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November 03, 2005

Crackup

In late June I pointed out what appeared to be the beginning of a crackdown against polygamy in Arizona and Utah (or at least against the many illegal activities associated with polygamy). Unfortunately, it isn't taking:

…the twin towns… continue to defy the law, the authorities and dissidents say: … women are still being removed from their husbands and assigned to other men, and girls under 18 are ordered to become brides of older men on a day's notice, all despite the presence of full-time outside law enforcement.

DeLoy Bateman, a high school science teacher here who left the church several years ago, says his daughter's marriage was recently broken up by church leaders. She was ordered to become the bride of her father-in-law, a man twice her age, Mr. Bateman says.

"This just makes me want to cry," said Mr. Bateman, a lifelong resident of Colorado City. "They tore up this marriage and ordered her to have sex with this older man. I've lost my daughter and her children to this church. I have to stand outside on the sidewalk and beg if I want to see my grandchildren."

Given that these people have a sort of subsistence-farming, salt-of-the-earth quality about them, I found this nugget of information particularly interesting:

About a third of the residents are on food stamps, and the welfare rate is one of the highest in the West. The followers, who account for most of the twin towns' 8,000 people, justify taking public money with a term used by [Joseph] Smith's own followers: "bleeding the beast" — that is, taking from a government under which the early Mormons were often persecuted.

I've had very little luck drumming up any negative sentiment towards polygamists, so I'm willing to change tack. The spectre of rampant child abuse being apparently insufficient to rouse Canadians from their blissfully tolerant slumber, I propose some good old-fashioned tax rage. Try this on for size:

The practice reportedly spread quickly as it gained acceptance among the FLDS faithful, which happened to coincide with the explosive growth of state and federal assistance programs. Multiple wives, who were married in church, but not in the eyes of the law, began applying for state assistance [i.e., as single mothers –ed.]. Food Stamps and federal programs like WIC, which provide nutritional assistance to low-income women and children, were also tapped. So were healthcare dollars through Arizona's AHCCCS program, which provides most of the medical insurance for residents in Colorado City AZ. Last year over 4,000 residents were enrolled, reportedly costing the state about $8 million a year.

Nifty! And though there have been fewer specific allegations of such activity in BC (it would be unseemly to suggest that a somnambulist press is to blame), it doesn't take much to connect the dots. From the August 14, 2004 National Post:

…Mr. [Warren] Jeffs, who is subject to investigations in two states for tax and welfare fraud, will cash a B.C. government cheque for nearly $500,000. The cheque is for Bountiful school this fall. Last year, it received $460,826 in government grants.

Education Minister Tom Christensen has said he's heard complaints about the school, but has no evidence that would cause him to stop funding the school.

Bear in mind that among the allegations against Jeffs that don't involve him sodomizing his five-year-old nephew during Sunday School, you will find funnelling money away from schools for his own purposes. From May 28, 2005's Arizona Republic:

The court decision comes three days after Arizona investigators served a search warrant on the Colorado City Unified School District, where authorities say Jeffs' followers raided the public treasury for personal gain.

School funds have been used to buy a small airplane, a four-wheel-drive pickup truck and a Ford Excursion, according to investigators, who seized financial records and computers during the search.

The district's superintendent, business manager and assistant business manager, all members of the sect, gave away school vehicles and school property to the church-controlled city government, according to state investigators.

They also allege that school officials allowed church members the free use of school equipment, wrote checks to city police officers for travel expenses and spent up to $900,000 on miscellaneous expenses since 2000.

And BC just hands him a cheque. Live and let live. Tra-la-freaking-la.

Look, I don't know what's going on in Bountiful any more than anyone else, but it's the same church, with the same leader, that's running scared in the US. There's no logical reason to believe that the same things aren't happening here. So for the sweet love of criminy, would someone in the BC Attorney General's Office please sprout some testicles and find out once and for all?

Posted by Chris Selley at November 3, 2005 10:49 PM

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