Letters to the Editor
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Great journalism
Thanks for this great article. I am so glad to see Salon return to journalism instead of the boring lifestyle pieces it has been running all year. Please no more Aylet Waldman and her ilk and more stories like this.
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Great Story!
Kimberly Sevcik researched and wrote a great story. This is journalism. Can I see more of this please? When Salon does this type of story I feel great about my subscription, and am glad I am supporting the site.
I remember when I was 18 and I went out on a date with a 16 year-old Mormon. Two days later she was gone, married off to a church elder.
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Local Law Enforcement complaisant
Salon should have checked into the complaisant Mohave County Sheriffs (current and former) and the former County Attorny's wooing of the Colorado City voters during election time. Law Enforcement and Legal departments in Mohave County have looked the other way for years. Colorado City uses the Sheriffs department for law enforcement and any deputies assigned up there were from one of the leading Colorado City families such as the Barlows. Colorado City always delivers a block vote (Jeff's also directed the votes) and the candidates including the incumbents would all go up and meet with the Colorado City leaders to ask for their votes. I suspect that in each case the agreement would be to leave Colorado City alone and look the other way. It is sickening to think that a vote was worth more than the rights of women and the pedophilia and abuse of the children.
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who needs to separate church from state
... when the two go hand & hand so well together?
Kimberley Sevcik nailed it with this piece.
The situation would be cartoonish, if it weren't so repleat with tragedy, as Sevcik lays out so well: left to his own devices, an alpha male f*cks everything in sight, and kicks out juvenile males who threaten his hegemony. Other primates do this, too, but only for so long... then some gutsy competitor takes it upon himself to out-Alpha the Alpha.
In this case, though, Jeffs and his forebears did this *for years* and got away with it by wearing the mantle of religion. The community and the government on all levels looked away, simply because he spouted off demented sermons. That kind of condescending behavior toward religious people is tearing us apart, in this country, and across the world.
The LDS folks I know and love would be horrified by the goings-on in this community, and equally shocked at the inability of the government to respond responsibly on behalf of the most vulnerable in society.
Thanks for running such an incisive, important piece!
DLF
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No different than the Taliban
How come we invade Afghanistan and topple their wacky fundamentalist government, but do as little as possible to stop this Jeffs nutjob. Hell, there should be US troops in the streets of Colorodo City, enforcing the rule of American law. Jeffs should be declared an enemy combatant and sent to GITMO, and those kids should be shipped off to orphanages in Hollywood and the Upper West Side to be raised by secularists.
Mormon fundamentalists are just as crazy as Muslim fundamentalists, and just as dangerous to American freedom and liberty.
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Welfare fraud
Utah and Arizona looked the other way while many of these families lived on welfare. Many of the "husbands" never worked a day in their lives, unless you call selling magazine subscriptions "work". After all when you have a dozen wives to service there is precious little time or energy for anything else.
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Tnx. for the wonderful article
I've known about Colorado City for years, having read Under the Banner of Heaven and been naturally curious about Mormons as one of the few truely "American" religions of this planet. In particular, I always found it laughable how they justified converting Native Ams. on the basis of them being decendents of the original Israelites, who migrated to North America...kinda like a mish-mash of evolutionary theory with theocratic zealotry.
If you can say anything, thank goodness the state/federal govt. is at least trying to make Jeff's life more uncomfortable...if Clinton had tried to do this same thing, we'd have another Mt. Caramel incident, and the conservatives and pro-militia nuts would be clamoring for overthrowing the U.S. govt. again...typical for a bunch of hypocrites, why aren't they bitching now when the Bush Admin. is essentially breaking the law with GITMO detainees being held with no formal charges? I'm sure those GITMO guys are guilty for conspiring to bomb U.S. targets, or working for the Taliban, but Jesus H. Christ, when will they get a trial and we can move on to other things?
Yes, we'll never get to see the U.S. send troops into Colorado City...or any other Mormon Fundamentalist enclave, it's just too controversial for the Bushies to try to clean house for a change...
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Thank you!
Thank you Salon and Kimberly Sevcik for such a wonderful article -- so evocative and full of rich detail despite its relative brevity. AND, it's a piece that's generated lots of really interesting letters that extend the conversation the article started, to boot.
Can we please have more of this and get rid of the boring, self-indulgent Caitlin Flanagan-style pieces?
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I love religion!!!
What a wonderful creation of humanity. The big invisible man in the sky tells you to marry lots of women, or not eat pork, or to blow up a plane, or chop off a head, or that bread and wine turn into flesh and blood.
I liked it better when all it did was keep people in line and prevented them from doing evil things, rather than ispiring them to commit more evil.
Thanks, elevated consciousness!
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Bravo
Just another vote that this is what I enjoy reading in Salon, much more than boring navel-gazing over how hard and guilt-inducing it is to be a privileged middle-class person.
Excellent job.
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Questions
This is an excellent article and I applaud Salon for it. I've heard about these "lost boys" for about a year now. "Dr. Phil" even did a show on this fundamentalist "cult".
But here's something I don't understand. In the article, the boy named Black describes his life just before he got thrown out. "Black and his friends drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of pot, and roared around town on their four-wheelers. There was a trailer parked behind his mother's pink-and-brown ranch house, and Black turned it into his own personal party palace. Every few nights around midnight, two hours after the Colorado City curfew and his mother's bedtime, Black and a dozen friends would huddle around his computer, watching DVDs, chewing tobacco, and flipping through Hustler and Playboy magazines."
My question is: Where did they get all this contraband stuff? Four-wheelers? A computer? Pot!? How could the parents not know the kid had all these things? The "authorities" surely would have seen the four-wheelers, or were they one form of fun that was allowed? I guess that I'm glad that the more adventurous were able to have some connection to the real world, even if it was through watching "Scary Movie", but I thought that this was a closed and isolated community. I got the impression that the kids only went so far in school, and certainly Jeffs would not have wanted them to have computers (and definitely not Internet connections). How did they get the money to buy pot and rent DVDs?
Are there people in this town who are NOT fundamentalists? Why do they live there? Do they sell these underage boys liquor and drugs?