A Modest Prediction

I think it's great -- and newsworthy -- that Warren Jeffs has been caught and arrested. There are some fundamental misapprehensions about the FLDS that, in a responsible media climate, would be rectified, which means that one of us stupid uncredentialed crazy-eyed nutroots is going to have to get the ball rolling. So I'll step forward. Or maybe everyone else just wisely stepped back.

I can see two primary ways in which this story will be approached, both of them grievously erroneous, and tactically useless, unless your goal is to perpetuate a soap-opera understanding of an issue and stoke a false debate. Not that that would ever happen.

One is that this gets framed as an issue of religious tolerance and persecution, of mean ol' secular America picking on an essentially harmless group of somewhat odd people. This is just flat wrong. Even characterizing the FLDS as a "cult" falls well short of the practical truth of the matter. Obviously, there are cult-like tendencies and mores, strict mind and behavior control, and a rigid hierarchy. And it's easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of intermarriage, incest, polygamy, and weird little inbred towns that have festered along the Utah/Arizona border for several generations.

But what Jeffs' cult really is, when you get right down to it, is a crime syndicate. It's easy to get caught up in the earnest, prayerful trappings of Big Love, but consider.

The self-proclaimed prophet of a polygamous sect was arrested yesterday in Nevada when a state trooper pulled over his flashy red 2007 Cadillac Escalade for a minor traffic violation.

....

In the vehicle, they found a lavish assortment of goods and shopping bags from Target and Old Navy.

Recovered were stacks of $100 bills, two long-haired wigs -- one blonde and one auburn -- and a range of technical gadgets, including four Sony Vaio laptops and multiple new-model cellphones, a video iPod, GPS navigation systems and what appeared to be portable scanners.

"Stacks of $100 bills" understates it -- there was reportedly north of $50K in that brand-new Escalade. That's an awful lot of cash for a guy who's been on the run for over a year. In a brand-new Escalade.

And Jeffs' lunatic strictures rival those of Kim Jong-Il, when you get right down to it. Except even Kim Jong-Il isn't trying to marry all of his 14-year-old nieces. But like Kim, Jeffs is nothing but a thug who uses cheap mind-control techniques to leverage absolute power over a great number of people, and lives like a king by shaking down the lower-level earners. So framing this story purely as a religious issue misses the bulk of it.

Talking to the cops and prosecutors about the facts will help avoid such problems in reportage, and while finally nailing Jeffs is sweet, finding and focusing on middle management is going to be key to getting rid of these creeps once and for all. You don't have to go Branch Davidian on them, just follow the money. Like all cults, FLDS is more than just a cult, it's a grift. And when you have 10,000 people involved -- most of them either children or uneducated women -- you have a real problem that can no longer be ignored under the false flag of "religious tolerance", which I'm sorry, does not extend to a 60-year-old man taking his 13-year-old grand-niece as his tenth wife.

Second, I have argued this point in the past with people who try to conflate the idea of gay marriage with that of polygamy, as if the two were merely equal yet different modes of approaching a common civil institution. This, of course, is absolute nonsense, yet it gains traction as a talking point from time to time. Usually it's put forth in the tone of impugning the supposed high-mindedness of the gay-marriage supporter by pointing out their hypocrisy at not supporting another "different" lifestyle.

The short answer is that, while I certainly support the idea of gay marriage, I would not support gay multiple marriage arrangements any more than "conventional" straight ones. The obvious power dynamic between the sole husband and his multiple brides (note that it's never the other way around) may not directly be a societal interest. But there are, especially in these shithole border compounds where these people multiply like inbred rabbits, all-too-frequent patterns of what amounts to child abuse, rape, incest, coercion, and more.

And these multiple wives, with their teeming litters of inbred offspring, are frequently on the dole. Think about it -- it's hard enough for a regular working Joe to support a wife and 2.3 children. There is simply no honest way an average person can support 3 or 5 wives and a dozen or so children, I don't care how much you buy bulk. And the women are essentially chattel, uneducated because they're married off at 13, and thus unemployable and entirely dependent on the "man". It's as unethical and immoral as most of the other lurid elements of these arrangements, and the state certainly sticks its nose into far less egregious examples of questionable morality and ethics.

It seems like thus far, the media is keeping a small if wary distance from the ugly details of these weirdos (and they are weirdos, but that should not be taken as a specific disparagement of mainstream Mormonism). So it remains to be seen if the saga of Jeffs and his cult -- which, it bears mentioning, is almost entirely descended from six men less than 100 years ago -- has legs. If it does, I would bet money that the media will latch on to exactly the wrong end of one of the two scenarios I've mentioned.

I actually hope I'm wrong about that, but my track record is a helluva lot better than theirs on such things.