Quote From: gwarrior6
What is the right thing to do here? If you have a religion that focuses on this (what I and most consider to be) abuse as integral to their beliefs, then their belief system ends up on trial as well. It's like a situation where you have human sacrifice as a religious belief, people would be murdered, but then you have religious freedom. It's amazing the amount of crap people try to get away with "in the name of God". Please, rape, abuse, exploitation of women....these shouldn't be a part of ANY belief system, and you can't have a bunch of sociopaths that think they can cross any boundary and claim that God told them to.
I believe that we all have rights as human beings. I think the rights of these children and , at least, the women who don't want to participate in this lifestyle, and who feel afraid and trapped, should be upheld. How, is another matter altogether. What is happening now, is a beginning, IMO. I have always leaned toward the separation of church and state, but in this situation, this particular church is in dire need of a state intervention. I'm just not sure how this can play out. I have read that the last time a serious attempt was made at outside intervention, was in 1953, when then Arizona governor, Howard Pyle, arrested 2 dozen local men and placed about 200 children in foster homes. I have not been able to find the whole story on this, I don't know where in Arizona this happened. But the outcome was, that images of crying kids being torn away from thier mothers had a boomerang effect and the gov. lost his re-election bid. (And some of the posters here are saying "Butt out, let the kids go back to thier mothers." ) Since then the community has been left to it's own devices-and those of the prophet. Of course now, Warren Jeffs is in jail and I don't know how much power he has from his cell. I think, if the proper authorities could just get thier foot in the door and this community could be more closely monitored by local agencies, like CPS maybe some positive changes could come about. I realize that this is almost an impossiblity because they are so against outsiders. And a big reason for that I suspect is because those in power know exactly how the outside world is going to react to thier outrageous practices. I suspect that those in power are fully aware that what they are doing is wrong. I'm not sure they really believe that what they are doing has anything to do with God or what God wants. I think they know it has to do with power. For the prophet, Jeffs, I think it had to do with power over the whole community. And for the older men, I think it's about power over women and keeping women beaten down and submissive. I think they are just using God and Heaven as a front.
