:Naiahdot

This is a project that I have been personally involved with and, if you value your rights, I am hoping that you will feel to check it out and speak out. You can do so at Voices for the Children.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, at the request of Senator Harry Reid, is going to convene this week for a hearing entitled “Crimes Associated with Polygamy: The Need for a Coordinated State and Federal Response”, coming up July 24, 2008. This is an entirely speculative hearing, and the only people called to testify are outspoken critics of the FLDS people. It does not matter how you feel about polygamy or the FLDS; what matters is that you oppose government targeting like this.

Just because they are a little different from mainstream culture doesn’t mean that they are not protected by the Constitution.

Aren’t we all a little different in our own ways?

If we allow this for some of us; it’s only a matter of time before it’s any of us.

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In his open letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry and 51st District Court Judge Barbara Walther, Samuel W. Roundy illustrates the fundamentally flawed nature in which the state has gone about ‘learning about’ the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with an intriguing metaphor. Brother Roundy writes:

These people, according to their own admission, have been schooled for a year or more by lying apostates from our society. This is akin to taking the testimony of an ex-wife who has left her husband and had a bitter divorce to find out what his character is like without using any other source of information.

I would like to take this metaphor a step further.

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The level of misinformation about the FLDS and their ways is astounding. I, myself, began with the same picture of these people as is commonly held–an extremist cult who practices a perverted form of the restorationist doctrine of celestial plural marriage wherein young girls are forced into early marriage and pregnancy, kept in poor conditions, mistreated–all to serve the lusts of the ruling body of old men, who oust young boys to keep them from stealing their would-be brides. Sensationally salcious to say the least, and those who spread such an image, such as Carolyn and Flora Jessop or Elissa Wall, undoubtedly sell many more books painting the FLDS that way than they would if the picture were a little truer to life.

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“Truth is truth, wherever you find it.” That’s one of my stock phrases. The lesser-used second half of it is “whether it’s from the mouth of a sage or the mouth of a babe.” While the wording is not the same, the idea comes from Joseph Smith, himself, and one usually thinks you can’t go too far wrong in following the prophet, but it has recently caused me to receive a little well-intentioned-yet-negative feedback from a couple of friends after I made known my feelings about the recent treatment of the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints living at YFZ Ranch and my outrage at the utterly unconstitutional way in which their community was invaded by the Texas authorities.

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