Winston Blackmore has yet to enter his plea to the criminal charge of practising polygamy, but he’s already on his third lawyer, has filed for legal aid and asked Utah’s attorney-general for help in having his bail conditions amended.
http://www.vancouversun.com/Life/Accused+polygamist+looking+legal+from/1330684/story.html
A federal discrimination lawsuit filed against a business linked to the
Fundamentalist LDS Church appears to finally be headed to trial.
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
What happens is a man marries one wife, she’s his legal wife, then he marries ten other wives in the church, and all the other wives are, by law, single women, so they have all these children with him, and they all get welfare.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/earlyshow/main4005519.shtml
Many of the celestial wives register with the state as single mothers and draw welfare for their huge families. In one decade Tom Green and his dependents received more than $647,000 in public assistance.
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/
Arizona faces a “Waco-level” threat from Mormon fundamentalists.
By John Dougherty
Published on October 03, 2002
Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano’s office is covering up information documenting extensive and ongoing criminal activity including rape, incest, assault, kidnapping, forced marriages of underage girls, weapons violations and welfare fraud that is rampant in the remote polygamous community of Colorado City, state records obtained by New Times reveal.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2002-10-03/news/cover-up-arizona-attorney-general-internal-memo/
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.
