Reid said, other criminal conduct occurs: ”welfare fraud, tax evasion, massive corruption and strong-arm tactics to maintain what they think is the status quo.”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/24/polygamy.hearing/index.html?eref=rss_latest
American taxpayers have unwittingly helped finance a polygamist sect that is now the focus of a massive child abuse investigation in West Texas, with a business tied to the group receiving a nearly $1 million loan from the federal government and $1.2 million in military contracts.
As the case of a snatched Mormon girl from Salt Lake City unfolds, polygamists along the Arizona-Utah border face legal scrutiny
By John Dougherty
Published on March 20, 2003
The leader of a renegade branch of the Mormon Church, now 47, had sexual relations with an underage girl who bore him a daughter in July 2000, records obtained by New Times indicate.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2003-03-20/news/fornicating-for-god/
From Governor Janet Napolitano down, Arizona authorities have protected polygamous sexual predators with their indifference
By John Dougherty
Published on August 07, 2003
“This is laughable,” scoffs CindiNannetti, Maricopa County’s sex-crimes bureau chief, as she finishes reading a three-page report prepared by the Colorado City Police Department — an agency controlled by fundamentalist Mormon polygamists along the Arizona-Utah border
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2003-08-07/news/eyes-wide-shut/
My own father, in 1974, at age 36, took as a plural wife a girl 16 years of age. It is laughable to see the impotence of state and local government when it comes to dealing with this particularly insidious form of child abuse.
Its horrifying. Girls married off to men when they hit puberty. Boys taught to be sexual predators
While these small towns are charming, there is a darker side to aspects of fundamentalist sects that have their roots in the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
In the largest release of evidence to date, hundreds of pages of dictations by Jeffs to his wife Naomie were unsealed last week, painting a picture in Jeffs’ own words of a paranoid leader whose meticulous control over his flock knew no bounds, continuing even after his arrest and imprisonment for arranging a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.
Very little attention is paid to the abuse and neglect of the boys. Some as young as 13, frequently expelled from the compound are forced to fend for themselves without education, friends, or adult guidance.
Anti-polygamy activists, who gathered here Saturday for an unprecedented meeting, charge the state has not done enough to stamp out “Utah’s dirty little secret.” They say the inaction is allowing child abuse, welfare fraud and sexual assault to continue unchecked in polygamous communities.
Polygamy is illegal in Utah and forbidden by the Arizona constitution. However, law enforcement agencies in both states have decided to focus on crimes within polygamous communities that involve child abuse, domestic violence and fraud.
