constitution, guarantees freedom of religion and association.

Those rights, however, are not unlimited. Twice since its decision not to prosecute polygamy, the B.C. government has successfully gone to court to force children of Jehovahs Witnesses to submit to blood transfusions, even though that goes against their beliefs. The governments argument: religious belief cannot override a childs right to health.

There are other conflicting rights. In 1879, in a landmark case called Reynolds versus United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments can intervene where the religious practice of polygamy undermines the rights of others.

Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile [sic] of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice? The justices unanimously answered, No.

Yet in 1992, the B.C. government effectively legalized polygamy. Since then Bountifuls population has more than tripled. In Utah and Arizona also, politicians have been loath to prosecute polygamists after a failed attempt to do so in 1953. The FLDS population in both states has doubled every decade since. To say that the Saints place a high value on large families is something of an understatement.

Unlike Christians, who believe that the soul comes to the body at birth and leaves the body at death, the Saints believe in both a pre-mortal existence and the lifting up of the earthly body into heaven. They believe millions of spirits are waiting to be born into earthly bodies. And, as Gods Chosen People, they believe they have a responsibility to bring as many of those spirits as possible into the world as Mormonsrather than as something less worthy. As Joseph Smiths friend and apostle Orson Pratt wrote, The Lord has not kept them [the spirits] in store for five or six thousand years past and kept them waiting for their bodies all this time to send them among the Hottentots, the African negroes, the idolatrous Hindoos or any other fallen nations that dwell upon the face of the Earth.

Emboldened by the failure of governments to prosecute, Canadian polygamist Winston Blackmore no longer hides. A second-generation leader and one of North Americas best-known and wealthiest polygamists, Blackmore makes no secret of the fact that he has many wives. How many, he wont say. But some of his wives, those who have left him, say that he has been married twenty-six times and has more than one hundred children.