St. George, USA - Polygamy is probably here to stay. But child abuse in the polygamist world must be eradicated at all costs.
That was the two-part message here on Thursday night from top state officials from Arizona and Utah, who spoke — sometimes in impassioned tones, sometimes in exasperation — to a packed audience of fundamentalist polygamists and curious local residents.
“We do not plan a raid to end polygamy,” said the Utah attorney general, Mark L. Shurtleff. “I know you’re worried about that. We’re not going to do it.”
Mr. Shurtleff added, “We don’t believe that’s the answer.”
The raid last month of a polygamist sect in Eldorado, Tex., the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F.L.D.S., was not formally on the agenda at what has become an annual town-hall-style meeting between law enforcement officials and local polygamists, who play a quiet underground role in the high desert country culture of the Southwest.
Instead, Eldorado and the fate of the 462 children who were seized by the state in an investigation of possible under-age marriages and child abuse seemed to swallow the agenda whole. Texas officials were invited but were unable to send representatives, a spokesman for Mr. Shurtleff said, so that left the audience and the speakers free to analyze, second-guess and sometimes bash outright the course Texas child welfare officials took.
Asked, for example, if Texas officials were getting help from Arizona and Utah, which have vastly more experience in dealing with fundamentalist polygamy, Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general, said he had offered assistance, “but right now they’re claiming they’re an independent republic and we need to establish diplomatic relations.”
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Patrick Crimmins, said that he was not sure what assistance Mr. Goddard was referring to, but that Texas had been studying the experience officials in Arizona and Utah had had with the F.L.D.S., especially in foster care, for guidance.
As for not attending the meeting in St. George, Mr. Crimmins said, “We have our hands full here.”
But if Texas got pounded a little, the even bigger punching bag was the sect itself, which one law enforcement official who investigated the group for years said was barely represented in the room.
Mr. Shurtleff, a Republican, and Mr. Goddard, a Democrat, agreed that Texas had been forced into the course it took by the secretive, command-down structure of the sect’s Eldorado leadership and the demonstrated willingness by the sect, they said, to flout child-marriage laws. The group’s leader, Warren S. Jeffs, was convicted last year of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl in his group by forcing her to marry.
“Some polygamist leaders have put their people in harm’s way,” Mr. Shurtleff said in reciting abuses by Mr. Jeffs. “Instead of cooperation, they’ve engaged in manipulation, distortion and lies.”
It is unfortunate, he added, “that so few have given a bad name to so many.”
Both men told the crowd that fostering cooperation to persuade polygamist families and groups to police themselves and report abusers — thereby creating an environment of trust so that girls wanting to report abuse or escape a sect could feel safe in speaking out — was the best way to protect children.
Raids, which Arizona tried most notably in 1953 on polygamous groups in Colorado City, Ariz., the historic heartland of the F.L.D.S., are often counterproductive, Mr. Goddard said. After that raid, for instance, the mistrust and silence lasted decades.
The meeting here on Thursday, by contrast, sometimes seemed bent on goodwill at all costs.
At one point, Mr. Shurtleff asked for a show of hands: How many people, he wanted to know, were related to the children seized in the Texas raid and now held in state foster care?
Scores of hands shot up. Then Mr. Shurtleff asked how many people would be willing to take those children into their homes. Without hesitation, the same hands rose.
“We think it would be wonderful if that were to happen, and we’re going to continue to try to encourage that,” Mr. Shurtleff said, as the room erupted with applause.
The two-hour session, at a convention hall here, about 45 miles northwest of Colorado City, took on a surreal, absurdist cast at one point. As the polygamists, all of whom take their religious heritage from the early founding principles of Mormonism, sat primly in their seats, a raucous convention of commercial truck drivers in an adjoining room was cranking up a live band, with an open bar just down the hall.
Mainstream Mormons from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disavowed polygamy in 1890, and abstain from alcohol and tobacco, as do many polygamists.
As talk of prosecutions and raids and sober-minded politics went on in one room, the band next door, thundering through the wall, played the old Elvis Presley hit “Jailhouse Rock.”